Excerpt from The National Land System: 1785-1820 It is the purpose of this study to show how the national public lands passed into private ownership during the first great period of our land system. It is concerned, therefore, only with the disposal of the lands by the nation, it does not presume to discuss the uses to which the lands were put. It considers the land grants for education, for example, merely as a way in which great areas passed from the public domain to the control of the States; it does not work out the management of those grants. In short, it deals with the origin of the public domain and with every form of disposition which was in use before 1820. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.