claim upon the
property. Its right to have the property used for the general welfare,
transcends the right of any private owner to direct it solely to his own
profit and the public injury.

It is thus plain that the private ownership of our natural wealth and of
all public franchises rests on the grounds of expediency alone. All the
lands and mineral wealth, all franchises for railway lines and for the
various public works discussed in the chapters on municipal monopolies
were the heritage of the whole people in the first instance, and they
have only transferred the title to private owners because it seemed
expedient so to do. On the grounds of expediency alone, then, is the
private ownership of natural wealth to be considered.

It can hardly be doubted that in the case of our own country, the
transfer to private owners of the title to our natural resources has
been in the past the wisest and only proper course. It is a fact not
often realized that the title to nearly all the natural wealth of the
country, almost all the lands and mines and forests, has been held
directly by the public within a century, and that the transfer to
private owners of a great part of it has taken place within a
generation.

The question now comes: Did the public, in transferring the title to a
private owner, relinquish all its right to the future control of these
valuable properties, as a private owner would have done? The answer must
be in the negative. Regarded simply as a matter of expediency, it is
plain that to cause the act of any public official to bind all
succeeding generations, living under dissimilar conditions and
circumstances, which were then unknown and unprophesied, might result in
unbearable evils. Necessary as it might be at the start to give away
valuable properties to meet present needs, one generation or its
representatives has no conceivable right to sell for a mess of pottage
the heritage of all succeeding ones. The fact is, then, that the natural
title to all gifts of Nature is vested in the public at large; and while
it is in duty bound to observe the contracts which it makes with private
parties, it is also not to be thought that the dishonesty or
incompetence of a public official, or the failure to foresee the future,
can work for too long a time an injury to the community.

It seems certain that, in every case where the public has transferred to
private owners the title to any gift of Nature, or has conferred