The area of the valuable public domain is measurable, but it is as yet not measured. To the eastward of the area named there is some land still open to settlement under the homestead act. What sort of land is it? Land covered with glacial drift, swamps, hills, sandy land—the cast away heritage of three generations of keen-eyed farmers. Greater stress of need will bring some of this under the plow, but the fact remains that it is undesirable land, viewed from the standpoint of the man who desires not only a home, but a competence. Alaska, with unknown but probably limited agricultural possibilities, is already beginning to attract the attention of the speculative public. Farmers are not greatly interested in the development of agriculture in a region so remote and where the season precludes farming on a broad scale. This somewhat lengthy statement of present day conditions is necessary in order to understand the danger that menaces us as a people through the alienation of the public domain from its legitimate uses. The land open to settlement is passing, not into the possession of makers of homes, but into the hands of speculators who are enriching themselves in the first instance at the expense of the farmers, but ultimately at that of the people at large. The vast grants to the transcontinental railroads, by means of which the Government paid private parties royally for building roads that have, since their construction, charged the people for services rendered “all the traffic will bear,” threw open, wide open, the doors to the land speculator. Railroad lands were bought up at a low figure by companies backed by Eastern capital, just as today similar companies are buying up and exploiting the Canadian Northwest. Settlers were sought for and brought in by the car load. They were located on a quarter section of Government land, and sold as much more of the adjoining speculators’ land as they could be persuaded to buy. Under other firm names these same gentlemen who exploited the public and corporation lands sold horses and farm machinery to the new settler, taking mortgages as partial security on crops not yet grown. The lean years came, and the land companies reaped to the full their harvests. So passed away from the people millions of acres of land in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and the bordering States. Today that land is selling back to the people at prices ranging from $10 to $40 an acre—land which I have seen sold under the sheriff’s hammer at less than $1.00 an acre.