concessions from the Government. It was in this debate, where the public
land was referred to as "refuse land" that Henry Clay felt called upon
to remind his fellow-legislators of the significance and growing value
of the public land. He said, "A friend of mine in this city bought in
Illinois last fall about two thousand acres of this refuse land at the
minimum price, for which he has lately refused six dollars per acre....
It is a business, a very profitable business, at which fortunes are made
in the new states, to purchase these refuse lands and without improving
them to sell them at large advances."[42]

A century ago, while it was still almost a wilderness, Illinois began to
feel the pressure of limited resources--a pressure which has increased
to such a point that it has completely revolutionized the system of
society that was known to the men who established the Government of the
United States.

This early record of a mid-western land boom, with Illinois land at six
dollars an acre, tells the story of everything that was to follow. Even
in 1832 there was not enough of the good land to go around. Already the
community was dividing itself into two classes--those who could get good
land and those who could not. A wise man, understanding the part played
by economic forces in determining the fate of a people, might have said
to Henry Clay on that June day in 1832, "Friend, you have pronounced the
obituary of American liberty."

Some wise man might have spoken thus, but how strange the utterance
would have sounded! There was so much land, and all history seemed to
guarantee the beneficial results that are derived from individual land
ownership. The democracies of Greece and Rome were built upon such a
foundation. The yeomanry of England had proved her pride and stay. In
Europe the free workers in the towns had been the guardians of the
rights of the people. Throughout historic times, liberty has taken root
where there is an economic foundation for the freedom which each man
feels he has a right to demand.

2. _Security of "Acquisitions"_

Feudal Europe depended for its living upon agriculture. The Feudal
System had concentrated the ownership of practically all of the valuable
agricultural land in the hands of the small group of persons which ruled
because it controlled economic opportunity. The power of this class
rested on its ownership of the resource upon which the majority of the
people depended for a livel