and impositions constantly practiced, with all their resulting great
extortions, upon the defenceless masses.

Of the long-prevailing frauds on the part of the capitalists in
acquiring large tracts of public land, some significant facts have
been brought out in preceding chapters. Those facts, however, are only
a few of a mass. When the United States Government was organized, most
of the land in the North and East was already expropriated. But
immense areas of public domain still remained in the South and in the
Middle West. Over much of the former Colonial land the various
legislatures claimed jurisdiction, until, one after another, they
ceded it to the National Government. With the Louisiana purchase, in
1805, the area of public domain was enormously extended, and
consecutively so later after the Mexican war.


THE LAND LAWS AGAINST THE POOR

From the very beginning of the government, the land laws were
arranged to discriminate against the poor settler. Instead of laws
providing simple and inexpensive ways for the poor to get land, the
laws were distorted into a highly effective mechanism by which
companies of capitalists, and individual capitalists, secured vast
tracts for trivial sums. These capitalists then either held the land,
or forced settlers to pay exorbitant prices for comparatively small
plots. No laws were in existence compelling the purchaser to be a
_bona fide_ settler. Absentee landlordism was the rule. The
capitalist companies were largely composed of Northern, Eastern and
Southern traders and bankers. The evidence shows that they employed
bribery and corruption on a great scale, either in getting favorable