Such is the history of this remarkable experiment in legislation; but it is an experiment no longer. Its character has been perfectly established by time, and the logic of actual facts. It has been extensively and thoroughly tried, and after repeated attempts to amend it by supplementary legislation, its failure stands recorded in the manifold evils it has wrought. The Land Commission, appointed under the administration of President Hayes in pursuance of an Act of Congress to classify the Public Lands and codify the laws relating to their disposition, visited the mining States and Territories in detail, and devoted ample time to the examination of witnesses and experts in every important locality touching the policy and practical operation of the laws in force relating to mineral lands. This Commission condemned these laws on the strength of overwhelming evidence, and recommended a thorough and radical reform, including the reference of all disputed questions as to title and boundary to the regular officials of the United States; the abolition of the "local custom or rules of miners," with the "local courts" provided for their adjudication; and the adoption of the United States surveys as far as practicable, including the geodetical principle of ownership in lieu of the policy of allowing the miner to follow his vein, "with its dips, angles and variations under the adjoining land of his neighbor," which policy is declared to be the source of incalculable legislation. The Commission, in short, urged the adoption of the principles of the Common Law and the employment of the appropriate machinery of the Land Department, as a substitute for the frontier regulations which Congress made haste to nationalize in 1866. It declared that under these regulations "title after title hangs on a local record which may be defective, mutilated, stolen for blackmail, or destroyed to accomplish fraud, and of which the grantor, the Government, has neither knowledge nor control"; that in the evidence taken "it was repeatedly shown that two or three prospectors, camped in the wilderness, have organized a mining district, prescribed regulations involving size of claims, mode of location and nature of record, elected one of their number recorder, and that officer, on the back of an envelope, or on the ace of spades grudgingly spared from his pack, can make with the stump of a lead pencil an entry that the Government recognizes as the inception of a title which may convey millions of dollars; that even when the recorder is duly elected he is not responsible to the United States, is neither bonded nor under oath, may falsify or destroy his record, may vitiate the title to millions of dollars, and snap his fingers in the face of the Government; and that our present mining law might fitly be entitled 'An Act to cause the Government to join, upon unknown terms, with an unknown second party, to convey to a third party an