veloped, and in point of fact each district, when it became sufficiently populous, was formed into a self-governing State, the less populous divisions still remaining in the status of semi-self-governing Territories. Although many blunders have been committed in the process of development, especially in the reckless contraction of debt and the wasteful disposal of the public lands, greater evils might have resulted had the creation of local institutions and the control of new communities been left to the Central government.[1] Congress would have been not less improvident than the State governments, for it would have been even less closely watched. The opportunities for jobbery would have been irresistible, the growth of order and civilization probably slower. It deserves to be noticed that, in granting self-government to all those of her colonies whose population is of English race, England has practically adopted the same plan as the United States have done with their western territory. The results have been generally satisfactory, although England, like America, has found that her colonists have been disposed to treat the aboriginal inhabitants, whose lands they covet and whose persons they hate, with a harshness and injustice which the mother country would gladly check.
The arguments which set forth the advantages of local self-government were far more applicable to the States of 1787 than to those of 1887. Virginia, then the largest State, had only half a million free inhabitants, about the present population of St. Louis. Massachusetts had 450,000, Pennsylvania 400,000, New York 300,000; while Georgia, Rhode Island, and Delaware had (even counting slaves) less than 200,000 between them.[2] These were communities to which the expression "local self--
- ↑ The United States is proprietor of the public domain in the Territories, and when a new State is organized the ownership is not changed. The United States, however, makes grants of wild lands to the new State as follows:— (1) Of every section numbered 16 (being one thirty-sixth of all) for the support of common schools. (2) Of lands to endow a university. (3) Of the lands noted in the surveys as swamp lands, and which often are valuable. (4) It has usually made further grants to aid in the construction of railroads, and for an agricultural college. The grants commonly leave the United States a much larger landowner within the State than is the State itself, and when all the dealings of the National government with its lands are considered, it is more justly chargeable with squandering the public domain than the States are.
- ↑ I give round numbers, reduced a little from the census of 1790.
