land, living in a distant state, learning of this,
claimed pay of the Indians and brought suit against them before the
agent to recover it. The Indians admitted that they had cut and taken
the grass; they also admitted its value. Their defense was that this
man had no right superior to theirs. This was a natural growth that
had cost him no labor, and they had not injured the land. Their
speaker said, "If the man had dug the land and planted it in corn and
hoed and tended the corn, the corn would have been his; but the Great
Spirit made the grass grow and this man gave it no labor nor care; the
buffalo or the cattle could eat it. Have we not the rights of the
cattle? This man has no right to it."

The agent decided against them and compelled them to pay the man. They
were much dissatisfied and felt they were unjustly treated and
oppressed, because they had to pay that which the man had never
earned. The red men were not versed in legal statutes nor educated in
the tutelage of usury, but it can not be denied that they interpreted
very accurately the law written in the reason and conscience: that no
man has any especial claim to that which he has not earned.

The convictions of white men, and their method of compelling absentee
owners to pay for the increase in value of their lands, came under the
writer's observation in a new settlement near the Indians'
reservation. He found three poor families in a district. They had
little land and extremely plain homes, but there was a good
school-house and a good school and an expensive bridge had been built
across a stream to enable one of the families to reach it. Enquiring
how they could afford to erect such improvements and support such a
school, they replied that the lands all around them were owned by
absentees, speculators in the east, who were holding the lands for the
advance in value, which they, in their struggling poverty, should make
by the improvement of the country, when they would gather in an
"unearned increment." They said they had the power to levy taxes for
bridges and for schools and they had determined to make the absentees
in this way compensate them, in part, for the increment they were
earning for them.

The conviction of right and justice in the white settler did not
differ from the innate and untutored argument of the Indian. The
Indians felt oppressed because they were compelled to pay the man for
what that man had never earned. The white settlers dete