The controlling motive at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation, seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the passing of the world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural right to the land without disturbing the system in force in older settled communities, the people strove to effect the subordination of revenue to the social good of the frontier and the country at large. By the middle of the century this many-motived feeling had expression in a party platform; that "the public lands-belong to the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil Democratic Platform, 1892, p. 12.] It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who in season and out kept asserting the equal right of man to land. It was as a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already congested areas on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making the wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his associates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social regeneration that would not disturb the titles to property already granted to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less, for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he thought. [Footnote: See J. R. Commons, "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," VII:287-349.] A German economist has expressed the view that it was only this movement, so inaugurated, that prevented America from going into socialism. One of our foremost economists in America, in discussing this very subject, begins with these observations: "The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting with the theory of the rights of man, they build up a logical system, then a revolution, and the theory goes into practice. Next a coup d'état and an emperor.