Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/214

180 It turned over to the settlers under the preëmption law, at the “Government price,” a great many more millions of acres than were ever covered by any decision or ruling concerning indemnity. For this act you had no memory. In the result of it you are personally concerned. The railroad corporations rushed at me with urgent applications for a reconsideration of the decision and a suspension of the instructions. I refused to suspend the instructions; and in a review of the decision on September 3, 1878, I reaffirmed it. The corporations then went before the courts, and the Supreme Court finally decided that, under the loose wording of the granting acts, the covering of the granted lands with a mortgage, which the companies had done as soon as they availed themselves of the granting act, was a “disposition” of them within the meaning of the law. Thus my decision was overruled, and I may say this was the keenest disappointment I suffered while I was at the head of the Interior Department.

Who was responsible for that loose wording of the law which brought forth this decision of the Supreme Court, and deprived the settlers of their preëmption right to untold millions of acres? When these granting acts were passed you were a member of the National House of Representatives, and also a member of the Committee on Public Lands. The larger part of the time you were chairman of that committee. You posed as the champion of the homestead law and as the protector of the settlers rights and interests. They were given into your official care. If there was a man in Congress who should have considered it his solemn and especial duty to see to it that in all these granting measures the settlers rights and interests be jealously guarded, and that no loose and equivocal language creep in that might be interpreted to their injury, you were that man; and yet you sat there and