a few families
or in an aristocratic class; that great danger we have escaped, but we
have not yet learned how to give the land meaning to the greatest number
of people. This is a question for the best political program, for we
look for the day when statesmanship shall be expressed in the details of
common politics.

We now hear much about the good-roads question, as if it were a problem
only of highway construction: it is really a question of a new map.

_The public program_

It would be a great gain if many persons could look forward to the
ownership of a bit of the earth, to share in the partition, to partake
in the brotherhood. Some day we shall make it easy rather than difficult
for this to be brought about.

Society, in its collective interest, also has necessities in the land.
There is necessity of land to be owned by cities and other assemblages
for water reservoirs, and all the rights thereto; for school grounds,
playgrounds, reformatory institutions, hospitals, drill grounds,
sewage-disposal areas, irrigation developments, drainage reclamations;
for the public control of banks and borders of streams and ponds, for
the shores of all vast bodies of water, for pleasure parks, recreation,
breathing spaces in the great congestions, highways and other lines of
communication; for the sites of public buildings, colleges and
experiment stations, bird and beast refuges, fish and game reservations,
cemeteries. There are also the rights of many semi-public agencies that
need land,--of churches, of fraternal organizations, of incorporated
seminaries and schools, of water-power and oil and coal developments,
of manufacturing establishments, of extensive quarries, and of
commercial enterprises of very many kinds. There is also the obligation
of the general government that it shall have reserves against future
needs, and that it shall protect the latent resources from exploitation
and from waste. Great areas must be reserved for forests, as well as for
other crops, and, in the nature of the case, these forest spaces in the
future must be mostly in public ownership.

Great remainders should be held by the people to be sold in small
parcels to those who desire to get out to the backgrounds but who do not
want to be farmers, where they may spend a vacation or renew themselves
in the soil or under the trees, or by the green pastures or along the
everlasting streams. It is a false assumption which supposes that if
l