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About The Conservative (Nebraska City, Neb.) 1898-1902 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 22, 1900)
Conservative * ing advice in the Nebraska City News of November 10th , 18(58 ( : We , as an old settler , may perhaps be excused for giving advise to newcomers , and so venture a little of that cheap article. It is better and cheaper for newcomers comers to winter in the river counties than to go into those of the interior. It is better because houses are more easily secured , grain more plenty , and fuel more reasonable. It is cheaper because corn and hay are cheaper on the river , and so is wood , and so are groceries. And when spring comes , buy small farms of entered lauds in river counties , and improve them as your means will permit. Forty acres within ten miles of a market town on the Missouri river , will pay better than ICO acres fifty miles west of it. A homestead is often times the dearest bought land in the state , though given to the settler. It costs "a heap" to take up and improve raw prairie , miles from timber , miles from market , and miles from schools and churches. This is our argument. It is much better for the settlers , and much better for the state , to give one-half of the unoccupied raw prairie laud in the in terior , miles from timber , miles from market , and miles from schools and churches , to a railroad company that will build a railroad into this uninhabited prairie waste , and sell the other half for $2.50 per acre to settlers. Give the settler his choice , laud for nothing , miles from timber and miles from a railroad , or land at $2.50 per acre near a railroad , and the lands at $2.50 will be taken and made into farms long before the free lands will have population enough for a county organization. The schools have one-eighteenth of all the lauds in the state , amounting to nearly 8,000,000 acres. If the state of Nebras ka makes a judicious appropriation of the lauds for internal improvements , by restricting the time to five years for building the roads , and giving a portion of the lands only on the completion and acceptance of the same in sections of twenty miles , she can secure the build ing of four or five lines of railway in the state , adding to the taxable property in the state $50,000,000 and increasing the value of the school lands in the state $5,000,000. Nebraska will build herself up with railroads ; this rich soil without timber must have railroads to supply the deficiency to the settler and carry to market the products of this garden of the West. Let the lands be so dis tributed that a large part of the state ' may receive the benefits. With a fair proportion of these lands , the Midlanc Pacific Eailway can be completed to Lincoln , the capital of the state , in the year 1809 , thus giving to Otoo and Lau caster counties the immediate benefits of her share of those lands. It is not the object of this circular to convince the people of Nebraska that he extension of railroads into the state s of more importance than any other mprovement , or all other improvements of like character ; the fact is self-evident hat a largo majority of the people in his state know and fully appreciate the vast benefits to be derived from them. Many of the inhabitants of Nebraska mvo emigrated from the old states east of us , and in their early life have wit nessed the building of one or two rail roads , and felt the great revolution in irade and commerce. They have sold ; heir old farms , received the great advance on their real estate , and now lave the evidence that railroads make a country while without them it re mains dormant and slow in develop ment. But there is a small class of men who call themselves conservatives , self- styled conservatives ( they adopt that iame because they fancy there is a show of wisdom in the name ) who apply to nternal improvements views as fatal tea a community or a city as it would be tea a merchant for him to refuse to solicit ; rado or offer inducements to customers. They do not perceive that while they are trying to preserve the people from nnovations and extravagant expendi tures , they are at the same time bottling them up and isolating them from the channels of trade and commerce. When ; hese misdirected conservative efforts succeed in any one community or .ocality , the outside world moves on without it. It must forever afterwards pay tribute to those around it or triple bhe expenditure to recover their position. Railroads cannot be forced through any city , town or country when large in ducements are offered to go around it. Why not apply these conservative views to building houses and improving farms ? Why mortgage your farms to add more acres , open more land , sow more seed , or build new buildings ? "The highest state of improvement for the face of the earth , " is the motto. Every aim and every blow struck by mankind says improvement. The farmer improves his farm , his cattle and horses ; the rail way improvement brings him every thing , distributes materials , unequally apportioned by nature over the face of the whole earth ; railways make new states , populate waste places by bring ing the surplus population from crowded cities , and carry products of the soil to market at one-half the former cost , thereby doubling the value of the soil. The amount of capital now invested in railroads in the United States is 1,600- 000,000 dollars. The demagogue tries to produce a prejudice among the people against capital. The demagogue tells them that capital invested in a railroad is a monopoly. Does he say that you must prevent capital from accumulating prevent people from growing rich Then if you cannot prevent capital from accumulating how will you have i nvested ? The demagogue says all rail roads are monopolies. Is a railroad a monopoly when it carries you a thous and miles in forty-eight hours , for the sum of forty dollars , when previous to he building of the railroad yon were carried in stage coaches , the same dis- ance in ten days , and charged $100 ? Do not most men welcome all suchmonopo- ies ? In addition to this great reduction n time and money , they by the same nvestmont , and the creation of the same monopoly increase the value of your property from one thousand to ; wo thousand dollars. If people could dictate how money should be invested , would they say put it in government ) ends , that the owners might draw their nterest at no trouble to themselves and no advantage to them or would they offer inducements to invest it in a rail road running by their doors to increase the value of their property , and furnish one of those misnamed monopolies ? What is there to induce a capitalist to convert his interest-paying bonds into doubtful paying railroad stock , unless ; he people who are to receive the benefits offer him some inducements ? The statistics of the state of Illinois show nearly 4,000 miles of railway. They also show that a railroad built one hundred miles , at an average cost of $4,200,000 , and that the increase in the value of the real estate along the line of and within the influence of the road is $10,920,000. While the capitalist has converted and invested his money in a railroad with the care and anxiety of watching dis honest employees to make it pay him seven or eight per cent , the people have made $10,920,000. The English government found in the railroad system the only policy to sus tain herself during our late war , without American cotton. At the breaking out of our rebellion , she commenced build ing railroads in British India. A paper read before the statistical society of London by R. Dudley Baxter , in Novem ber , 1866 , shows that since 1861 the English government has granted $440- 000,000 subsidy to cotton railroads in India. She has built a main line through the center of the empire , uniting the extremes , with many branches through the cotton districts , and by that means supplied her cotton factories at home , and kept her people from star vation and revolution during our re bellion. In November , 1866 , there were three thousand two hundred miles of railroad in operation and one thousand miles in process of construction , to be completed in 1867 ; and now in 1868 , they have completed an unbroken con nection from Calcutta to Bombay , a dis tance of fourteen hundred and fifty- eight miles all belonging to one com pany the Great India Peninsular Railway Company. By the develop ment of British India with railways , more than half of the supply of cotton
