restriction or that reservation until they became absolute masters of
hundreds of millions of acres of land which a brief time before had
been national property.

"These enormous tracts," wrote (in 1886) William A. Phillips, a
member of the Committee on Public Lands of the Forty-third Congress,
referring to the railroad grants, "are in their disposition subject
to the will of the railroad companies. They can dispose of them in
enormous tracts if they please, and there is not a single safeguard
to secure this portion of the national domain to cultivating
yeomanry." The whole machinery of legislation was not only used to
exclude the farmer from getting the land, and to centralize its
ownership in corporations, but was additionally employed in relieving
these corporations from taxation on the land thus obtained by fraud.
"To avoid taxation," Phillips goes on, "the railroad land grant
companies had an amendment enacted into law to the effect that they
should not obtain their patents until they had paid a small fee to
defray the expense of surveying. This they took care not to pay, or
only to pay as fast as they could sell tracts to some purchasers, on
which occasions they paid the surveying fee and obtained deeds for
the portion they sold. In this way they have held millions of acres
for speculative purposes, waiting for a rise in prices, without
taxation, while the farmers in adjacent lands paid taxes." [Footnote:
"Labor, Land and Law": 338-339.]

Phillips passes this fact by with a casual mention, as though it were
one of no great significance.

It is a fact well worthy of elaboration. Precisely as the
aristocracies in the Old World had gotten their estates by force and