Excerpt from Galusha A. Grow: Father of the Homestead LawThe definition of history as the biography of great men holds good in the land movement of the United States as elsewhere. Galusha A. Grow, Speaker of the House of Representatives in Lincoln's time, true statesman, patriot in so large a sense that to-day we are reaping a harvest which he helped to sow and largely cultivated, did human, historical work which should make him proportionately honored.To his foresight and persistence we owe, in great part the settlement of the Far West with genuine homes, the peopling of vast tracts with earnest homesteaders who could give that invaluable element, personal interest, to the task of breaking open the continent, and the retention to such people of a consider able part of the domain which, in 1850, was in so large a measure not only new possession but entirely unassimilated.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.