12.]
It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the
signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been
active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New
York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who
in season and out kept asserting the equal right of man to land. It was as
a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already
congested areas on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making the
wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his
associates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested
privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of
property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of
this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but
to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred
and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social
regeneration that would not disturb the titles to property already granted
to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less,
for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and
would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he
thought.
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