It is true that, accompanying your communication, there is a great mass of representations, depositions, arguments, and other papers, which show that the questions propounded by you are not speculative ones, and that, on the contrary, they bear, in some way, on matters of interest, public or private, to be decided by the Department.  But those are matters for you, not for me, to determine.  You have requested my opinion of certain points of law, to be used by you, so far as you see fit, in aid of such your own determination.  I am thus happily relieved of the task of examining and undertaking to analyze the voluminous documents in the case:  more especially as your questions, while precise and complete in themselves, derive all needful illustration from the very instructive report in the case of the present Commissioner of Public Lands and the able brief on the subject drawn up in your Department.

I. To return to the questions before me:  the first is in substance whether the words in the act of 1841,—­ " portions of the public land which have been selected as the site for a city or a town,”—­ are to be confined to cases of such selection in virtue of some special authority, or by some official authority?

I think not, for the following reasons: 

The statute does not by any words of legal intendment say so.

The next preceding clause of the act, which speaks of lands “included within the limits of any incorporated town,” implies the contrary, in making separate provision for a township existing by special or public authority.

The next succeeding clause, which speaks of land “actually settled or occupied for the purposes of trade and not agriculture,” leads to the same conclusion; for why should selection for a town site require special authority any more than occupation for the purposes of trade?

The general scope of the act has the same tendency.  Its general object is to regulate, in behalf of individuals, the acquisition of the public domain by preemption, after voluntary occupation for a certain period of time, and under other prescribed circumstances.  In doing this, it gives a preference preemption to certain other uses of the public land, by excluding such land from liability to ordinary preemption.  Among the uses thus privileged, and to which precedence in preemption is accorded, are, 1.  “Sections, or fractions of sections included within the limits of any incorporated town;” 2.  “Portions of the public land which have been selected for the site of a city or town;” and, 3.  “Land actually settled or occupied for the purposes of trade, and not agriculture.”  Now, it is not easy to see any good reason why, if individuals may thus take voluntarily for the purposes of agriculture,—­ they may not also take for the purposes of a city or town.  The statute assumes that the purposes of a city or town have preference over those of trade, and still more over those of agriculture.  Yet individuals may take for either of the latter objects:  a fortiori they may take for a city or town.