litigation
and the evil of uncertain titles, are not the men who control public
opinion and influence the course of legislation. It may thus happen
that a system of laws initiated by itinerant miners solely for the
protection of their transient posessory interests, and carried
through Congress at their behest by parliamentary roguery, may be
permanently engrafted upon half the continent. If California had
been contiguous to the older States, and her mining operations had
only kept pace with the progress of settlements, or if her
representatives had been less ready to sacrifice the enduring
interests of their constituents for temporary and selfish ends,
the wretched travesty of law which now afflicts the States and
Territories of the West would have been unknown, and the same code
and forms of administration would have prevailed from the lakes to
the Pacific.

The lesson of this vital mistake is a pregnant one. The laws
regulating the ownership and disposition of landed property not
only affect the well-being but frequently the destiny of a people.
The system of primogeniture and entail adopted by the Southern
States of our Union favored the policy of great estates, and the
ruinous system of landlordism and slavery which finally laid waste
the fairest and most fertile section of the republic and threatened
its life; while the New England States, in adopting a different
system, laid the foundations of their prosperity in the soil itself,
and "took a bond of fate" for the welfare of unborn generations.
Their political institutions were the logical outcome of their laws
respecting landed property, which favored a great subdivision of
the land and great equality among the people, thus promoting
prosperous cultivation, compact communities, general education, a
healthy public opinion, democracy in managing the affairs of the
church, and that system of local self government which has since
prevailed over so many States. So intimate and vital are the
relations between a community and the soil it occupies that in the
nomenclature of politics the word "people" and "land" are convertible
terms; but no people can prosper under any system of land tenures
which tolerates a vexatious uncertainty of title, and thus prompts
every man to become the enemy of his neighbor in the scuffle for
his rights. Such a state of affairs is worse than pestilence or
famine; but the evil of uncertain titles puts on new and very
aggravated forms