The land question is too large for one short chapter or for one small book. It requires more and deeper study than the subject has ever yet received. The ownership of lands cannot be absolute; it must be limited by the rights of those who live upon them, but the limitations have never yet been clearly defined. If a man has a right to live he must have a right to a place to live. If a child has a right to be born it must have a right to a place to be born. It cannot be that the mass of our race only touch the earth by the sufferance of those who claim to own it.
The unprecedented rapidity of the development of this country is owing more to its wise and beneficent land laws than to anything else. They are not perfect but the most favorable to the landless that the world has ever known. No landlordism, no binding up lands by entail to make it forever impossible to gain a title to a portion of the soil, but our land laws, wisely devised, gave hope of a home to the homeless everywhere. The result was that our people from the eastern part of our own country, and the landless from across the seas, swarmed over the mountains and filled the Ohio valley and pushed on to the great Mississippi and Missouri valleys, and in three generations have transformed this waste into happy homes. The possession of land, of a home, ennobles the character, produces a patriotic love of this country and stimulates devotion to her institutions. The landless foreigner who makes here a home of his own is unwavering in his loyalty to the country of his adoption. Those foreigners, who do not fall in love with our institutions and do not become assimilated with our people, are tenants here as they were before they came here. They are not attached to our soil; they do not secure homes of their own and are therefore restless and a menace.
A dangerous tendency has been developing throughout our whole land in these later years. The usury of lands is on the increase. Tenantry is becoming more common on the farms in the country, while the mass of our city populations are living in rented houses or flats or crowded tenements.