Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/137

Rh dedicated to the purpose of making a perpetual fund for the education of the youth, had no champion. The concept of an Oregon public as the owner of the wealth represented by these lands, and as having the largest realization of highest social aims dependent upon the best handling of it, was never actively advanced. — if ever entertained. The absence of all traces of what would, in the more recent decades at least, have been a promising and practical idea for the promotion of the common good surely argues the existence hitherto of a fateful warping of the common consciousness of this commonwealth, or simply that it had not arrived in the development of an essential commonwealth faculty. Such obliviousness to a great public interest under conditions giving that interest strongest emphasis and most concrete illustration, betrays a fearful ignorance of what community discernment, purpose and effort may yield for strength and common welfare. The sweeping change wrought in social relations, which change is still going forward at an ever accelerating pace, to which all lines of invention have contributed, make such a lack of the social, community or public point of view an increasingly costly if not now a fatal handicap. This is not saying that Oregon should have gone with headlong precipitancy into the farming or landlord business. It claims only to be a pertinent suggestion provoked by the incessant, uninterrupted and almost rabid intent to sell, to sell immediately and as rapidly as possible, and until this last decade for a nominal price, all its varied holdings of land.

No Conception of a Community Interest in These Lands— No spectre of land or other natural monopoly seems to have troubled the thought of the Oregon people in the past and no vision of a good for themselves or their posterity seems to have inspired them. This observation — so far from flattering — is made in introducing this narrative of the state's land policy for the reason that the state's management of its common interests embodied in its land suggests the likelihood, if not certainty, of a similar commonwealth failing with regard to even greater