The Fight for Seattle’s Soil

Colonel Larrabee has introduced an article in the Constitutional Convention as follows: After the admission of this State into the Union, no person, corporation, company or association, civil or ecclesiastical, except railroads or canal corporations or companies, shall thereafter acquire and own in fee-simple, by purchase, conveyance, gift, devise, descent, or by or through any other means, more than 640 acres of land, or a section of land according to the survey of the U.S. This section, however, is not in any manner to impair any bona-fide contract made and entered into before such admission. The writer has spent over forty years of his life in Territories and new States, and from his own personal observation, he is profoundly impressed with the conviction that land monopoly is one of the greatest curses which can be inflicted upon any commonwealth. When the settler enters upon his homestead claim he is immediately hemmed in by speculators who profit by his improvements and present obstacles to settlement more onerous and expensive to overcome than the payment for land at government price. The seventy-two sections granted to Washington Territory for a university are now nearly all in the hands of two or three mill companies, held exclusively for timber, and the University has not a fund equal to the lumber product of a single section to show for it. If there is no legal limit to the greed of the land monopolists, our magnificent timber lands, inexhaustible coal fields and valuable tide lands will inevitably pass into the hands of a few capitalists and the condition of our people will be no better than that of the tenants and retainers upon the baronical estates of monarchical countries. The public lands are the natural heritage of the people, and it is the duty of the government to guard and protect them for the use of the people, not as the means for their subjugation.