Fortunately these sales were repudiated before patents were given by the state. Even now holdings belonging to large tracts that were deeded by the state are in litigation on the ground of having been obtained fraudulently. They were not swamp lands.
(2) The same legislature that responded to Governor Pennoyer's appeal to stop the swamp land disgrace was guilty of the second great debacle in Oregon's land policy. Its act requiring that all lands the price of which was subject to its control should be sold at $1.25 per acre and providing that all selection of lieu lands should be by the intending purchaser, brought the transactions of Oregon's land office down into the lowest depths of iniquity — not once only, but a second period worse than the first was countenanced.
(3) Though regularly there was a solemn affidavit required of each purchaser that his purchase was for his own use and benefit and not for speculation, yet through easy assignment provided for of his certificate of sale, and through the fact that an assignee could have a million acres deeded directly to him by the state, land monopoly was made easy.
There is no excuse for these several delinquencies in the state's policy. The primitive practices of the earlier decades are easily condoned. The absence of any constructive policy on the part of the state is, down to the beginning of the nineties, no fault of Oregon's, for the general government with holdings nine or ten times those of the state, and therefore dominating the situation, exhibited a like lack of any discernment of its duty and opportunity with its domain. The new and higher purposes exhibited by the national government with the remnant of its resources came too late to be easily emulated by Oregon. It must now be a climb up a rugged and steep ascent to secure control of the resources absolutely essential to a commonwealth's life and strength and to the happiness of its people.
