St. Paul daily globe., 1889-03-07
THE DULUTH & WINNIPEG.
Attention Of the Legislature Directed to
Land Grants.
AN EDITORIAL VIEW OF THEM
Land Which, Without the Railroad,
Would Be Devoted to Solitude
and Desolation.

Mr.. Editor-Dear Sir: / take pleas
ure in calling the attention of the men,
bers of the legislature, through your
columns, to an able editorial upon the
subject of forfeiting land grants, pub
lished in the Pioneer Press of Feb. 81,
1878. The views therein expressed
apply to the case of the Duluth & Win
nipeg Railroad company. 1t needs only
to substitute for Jay Gould the name of
the party who opposes the construction
in the place of 'Union Pacific Railway
company" read ''St. Paul, Minneapolis
q Manitoba Railway company"
Jay GOULD ON THE FORFEITURE OF
LAND GRANTS.
"Jay Gould is the owner, among other
things, of the Union Pacific, Pacific
Mail steamships and the New York
Tribune; and his newspaper is so shame
leSSly run in the interests of the rail-
road schemes and stock-jobbing opera
tions that it has lost all influence upon
public opinion on any question in which
Jay Gould is known or suspected to
have any interest. The Tribune of the
23d inst. contains an editorial which is
the interest of the Union Pacific mo-
its prodigious impudence, if for moth
ing else. MIR. Joyce. of Vermont, has
just introduced in the house joint
resolution declaring forfeited all
grants or donations of public lands
to railroads and other corporations
where the conditions of the grant have
been violated or not fulfilled, and Civ
ing said lands so forfeited to the use of
actual settlers and to education in the
several states and territories as may
hereafter be provided by law and a
list of twenty railroads, including the
Northern Pacific, the St. Vincent ex-
tension and Brainerd branch of the st.
Paul q Pacific, the Hastings & Dakota
Minnesota is especially interested, is
embraced in this sweeping forfeiture of
such portions OF their several grants as
remain unearned. And Jay Gould,
through his Tribune, comes to the sup
port of this resolution with force and
zeal which at once betrays the source
and inspiration of the resolution
itself and the colossal cheek of
this mammoth subsidy gorger. There
is not in the whole history of this
country single parallel for the enor-
nous subsidies which have been given
the Union Pacific railroad and its eX-
tensions and branches. Not content
with an immense donation Of public
lands, it besieged congress until it re-
ctiyed an immense money subsidy, and
kept on besieging it with all the imple-
ments of corruption, until the original
conditions on which the subsidy was
granted were so modified as to leave the
government loan of credit almost with
out security. And now this gigantic
monopoly. built up and enriched with
the only money subsidies which the
government has ever granted, and
which has persistently refused to
pay the interest ON the govern
ment bonds which were loaned it,
now has the impudence to deuounce as
eXtravagent in themselves the land
grants given to other companies on con-
railroad which would open the lands to
settlement and make them available,
and it is especially urgent that the land
grants shall be withdrawn from the
Northern Pacific and Texas Pacific.
Such a demand, emanating from any
source, would, as a measure of national
economy and craftsmanship, be piece
of colossal and suicidal folly, and under
the existing circumstances, piece of
infamous turpitude. but coming from
Jay Gould-from the owner of that very
corporation which has made the name
of subsidy stencil in the nostrils of
the natiOn-and that huge monopoly
now striding the continent like ColOs-
sus which disdained the meager aid of
land grant and was built by the
money of the United States poured by
millions from the treasury to aid in its
construction and to swell the Golfers of
its plundering credit mobilier coming
from such source, the demand that the
Northern Pacific, which asks no money
subsidy, but simply that it may be given
a few years time to save it's land grant,
to open the interior wildS of the West
to settlement and to furnish new and
rival path of commerce to the Pacific,
shall be deprived of its land grant
when only quarter of its line is built,
is the sublimity Of cheek. If anything
could enhance the impudence of the
performance it would be the pre-
tense that by this means the
land would be thrown open to actual
settlers. TO hear it gravely urged on
the policy of congress, and repeated
with the same simulated gravity in Jay
Gould's newspaper, that the lands
ought to be taken away from the rail-
road companies to bestow them on
actual settlers, and to see this i'm
measurable idiocy repeated in the reso-
luUlOnS OF pOllllcdl conventions from one
end of the country to the other, is a
severe task on the patience. AS mat
ter of notorious fact the only possible
way in which the lands on the line of
most of these prospective railroads can
be opened to settlement or made avail
able for the occupancy of the actual
settler is by building railroad through
them: and there is no way in which
railroad can be built in adj
vance of settlement so as to make these
lands available for that purpose except
by land or money subsidy. The sys-
tenn of granting alternate sections in
aid of railroad construction has proved
in practice the simplest and most effica-
cious and beneficent means of opening
the broad domain of public lands to set
tlement which was ever invented.
Without the aid of land grants it is
doubtful whether Minnesota would
have 100 miles of railroad to-day, and
not one-slXth part of all l2r immense
acres of fertile lands would have been
available for settlement. 1t would have
been very pretty indeed. twenty years
ago, for some demagogue to have got