es. It was supposed to be worth, on
the average, about a dollar an acre, which would make this property an
asset sufficient to meet the debts of the war and to leave a balance
for the running expenses of the Government. It thereby became one of the
strong bonds holding the Union together.

"Land!" was the first cry of the storm-tossed mariners of Columbus. For
three centuries the leading fact of American history has been that soon
after 1600 a body of Europeans, mostly Englishmen, settled on the edge
of the greatest piece of unoccupied agricultural land in the temperate
zone, and proceeded to subdue it to the uses of man. For three centuries
the chief task of American mankind has been to go up westward against
the land and to possess it. Our wars, our independence, our state
building, our political democracy, our plasticity with respect to
immigration, our mobility of thought, our ardor of initiative, our
mildness and our prosperity, all are but incidents or products of this
prime historical fact.*

* Lecture by J. Franklin Jameson before the Trustees of the
Carnegie Institution, at Washington, in 1912, printed in the "History
Teacher's Magazine," vol. IV, 1913, p. 5.

It is seldom that one's attention is so caught and held as by the happy
suggestion that American interest in land or rather interest in American
land--began with the discovery of the continent. Even a momentary
consideration of the subject, however, is sufficient to indicate how
important was the desire for land as a motive of colonization. The
foundation of European governmental and social organizations had been
laid in feudalism--a system of landholding and service. And although
European states might have lost their original feudal character, and
although new classes had arisen, land-holding still remained the basis
of social distinction.

One can readily imagine that America would be considered as El Dorado,
where one of the rarest commodities as well as one of the most precious
possessions was found in almost unlimited quantities that family estates
were sought in America and that to the lower classes it seemed as if a
heaven were opening on earth. Even though available land appeared to be
almost unlimited in quantity and easy to acquire, it was a possession
that was generally increasing in value. Of course wasteful methods of
farming wore out some lands, especially in the South; but, taking it by
and large throughout the country, with t