Smith, Stephen; Wilkinson, J. Grains for the Grangers, Discussing All Points Bearing Upon the Farmers' Movement for the Emancipation of White Slaves from the Slave-Power of Monopoly . Philadelphia: John E. Potter and Company, 1873. [format: book], [genre: essay; history; letter; narrative; poetry]. Permission: Northern Illinois University
Persistent link to this document: http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/file.php?file=smith.html

The Farmers' Movement condemns the party policy of subsidizing private corporations of speculators with the public money and the people's lands. The enemy, in a familiar mask, asks the Illinois State Grange if Stephen A. Douglas did not initiate in Congress the policy of subsidizing railway corporations with public lands.

The answer is, he did not. It was through the influence of the great Illinois statesman that the policy was initiated in Congress of making grants of public lands to the new states to aid their inhabitants in the development of their commercial resources. It was a democratic Congress which granted 2,500,000 acres of public land, not to the Illinois Central Railway Company, but to the state of Illinois, to aid that state and its inhabitants generally in the development of the central prairie region by building a railway which would give it access to the great natural commercial channels. It was a democratic Congress which granted

public lands to the State of Michigan, to the State of Missouri and several other states for similar purposes. Mr. Douglas' party never voted an acre of the public domain to a private corporation of land speculators. But no sooner did the professional politicians come into power with an "organization perfected," than they initiated the villain's policy of giving away the people's estate in "whole empires" to rings of speculators and party favorites. Their first Congress under Mr. Lincoln, in 1862, gave no less than 35,000,200 acres to a single combination known as the Union Pacific Railway Company. The whole state of Illinois contains only 35,450,200 acres. The professional politicians signalized the entrance of their "perfected organization" into power, by taking away from the people generally, and giving to an organized ring of less than two dozen persons the absolute proprietorship of a territory equal to the great State of Illinois. Such was the initiation of the policy of subsidizing private rings with public lands, which the professional politicians have followed up with vigor, until the number and magnitude of these gifts of the people's lands to private corporations, cover a domain greater than four and a half states of the size of Illinois.

The grant to Illinois of 2,500,000 acres was hardly equal to 4,000 acres per mile of the Illinois Central Railway. The gift to the Pacific Railway Company amounts to nearly 18,000 acres per mile, and the first gift to that unmitigated organization of New England land-thieves, the Northern Pacific Railway Company, amounts to more than 25,000 acres per

mile, while the second gift to the same band of land speculators amounts perhaps to as much more. What consideration do the people of the United States receive, or what consideration will the inhabitants of any new state at the West ever receive, for the imperial grants of the public domain that have been made by professional politicians and their "perfected organizations" to rings of speculators? Not one dollar of public revenue; not one penny of benefit in any shape but that which is incidental to every other railway, as well as those owned by the rings of speculators, bands of land-stealers, and which have been brought into existence, nursed and loaded down with stolen wealth by professional politicians and their "perfected organizations."

The author need not pause to give the names by which these "perfected organizations" — if forsooth there should be more than one — have been designated from time to time. It is enough for the farmer to know that he has been robbed, and that he has the thief within the reach of legal process. He does not have to search the rogue's calendar to ascertain the various aliases of the accused.