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586 step by step up to the Supreme Court at "Washington. As a matter of fact the reports of this court teem with these cases, wherefrom the reader can imagine something of the routine litigants have undergone to get there. All these hearings and rehearings, appeals and new trials, and further appeals, have to be attended and argued by counsel in behalf of the Government's own grantee, the defendant company. And since, should the company finally secure its title to the land the Government had already granted it, it can only sell it for two or three dollars an acre, and lawyers' bills are not apt to be prepared on a diminuendo scale, the public mind can now begin to appreciate how recklessly magnanimous a "gift" this land-grant was on the part of the Government, and the extent of Mr. Hudson's charity in being able to "make allowance" for the recipients!

But the above is not all. This gift, Mr. Hudson himself admits, has to be ratified, and legislators bribed to ratify it. He would come nearer the truth did he assert that it has to be ratified at every session of Congress. I have in my mind a company whose land-grant was received considerably more than twenty years ago, and which has earned it by building and operating its entire road, and yet I doubt if the lawyers of that company could, without considerable research, mention a year in which that grant had not been a matter of attack upon the floor of Congress. Nor is it yet at rest there, although that road is operating over three thousand miles of trackage. Mr. Hudson says that the men who receive these dubious "gifts of empire" "bribe legislators and buy up public officials," to prevent adverse action as to the ratification. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks. Our legislators are elected by the people, and to the people they are responsible. But the fact that our legislators do not, as a rule, allow land-grant questions to rest, and are constantly demanding adverse action, even in cases as old as the one I have just referred to, does not look as if land-grant companies had largely added to the expense of receiving their already costly present of lands by large "bribes to legislators and purchase of public ofllicials"; for certainly they have not prevented adverse action upon these grants to any very memorable extent.

Mr. Hudson speaks of money-grants as well as land-grants to a transcontinental railroad. In the throes of a bloody civil war it is to the eternal credit of one patriotic Congress that it did vote a loan to a transcontinental railway company to enable it to connect the shores of two oceans whose communications otherwise were at the mercy of pirates and privateers, fitted out by a rival nation, interested in driving our commerce from every sea. But, with the necessity, the policy ceased forever. In other cases, to make their heavily purchased "gifts" available, the plan of mortgaging them was resorted to. They have been so mortgaged, and, on the faith of the Government, the bonds secured by these mortgages are now held by this people;