e construction of a railroad, yet the lands
are withdrawn from settlement and claimed by the
corporation, although the grants were long since forfeited.
The forfeiture of these grants will, of course, be declared.
Of all of these grants over 109,000,000 acres, including
over 16,000,000 this House has already declared forfeited,
are beyond any reasonable question forfeited, and the
declaration of that forfeiture by Congress is demanded by
the highest consideration of public policy, common honesty,
and justice to the people. Even to the extent these
land-grant railroads enumerated in the first table were
completed, you paid them, as I have shown, last year
$1,144,323.91 for transporting your mails. This bill would,
as to these roads, to the extent they are entitled to the
lands granted and including the Pacific systems, save to the
Treasury annually, I think, near a million dollars, perhaps
more.

Deducing from the foregoing statement of land-grants to corporations,
Mr. Holman draws the following picture of what the people may do when
they are fully informed and aroused to the enormous extent to which
they have been despoiled by their unfaithful servants in congress:

The wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations
of free Government, and wrings from the heart of labor the
cry of despair! With the public lands exhausted, with
remnants of the Indian-tribes despoiled of their
reservations, and the lands seized upon by capitalists and
merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged
them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands
everywhere advanced in price beyond the reach of laboring
men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent
homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully
conscious of the wrong you have done them by your
legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for
as of old? I am not astonished that gentlemen deem this
early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great
navy; it will come, if it does come, in the natural order
before a great army. Capital is timid and full of
suggestions; the Navy is the most remote, but I am not
surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that
your Army is too small. These, too, may be some of the
bitter fruits of your imp