Free Homesteads
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FREE HOMESTEADS.
There is some little probability of that important and every way commendable project, the Homestead Bill, achieving a success, before the adjournment of this session of Congress. We certainly think the passage of that bill would go far towards redeeming the sins of omission and commission, of the present executive and legislative departments of the nation. Yesterday, at Washington, in the Senate, Mr. Johnson, of Tennessee, the father of the Free Homestead measure, made the following remarks—the bill being under discussion:
He discouraged the idea entertained by many that the bill distributes the public lands as a donation. On the contrary, it was framed on a principle of compensation, inasmuch as the settler fulfilling the requirements of five years' residence and improvement, pays in labor more that the value of the land. The Homestead measure was not a trick for demagoguism. It received the approval of Washington and our forefathers. It was national in its character.
The only use of our Territory is to have it settled. Industrious and poor settlers on their own homestead would speedily change their condition; producting more, they would buy more, and consequently contribute more towards the support of Government. Were but one million of families enabled to spend fifty-six dollars each additional, it would procure seven millions additional revenue. This measure was equally one of revenue and of patriotism.
Our policy should be to prevent the accumulation of a pauper population around large cities—populate your rural districts and they will produce self-dependent men. Have no pampered aristocracy nor vicious pauperhood, but raise a middle class who own homes in the country, and they will defend the country reliably.
Mr. Johnson had heard it urged by his Southern friends that the bill would act prejudicially to the South. He then went into an elaborate disquisition, the scope of which was that the extension of homesteads even in the North would extend the demand for the products of Southern labor, and thus benefit both sections of the country. In this connection he incidentally expressed the belief that were a few ultras of teh North and South out of the way the bulk of the people would fraternise and the Northern States become advocates for the permanence of Slavery in the South.