As it was, some acres were born large and some small, some
fruitful and some barren, some with gold in their mouths and some with
only the taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have adjusted
them to the unequal capacities of that army of land lackers who declared
themselves free and equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to
the territory where the squatters became sovereigns and homesteads became
castles.
President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven-
hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and
sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one
hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30-
per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two
hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the
homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the
homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of
four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the
nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred
dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen
billion six hundred million dollars--a scheme as ingenious, says one, as
Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting
hen.
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