| | | | | and the | |122,000,000|137,000,000 | 164,000,000| 319,000,000 | Report of the | |Acres | Acres | Acres | Acres | Commissioner | | | of the | | Land area of the twenty-nine states constituting the | General Land | | public domain. 1,442,000,000 Acres | Office, 1905) | +---------------------------------------------------------+---------------+ By 1890 the good agricultural lands of the United States were nearly all in private hands. Their occupation had been hastened in the last five years by facility of access and the efforts of the railways. With the disappearance of free lands a new period in America began, as was recognized at the time, and has become clearer ever since. Out of forty-eight States comprising the United States in 1912, and including about 1,902,000,000 acres, twenty-nine with 1,442,000,000 acres had been erected in the public domain to which Congress had once owned title. By cession, purchase, or conquest this domain had been acquired between 1781 and 1853; it had been treated as a national asset and governed with what efficiency Congress possessed. By 1903 the United States had transferred to individuals about half its public land and nearly all its farm land. It retained many millions of acres, but these were mountain or desert, and were not usable by the individual farmer who had been the typical unit in the occupation of the West. Already, by 1880, the statisticians had recognized that the period of free land was at an end, and had turned their attention to the abuses which had arisen in the administration of the estate. From the beginning, it had been difficult to compel the West to respect national land laws. The squatter who occupied lands without title had always been an obstacle to uniform administration. Evasion of the law had rarely been frowned upon by Western opinion, which had hoped to get the public lands into private hands by the quickest route. In the region where the laws had to be enforced, opinion prevented it, while the National Administration, before the adoption of civil service reform, was incapable of directing with accuracy and uniform policy any administrative scheme which must be so highly technical as a land office. The Preemption, Homestead, and Timber Culture Laws were all framed in the interest of the small holder, but were all perverted by fraud and collusion. The United States invited much of the fraud by making no provision by which those industries which had a valid need for a large acreage could get it legally.