coöperate further with private owners in establishing the principles of scientific forestry, while the policy of alienation has been modified to an extent amounting almost to reversal. Instead of selling forests, the government is now permitting timber to be cut in a way to preserve the forests. The revenue from this source at the present time is nearly $2,500,000, but that is a secondary consideration. The important point is that the government has demonstrated its ability to manage the forests along lines at once scientific and commercial. In many European countries, however, a greater revenue is secured from the forests. In France, for example, the public forests cover nearly 18 per cent of the entire land surface of the country, and yield approximately, it is reported, $2.50 per acre annually, - giving a revenue of about $59,000,000 a year. In the United States at present 35 per cent of what is received, according to law, goes to the states and territories in which the reserves are situated for public roads and schools. It is estimated that in a few years the reserves will yield not less than $5,000,000 a year.

Experience seems to show that the public ownership and management of forests is more efficient than private ownership and management. This is due to the length of time required to realize upon investments in this industry, its routine character, the large area one man can supervise, and, perhaps chiefly, to the fact that the government in its management takes into account the interests of the community as a whole. Although private corporations may make plans for a long period of time, they are less desirable owners and managers, especially in the last particular. The property tax, as now levied, is one of the greatest enemies of rational forestry by private owners. If an owner is forced to pay ordinary property taxes upon a standing or growing forest year after year, the pressure to cut the timber is almost irresistible. The State spends millions of dollars to preserve the forests, and yet often enforces a tax that puts a premium upon their destruction.

Mineral Lands. Our experience with timber lands is important as showing that private ownership of some kinds of land has not resulted in the greatest or wisest use of that land.

Our experience with mineral lands demonstrates that the policy of disposing of public lands in small holdings, free of cost or at prices far below their real value, has not led to a widespread participation in the use and profit of those lands. The reason for this, broadly speaking, is that our policy of alienation in small holdings conflicts with the requirements and necessities of modern industry. In disposing of our lands we have tried to balk the corporation and the speculator in order to subsidize the settler and home builder. For instance, we have made the recipients of homesteads and mineral claims swear that they are not acting as agents "for any person, corporation, or syndicate," or in collusion with any person, corporation, or syndicate, to give them the benefit of the land entered," and that the land is not being secured "for the purpose of speculation." Yet for purposes of grazing and in less degree for mining and lumbering, modern industrial methods require that large tracts of land shall be worked together, and that individual claims shall be consolidated. The core of the difficulty was well described by Mr. Roosevelt, when President, in these words: "It is a scandal to maintain laws which sound well but which make fraud the key without which great natural resources must remain closed. The law should give individuals and corporations, under proper government regulation and control, the right to work bodies of coal lands large enough for protfiable development." And he thereafter recommended laws to authorize the leasing, instead of the complete alienation, of coal, oil, and gas rights, as well as grazing rights on the public domain. Already the royalty has been adopted by some of the state governments, and has been employed in a few of the permits issued by the federal departments of Agriculture and the Interior. In a few decades, these leases will probably yield handsome revenues in some of the western states which have adopted them. As time passes the federal government exercises more freely its powers of reserving mineral rights in lands granted to "home

1

1 Cf. the conditions of the interesting permit issued in favor of the International Power and Manufacturing Company, and published as Senate Document No. 147, 63d Cong., 1st Sess.

steaders" or municipalities, and of withdrawing from entry valuable mineral deposits such as the potash beds of California. Year by year, therefore, the policy of complete alienation is more and more restricted.

to

The Success of our Land Policy. In a rough, general way, our land policy has been a success, as is shown by the unprecedented and almost feverish development of the country in the last century, with the creation of a fund of taxable values which makes it an easy matter for the state governments to raise all the revenue which they need. But in some respects it has signally failed. In the first place it has not paid more money has been spent for the purchase, survey, and care of the public lands than has been received from their sale and lease. In the second place, certain kinds of lands, as we have shown, should not have been alienated. And in the third place, our efforts to give land to the landless have bred an immense amount of corruption, fostered speculation, endowed private monopoly with public wealth, and pauperized whole communities. One has only to recall the convictions of public officers for land frauds, and to read the report of the Public Lands Commission-to which specific reference is given at the end of the chapter appreciate the truth of all these charges. The desert land law and the commutation clause of the Homestead Act, they tell us, operate far too often" to bring about land monopoly rather than to multiply small holdings by actual settlers." . . . many localities, and perhaps in general, a larger proportion of the public land is passing into the hands of speculators and corporations than into those of actual settlers who are making homes." ... "Nearly everywhere the large landowner has succeeded in monopolizing the best tracts, whether of timber or of agricultural land." . . . "Your commission has had inquiries made as to how a number of estates, selected haphazard, have been acquired. Almost without exception, collusion or evasion of the letter and spirit of the land laws was involved." . . "The fundamental fact that characterizes the present situation is this that the number of patents issued is increasing out of all proportion to the number of new homes."

Possibly the most important lesson to be derived from the history of our landed domain is the vital truth that the government cannot give away valuable lands or sell them at prices far below their real value without subsidizing the speculator, endowing monopoly, and pauperizing the people. The poorer classes derive no real benefit from this indiscriminate public charity. As Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock said in 1905, in discussing the Timber and Stone Act: 1" Many transfers of land patented under this law are made immediately upon completion of title to individuals and companies. In this way a monopoly of the timber supplies of the public-land states is being created by systematic collusion. . . . It has been urged in behalf of this act that it enables poor men to enjoy the bounty of the government by obtaining tracts of land which they can afterwards sell with advantage. A careful study seems to show, on the contrary, that the original entrymen rarely realize more than ordinary wages for the time spent in making the entry and completing the transfer. The corporations which ultimately secure title usually absorb by far the greater part of the profit." When Uncle Sam was rich enough—or was supposed to be rich enough -to provide us all with a farm, the policy of giving away the public domain appeared to be in harmony with the principle of equality of opportunity. But when the supply is far below the demand, those who receive gifts by lot or similar methods are in receipt of special privileges. What once seemed fair has, in the course of economic evolution, become unfair and demoralizing.

Our conclusion may be formulated in the following general rule: Only those lands should be wholly alienated whose use and development under private ownership lead neither to monopoly nor to exhaustion and waste. Or, in more concrete terms (remembering that the maxim applies only to those lands left to the government, and to the majority of cases, not to every specific case), the rule for agricultural lands should be private ownership and management, for forest lands State ownership and management, for mining and grazing lands State ownership 1 Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1905, p. 331.

and private management under a lease or royalty system, by which the State shall secure a share of the profits and retain a large amount of regulation and control. In disposing of its lands the government should endeavor to charge value received, as gifts of valuable land, or sales at inelastic schedules of prices which place an extreme valuation upon some tracts and an utterly inadequate valuation upon others, lead to speculation and monopoly, having most of the demoralizing features of a public lottery in which the prizes are distributed partly by chance and partly in accordance with the cunning, chicanery, and unscrupulousness of the participators. Under existing conditions the poorer classes of society get almost none of the valuable lands. Charge value received, and the people, the masses, get their share in the revenues flowing to the public treasury, in reduced taxes, and more generous expenditures for educational, protective, and developmental purposes.

Land Nationalization and Municipalization. — In recent years both state and national legislation have shown a decided trend toward the adoption of methods which will yield both greater revenue and greater control of those varied forms of national wealth which we collectively designate "land." The object of this legislation is to prevent monopoly and give to society a share in the land values created by social growth. One of the most ingenious plans for securing this end ever proposed is the single-tax scheme defended with great eloquence and earnestness by the late Henry George. His scheme, usually called "the single tax," is stated thus in his own words, printed in his organ, The Standar1:

"The Standard advocates the abolition of all taxes upon industry and the products of industry, and the taking, by taxation upon land values, irrespective of improvements, of the annual rental value of all those various forms of natural opportunities embraced under the general term 'land.'

"We hold that to tax labor or its products is to discourage industry. We hold that to tax land values to their full amount will render it impossible for any man to exact from others a price for the privilege of using those bounties of nature in which all living men have an equal right of use; that it will compel every individual controlling natural opportunities to utilize them by employment of labor or abandon them to others; that it will thus