Equal rights once conceded as just, this reasoning cannot be refuted.
Discussed in economic literature since before the day of Adam Smith, it
has withstood every form of assault. If it has not been acted on in the
Old World, it is because the wage-workers there, ignorant and in general
deprived of the right to vote, have been helpless; and if not in the
New, because, first, until within recent years the free western lands,
attracting the unemployed and helping to maintain wages, in a measure
gave labor access to nature, and, secondly, since the practical
exhaustion of the free public domain the industrial wage-workers have
not perceived how, through politics, to carry out their convictions on
the land question.

Our reasoning is further strengthened by law and custom in state and
nation. In nearly every state, the constitution declares that the
original and ultimate ownership of the land lies with all its people;
and hence the method of administering the land is at all times an open
public question. As to the nation at large, its settled policy and
long-continued custom support the principle that all citizens have
inalienable rights in the land. Instead of selling the national domain
in quantities to suit purchasers, the government has held it open free
to agricultural laborers, literally millions of men being thus given
access to the soil. Moreover, in thirty-seven of the forty-four states,
execution for debt cannot entirely deprive a man of his homestead, the
value exempt in many of the states being thousands of dollars. Thus the
general welfare has dictated the building up and the securing of a home
for every laboring citizen.

In line, then, with established American principles is the proposition
for municipal lands. And if municipalities have extended to capitalists
privileges of many kinds, even granting them gratis sites for