Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/138

128 common resources that are being evolved day by day. A state that has exhibited almost up to the present such bald obliviousness to common interests will be all too prone to retain laws and institutions that will let slip other and even grander commonwealth opportunities.

The story of the public lands of Oregon is largely a "spilt-milk episode," but it must be realized that wealth and welfare are every day more and more of a social and collective creation, and that laws and institutions fitted for more primitive conditions will cause these new commonwealth resources, less tangible than land yet if possible more vitally important to the public welfare, to be sacrificed. The presentation of a public "spilt-milk episode" of the character of Oregon's public land history while that public is being swept into a new era and is being constituted more and more largely an organic unity should be worth while. With the whole trend of change towards bringing the organizations under the state into combinations with monopoly powers it behooves the public as such to assert itself. This role is inevitable. The task of preparation for it is stupendous beyond comparison. The Oregon public land story affords most elementary yet striking suggestions.

Conditions Peculiar to Early Oregon Affecting Its Land Policy— But enough as to the social significance inhering in a state's policy with a collective possession like that of public lands. Turning now to the special conditions that constrained Oregon to develop the characteristic features of its policy. A glance at a map representing the nature of the surface of the different sections of this country quickly reveals a striking contrast between that of the Mississippi valley and that of the Pacific slope, Yet the actual measure of difference between the two sections in the lay of their lands is hardly suggested by a map. In the Mississippi valley states land is pretty much all-of-a-piece. In the mountainous regions of the West diversity is the rule. To say nothing of the possible value of mineral lands, agricultural lands under the conditions of soil and