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Show 518 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT cepted, though they were filed. On June 12, 1917, Congress voted $150,000 for classifying land but the task was to take months, even years, because the Interior Department interpreted the act as requiring field examinations, as one member of Congress said, of every 40-acre tract. The number of applicants for land had grown to 70,000 before an acre had been classified. One member of Congress who wanted speedy action claimed that applicants had moved upon the land and presumably begun their improvements without any certainty that their tracts would become subject to entry but when it was pointed out that the building of fences was illegal it was conceded that many of the persons referred to were in small towns waiting for the land they had selected to be designated as suitable for stock raising. In either case, haste in classifying the public lands was advisable and to assure speedy action remedial legislation, which seemed always to be called for after every major law affecting land entries, was considered. A group of western Senators brought forth an amendment to the Act of 1916 that would direct the Secretary of the Interior to complete the classification of land subject to entry within 6 months. If classification were not completed within that time any person qualified to make an entry would become entitled to do so by accompanying his application with a verified statement supported by affidavits of two disinterested parties that the land for which he filed contained no merchantable timber, was not susceptible of irrigation, contained no water holes, and was chiefly valuable for grazing and forage crops. The government was to be privileged to contest his selection within 12 months but if it did not do so within that time the applicant's right to the entry would become valid. Paul Husting of Wisconsin pointed out that such a measure would make ineffective all the restrictive clauses of the original act and would throw open to entry all the remaining public lands, since classification could not possibly be completed in 6 months and no public officer would be anxious to question the rights of an entry-man even if he had skirted the truth somewhat in his application. The measure was a fraud, he declared, though wrapped up in qualifying but meaningless phrases. He feared it was designed, as apparently he believed the Act of 1916 had been, to enable stockmen and other powerful groups to engross great areas, and would contribute further to the development of large estates and tenancy. His criticisms were sound, as Thomas J. Walsh partly conceded, but most members of the Senate thought otherwise. They voted for the adoption of the measure 51-3 with only Husting, Walsh, and Henry F. Hollis of New Hampshire opposing it. One might have expected Robert Marion LaFollette to have opposed the bill but, strangely enough, he was recorded as favorable to the measure. The House took no action.52 Failing in their efforts to nullify the classification provisions in the Act of 1916 the western Representatives secured a deficiency appropriation of $200,000 on March 28, 1918, and a regular appropriation on July 1, 1918, of $197,268. With $175,000 appropriated in 1919 and $300,-000 in 1920 and 1922 it was possible for the Geological Survey to press forward its task and to soothe feelings in the West. Western representatives were quite right in claiming that the delay in classifying the land was discouraging to the many who had proceeded to the public lands to gain a 640-acre homestead. Not until November 28, 1917, 11 months after the adoption of the Stock Raising Homestead Act, was the first application accepted and by June 52 Cong. Record, 65th Cong., 1st sess., Sept. 27, Oct. |, 1917, pp. 1457-58, 7546, 7554; Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1917, pp. 178, 522. |