Land Distribution Quotes
Fixed tenure meant leases for a significant period of time. For various reasons, Irish landowners were reluctant to invest in improving property in any way. It the tenant invested his own sweat or resources to improve the property, the landlord would evict him and rent to someone else for more money for the “improved” property. So no one would ever improve property until there were laws requiring tenants to have rights of transfer, inheritance and reasonable fixed lease terms.
This was the basic document issued after the Russian Revolution establishing the basic legal and economic structure of the new Soviet State.
Church doctrine was that the earth was flat. Augustine did not believe the contrary, but this quotation shows that a thousand years before Galileo and Columbus, there were many people who did. . There were ancients who knew about the round earth as well. See {590333} and {590334}.
In England when a landowner died, the eldest son inherited all the land. In Ireland at that time, the land was equally divided among all the sons. This subdivision over several generations produced smaller and smaller land holdings at the same time when new agricultural technology was making the smaller farm an uneconomical entity. Although the Irish system was fairer, it destroyed Irish agricultural productivity.
In every society where there had been past unjust ownership of land, all efforts of land reform were faced with the problem of having to dispossess the current “owners” who themselves had not been guilty of the crimes of their ancestors in unjustly obtaining the land originally. In America land reform was unworkable in most cases and the solution was usually a large monetary payment as compensation for the land.
This law provided for Individual Indian ownership of land which was seen as an essential step to stimulate assimilation of Indians into American society. For some it had that effect, but it also weakened the tribal community as the allotted land was then no longer controlled communality by the tribe and civil governance of the allotted lands were transferred to the state and local government and away from the traditional tribal government. In some cases traditional tribal government became impossible. Also, the Indians who were allotted the land could and often did sell it to whites. Land owned by Indians decreased from 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million acres in 1934—a 65 percent reduction. This Act also imposed a patriarchal household onto many matrilineal Native societies, in which women had controlled property and descent, since under the sexist American law at that time all family property was owned and controlled by the husband. In 1934 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt supported the US Indian Reorganization Act. It ended allotment and created a "New Deal" for Indians, including renewing their rights to reorganize and form their own governments. Much of the damage of the Dawes Act had already been done however. See Senator Henry Moore Teller’s criticism of the Dawes Act {633120}.
They were corresponding about the anti-Chinese movement in America and the attempt to exclude Chinese from immigration to the United States and ethnically cleanse the country.
