l and ultimate ownership of the land lies with all its people;
and hence the method of administering the land is at all times an open
public question. As to the nation at large, its settled policy and
long-continued custom support the principle that all citizens have
inalienable rights in the land. Instead of selling the national domain
in quantities to suit purchasers, the government has held it open free
to agricultural laborers, literally millions of men being thus given
access to the soil. Moreover, in thirty-seven of the forty-four states,
execution for debt cannot entirely deprive a man of his homestead, the
value exempt in many of the states being thousands of dollars. Thus the
general welfare has dictated the building up and the securing of a home
for every laboring citizen.

In line, then, with established American principles is the proposition
for municipal lands. And if municipalities have extended to capitalists
privileges of many kinds, even granting them gratis sites for
manufactories, and for terms of years exempting such real estate from
taxation, why not accord to the wage-workers at least their primary
natural rights? If any property be exempted from taxation, why not the
homesite below a certain fixed value? And if, for the public benefit,
municipalities provide parks, museums, and libraries, why not give each
producer a homesite--a footing on the earth? He who has not this is
deprived of the first right to do that by which he must live, namely,
labor.

_Effects of Municipal Land._

A city public domain, open to citizen occupiers under just stipulations,
would in several directions have far-reaching results.

Should this domain be occupied by, say, one thousand families of a
population of 50,000, an immediate result, affecting the whole city,
would be a fall in rents. In fact, the mere existence of the public
domain, with a probability that his tenants would remove to it, might
cause a landlord to reduce his rents. Besides, the value of all land,
in the city and about it, held on speculation, would fall. Save in
instances of particular advantage, the price of unimproved residence
lots would gravitate toward the cost, all things considered, of
residence lots in the public domain. This, for these reasons: The corner
in land would be broken. Home builders would pay a private owner no more
for a lot than the cost of a similar one in the public area. As houses
went up on the public domain, the chance