the world. The British
land-shark, having got his hold upon the soil, possesses the place to
stand for which the Greek sighed in vain, and no man will say he does
not move the world; and he will continue to move _it_ until such time
as the world shall move _him._

The foreign land-shark is still in his infancy. We have an indigenous
land-shark whose maw is so capacious that the rapacity of his appetite
in no wise keeps pace with its lightning-like digestion. Congressman
William Steel Holman, of Indiana, one of the purest statesmen of these
corrupt times, and one of the most thoroughly informed men of the
country upon the question of eminent domain, and the bestowal of that
domain upon corporations and syndicates, recently said, on the floor
of the House of Representatives, in the course of a discussion on the
Post-office Appropriation bill:

Is it just and proper to require the landgrant railroads to
transport your mails at 50 per cent of the rates you pay to
corporations whose railroads were built by private capital?
I think it is. I think it liberal and more than liberal when
the cost in public wealth is considered in the building of
these land-grant railroads. I submit tables of the railroads
built under the land-grant system, compiled from official
reports, and they show an aggregate of 218,386,199 acres,
192,081,155 acres of which were granted between June 30,
1862, and March 4, 1875, the aggregate length of railroads
for which the grants were made being 20,803 miles, 13,071
miles independent of the 7,732 mileage of the Pacific roads;
and the reports of the Post-office Department show that last
year the Government paid, on 11,588,56 miles of land-grant
railroad, independent of the Union Pacific system and the
great body of lapsed grants, $1,144,323.91 for postal
service. The startling fact appears that in the gradual
development of these grants, great as they are, they still
swell in their proportions. I pointed out on a former
occasion the startling discrepancies that appear in the
official statements of these grants, and can only say now,
as I did then, that in such enormous grants a few million
acres either way is considered of no moment.

Again:

There are other grants which I have not included in either
of the foregoing tables where not a spadeful of earth has
been dug in th