160. What was more significant still of their barn door work after the
horse was gone, they made the owning of 160 acres, regardless from whom
it was got, private purchase or Government, a bar to the taking up of
Government farm land. Prior to the repeal every citizen, and those
intending to become citizens, had certain land rights, and owning half a
State did not impair them; which all goes to show that even this free
and easy-going Government thought it about time to call a halt. But that
was all it did do. As it was not necessary to give the laws under which
the homesteader and preemptor got title, neither is it necessary to here
ask how some men became owners of all the way from 1,000 to 60,000
acres, every acre of which was Government land years after California
became a State. (We are using California facts. The rest of the Western
part of the United States has an abundance of the same kind.) Suffice it
to say, that they now own them; and suffice it too, that Confiscation is
the only way by which we can dispossess them of plunder, that the
welfare of the country demands should be returned? In Confiscation alone
will the people find a servant who will not condone the past, but will
follow up this breed of the grabber and restore what it finds, as it has
already done with others of his tribe.

It will be the re-discovering of America.

Never did kind and beneficent laws show what men, with the right kind of
stuff in them, could do, as did our land laws. Men who now own territory
as large as some of the Eastern States started in without a dollar.
They had something better. They had consciences that was good for any
tests that the scoundrels could put them to. Never did gangs of
"floaters" help the political boss and ward-heeler rob the public
treasury with greater success than did this other brand of the bastard
citizen help his boss to hog the public domain.