Already men of keen insight foresaw a time when oil, timber, coal, and iron must become the stay of a vastly expanding industrial system, and bent their energies to secure the chief sources of supply.  From the nature of their work the men who built railways first became aware of the riches of nature, and aided by an enormous public sympathy with their efforts, monopolized all the natural opportunities of value.  Coupled with industrial development was the gradual appropriation of the land.  The time soon arrived when the late comers either stayed in the manufacturing centers at the railways terminals or were pushed farther and farther away from the centers.  As the landowning families multiplied, the young men were confined to the same choice.  Forced off the land, the tendency has been to crowd the brainiest blood of America into the cities.  In addition, the competition of the new Western lands, brought into use by railway development, has exiled the youth of New England, who found in their rocky acres no incentive to toil.  They, too, joined the ever-increasing flow to the cities, and entered into the savage competition of our great towns.

In our time the pendulum has swung to its extreme.  At every depression of business, armies of the unemployed perish in sight of the land they abandoned in the hope of a brighter future.  Their children have forgotten the traditions of the soil, and the energies of our people must now be concentrated to reverse the aimless tide of human sufferers, which under stress continues to flow city-ward, and to send it to repeople the silent places whence it came.  The fight will not be easily won.  Changes in the national land policy are imperative.  To give one generation privileges which enslave all who succeed it, is intolerable and will not be permanently endured.

It is easy to determine upon a policy in the quiet of the study; different is the problem of applying a comprehensive scheme to repeople the idle land.  In the first place, where is the idle land?  In all parts of our country it exists in abundance.  Almost every state in the Union has lands which either have never been alienated, or which have reverted to the state through nonpayment of taxes.  In the East, particularly, the competition of Western lands, aided by discriminating freight rates, now so notorious, has resulted in the abandonment to the mortgagee of vast areas in New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, and to some extent in New Jersey.  These are now largely resold.

Declining fertility and exorbitant and oppressive transportation charges have helped to keep these lands out of use, and some still lie idle and neglected, to excite the wonder of the social and economic student.  To use the abandoned lands of the East, equal rates on agricultural products is a basic necessity.

The first step, now well under way, is railroad control by the Government.  Equal access to transportation is as essential as equal access to land, for transportation is indeed an attribute of land.