Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/156

144 the use of schools for the instruction of children forever. Mississippi was required to reserve section 16 in each township for the support of schools within the same, "with the exception of thirty-six sections, to be located in one body by the Secretary of the Treasury, for the use of Jefferson College." Other grants were made for religious purposes, and for military services. Lewis and Clark, for their services in exploring the continent to the Pacific, received land warrants calling for one thousand six hundred acres of land each, and the men who accompanied them three hundred and twenty each, to be located on any of the public lands offered for sale west of the Mississippi. None of these donations could be made except by the consent of the representatives of the people in congress assembled. Thus our government set out with the highest ideal then possible of community rights in land. If since then we have gambled away our common heritage, or sold it to non-resident speculators, we have in so far departed from that ideal.

The largeness of the subject prohibits any attempt to furnish a history of the land laws of the United States in a single article. It is in fact the history of this nation. Our land system settled the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It drew to us all the nations of the earth; it gave them homes, and educated their children; it was "Liberty enlightening the world." But just because the government was so rich in lands, it grew careless, speculative, even profligate. It lavished soil enough to make several states upon corporations without honor, forgetting that it was only the trustee of the people, whose consent had never directly been asked. It sold to adventurers, who never intended to make homes, immense tracts contiguous to watercourses, from which the buyers excluded citizens of the United States. It winked at the wrongful acts of its agents in selecting swamp and over-