case. The fact seems to be that the inherent right to the benefit of every one of Nature's gifts is vested, if perfect equity were established, in the whole human race; or, as a reasonable approach to this, in that portion of the public to whom this gift is a direct benefit. The title which the public holds may be transferred to private individuals, as a matter of expediency; but the public must still retain a prior claim upon the property. Its right to have the property used for the general welfare, transcends the right of any private owner to direct it solely to his own profit and the public injury.
It is thus plain that the private ownership of our natural wealth and of all public franchises rests on the grounds of expediency alone. All the lands and mineral wealth, all franchises for railway lines and for the various public works discussed in the chapters on municipal monopolies were the heritage of the whole people in the first instance, and they have only transferred the title to private owners because it seemed expedient so to do. On the grounds of expediency alone, then, is the private ownership of natural wealth to be considered.
It can hardly be doubted that in the case of our own country, the transfer to private owners of the title to our natural resources has been in the past the wisest and only proper course. It is a fact not often realized that the title to nearly all the natural wealth of the country, almost all the lands and mines and forests, has been held directly by the public within a century, and that the transfer to private owners of a great part of it has taken place within a generation.
The question now comes: Did the public, in transferring the title to a private owner, relinquish all its right to the future control of these valuable properties, as a private owner would have done? The answer must be in the negative. Regarded simply as a matter of expediency, it is plain that to cause the act of any public official to bind all succeeding generations, living under dissimilar conditions and circumstances, which