Arizona republican., 1905-01-23
Rapid Absorption of Rest
 of Public Domain
IS BEING ARRANGED FOR
The Project Is to Procure Congress- iOnal Legislation Designed to Be
 Applied to Various States - Square Mile Entries in Colo. and s. Dakota.

Washington, Jan. PA wholesale raid is in evidence at Washington, de- signed upon the remaining western public lands. Already this session two bills have been introduced, by Repre- sentatives Martin and Brooks, allowing a man to take up a square mile of gov ernment land in South Dakota and in Colorado. respectively, and permitting those who may have already made 160-acre homestead entry to make an additional entry of 4S0 acres.
 The claim has been consistently made by western land men that a man cannot make a home and living on 160 acres anywhere in the west, and so this square mile-home plan is brought forward as means of getting the pub lie domain into private ownership as rapidly as possible. The question is, even assuming that $40 acres is not too large a farm for the government to give a citizen, to whom will this land gcI
 The bills above mentioned are mod eled after the Kinkaid law, which ap- plies the 64O-acre unit to western Ne braska, and was slipped through con- gress at the tail end of last session. Yet it was not thirty days before it
 
 Nebraska cattlemen had secured about all they wanted in Nebraska. The Kinkaid law and the above bills pro- vide that where a man has a 16O-acre entry, or a mere filing on 160 acres, he shall have the preference right to en- ter an adjoining 4SO acres, and in Ne braska the cattlemen are alleged to have entered" through their em- plOyes, the choice of the lands. so that as soon as the law passed, they sim ply had to apply in each case for the contiguous 4SO acres. It takes but a few such entries-they can be made half a mile wide and two miles long to control a vast territory of country. It was foreseen that similar bills to the Kinkaid Nebraska law would be Immediately introduced at this session, and it is understood that a number more of such measures will follow, to include other. states. If congress is to act further in this matter, the issue must be met squarely and frankly, the present homestead law overturned and a square mile made the homestead unit for the entire country, instead of the present 160 acres.
 SAFEGUARDS ONLY IN NAME.
 Apparent safeguards are provided in these bills. authorizing the secretary of the interior to immediately withdraw any such lands as he may deem fit for irrigation under the national irrigation law. Some such lands have, of course, been withdrawn, and they have been and are constantly being withdrawn. under the irrigation law itself, from speculative entry by use of the deser. land law and the communication clause of the homestead law. These with drawals are being made from time to time, but only after investigation and survey to determine which may be ir- rigable lands. Active as the geological survey has been in it's western investi- gations, it is more criminal than ab- surd to assume that the government is in possession of sufficient accurate information regarding the billion or so acres comprising the entire western half of the United States which would enable it to inteIligently withdraw what may later prove to be irrigable lands. With the utmost activity and the most energetic surveys, it must be ten, if not fifteen, years before the government can possibly know what are it's irrigable lands.
 In the meantime, under the proposed plan, every acre will have been taken up in these 640-acre tracts, and as provided in the Brooks bill for Color ado, commuted, after the farce of a fourteen months residence has been gone through with, and then transfer red to syndicates or corporations in single tracts as large and monOpOlistic as desired
 This entry on the public domain of $40 acre homesteads with the privilege of committing is even a more bold faced ,1. Jrv, ,1 law with it's $40 acres provision, which later was with a great flourish of re- form trumpets, cut down to 320 acres. To legally comply with the commuta- tion clause, all that is necessary. is. for