tter
lands. Such a measure would also seem to be more consistent with the
policy of the existing laws--that of converting the public domain into
cultivated farms owned by their occupants. That policy is not best
promoted by sending emigration up the almost interminable streams of
the West to occupy in groups the best spots of land, leaving immense
wastes behind them and enlarging the frontier beyond the means of the
Government to afford it adequate protection, but in encouraging it to
occupy with reasonable denseness the territory over which it advances,
and find its best defense in the compact front which it presents to
the Indian tribes. Many of you will bring to the consideration of the
subject the advantages of local knowledge and greater experience, and
all will be desirous of making an early and final disposition of every
disturbing question in regard to this important interest. If these
suggestions shall in any degree contribute to the accomplishment of
so important a result, it will afford me sincere satisfaction.

In some sections of the country most of the public lands have been sold,
and the registers and receivers have very little to do. It is a subject
worthy of inquiry whether in many cases two or more districts may not
be consolidated and the number of persons employed in this business
considerably reduced. Indeed, the time will come when it will be the
true policy of the General Government, as to some of the States, to
transfer to them for a reasonable equivalent all the refuse and unsold
lands and to withdraw the machinery of the Federal land offices
altogether. All who take a comprehensive view of our federal system and
believe that one of its greatest excellences consists in interfering as
little as possible with the internal concerns of the States look forward
with great interest to this result.

A modification of the existing laws in respect to the prices of the
public lands might also have a favorable influence on the legislation
of Congress in relation to another branch of the subject. Many who have
not the ability to buy at present prices settle on those lands with
the hope of acquiring from their cultivation the means of purchasing
under preemption laws from time to time passed by Congress. For this
encroachment on the rights of the United States they excuse themselves
under the plea of their own necessities; the fact that they dispossess
nobody and only enter upon the waste domain: that they g