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Senate Bill 5228: Senator Simmon's speech

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  • 000,000, only $2,000,000 of that sum is made available for the next four years, the idea of the committee being that it would be at least ten years before the whole 4,000,000 acres would be purchased and title secured. The bill further provides as a safeguard that the Secretary of Agriculture shall make an annual report to Congress during the time he is engaged in making purchases of tbe land of which the park is to be composed. Mr. President, I have heard but one I might term substantive ground of objection to this bill, and that is that it commits the Government to a new line of policy which may eventually involve the expenditure of large sums of money. I want for a short time to examine this argument, for it is the basic ground of opposition to the bill. It is well known that during the last ten years there have been organized and established in the United States forty-one national forest reservations. These reservations are located in thirteen different States. They comprise a total area of 72,000 square miles, the smallest containing about 18,000 acres, and the largest about four and one-half million acres. Not a single one of these forest reservations is located east of the Mississippi River. It is true that in the region east of the Mississippi River there are a number of so-called military parks or reservations, all of a limited area and for a specific purpose. There are certain battlefield reservations, such as the Chickamauga battle ground and the Gettysburg battle-ground park, also of limited area and established because of the historic interest attaching to those particular spots. But of course these can not be called forest reservations or parks in such a sense as the Yellowstone is a park or the reservations in the West are national forest reservations. Now, the establishment by the Government within a decade of these numerous and extensive Western reservations would be, I take it, accepted as a precedent for the legislation proposed in this bill and as a sufficient answer to the suggestion that it will commit the Government to a new policy but for the fact that all of these parks were carved out of the public domain, land which already belonged to the Government, while it is proposed by this bill that the Government shall go into the market and purchase the land out of which the park is to be established. Mr. President, I concede that there is a distinction between the proposition involved in the establishment of these Western reserves and the proposition of this bill, but I think it is a distinction without a substantive difference, because there can not be any material difference in principle between an appropriation of the property of the people and an appropriation of the money of the people. Whether these Western reserves were originally acquired by purchase, as in the case of the one which is located in what is known as the "Louisiana Purchase," or whether acquired by war, as in the case of those that are located within the territory embraced in the Mexican cession, or acquired by discovery, as in the case of those embraced in the Oregon and Washington territory, in each case the lands were the property of the people and constituted a national asset of considerable value at the time they were organized. Those lands are used for parks, and to-day I am informed (I do not know whether it is correct or not) by a 5333
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