These land agencies are, in a thousand ways, busying themselves in the securing of further lands for speculative purposes. The days of wholesale grants having gone by, they are turning their attention to the lands of the individual settler, and under their tutelage clerks, teachers, town men and women, hired laborers, men who do not know wheat from barley or rye from flax, are filing upon the last of the tillable public lands. Under the homestead law, these settlers are allowed six months after entry in which to establish homes on their land. This time is taken full advantage of. Then a board shack is built and the law complied with by the breaking of a few acres of sod. Eight months more of (constructive) continuous residence, and the land becomes the property of the settler upon a cash payment of $1.25 to $2.50 an acre, according to location. The company furnishes the commutation money and “finds” a purchaser for the claim. The shack is boarded up or moved off. The sod grows to weeds. The settler, having made from $800 to $2,500 by a little enterprise and a good deal of perjury, is eliminated from the problem. This cat’s-paw of organized land plunder is securing for his principals a large, a very large, percentage of all the public lands passing under private ownership. It would be safe to say that one holding out of every four passes into speculative hands. Judged by conditions, past and existing, in the two Dakotas, this estimate might be doubled, and yet fall within the facts. On this point see the report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for 1905. The land companies immediately list their newly acquired lands, and by an ingenious system of “booms,” carefully nursed and let loose at the proper time, they advance the price of their lands to a point sometimes double or treble the original market value of the raw prairies. This is wholly, or almost wholly, a paper increase in value. Roads, schools, markets remain as before save for the change wrought by the actual settlers. This is, in essence, the same thing as the watering of railroad or other stocks, and it is done for the same purpose—that the “ins”—the land speculators—may fatten on the “outs”—the farmers. And if the land valuations now obtaining in the fringe of settlement bordering the public domain be from 25 to 75 per cent water, how about its effect on the land values in older sections—say in Iowa, or Ohio, or Illinois? Obviously the price will be enhanced. And the immediate, discernible effect of that is to render it more difficult for the landless man to become an owner. I have seen land go from $25 an acre to $60 and over, in Iowa and other States in the East. The land utility is the same as in years gone by. It will raise no more—sometimes less than former years. But every dollar added to the price has increased the rental, and decreased the possibilities of a laboring man becoming owner of his own farm.