Some such legislation as that proposed is essential in order to preserve the great stretches of public grazing land which are unfit for cultivation under present methods and are valuable only for the forage which they supply.  These stretches amount in all to some 300,000,000 acres, and are open to the free grazing of cattle, sheep, horses and goats, without restriction.  Such a system, or lack of system, means that the range is not so much used as wasted by abuse.  As the West settles the range becomes more and more over-grazed.  Much of it can not be used to advantage unless it is fenced, for fencing is the only way by which to keep in check the owners of nomad flocks which roam hither and thither, utterly destroying the pastures and leaving a waste behind so that their presence is incompatible with the presence of home-makers.  The existing fences are all illegal.  Some of them represent the improper exclusion of actual settlers, actual home-makers, from territory which is usurped by great cattle companies.  Some of them represent what is in itself a proper effort to use the range for those upon the land, and to prevent its use by nomadic outsiders.  All these fences, those that are hurtful and those that are beneficial, are alike illegal and must come down.  But it is an outrage that the law should necessitate such action on the part of the Administration.  The unlawful fencing of public lands for private grazing must be stopped, but the necessity which occasioned it must be provided for.  The Federal Government should have control of the range, whether by permit or lease, as local necessities may determine.  Such control could secure the great benefit of legitimate fencing, while at the same time securing and promoting the settlement of the country.  In some places it may be that the tracts of range adjacent to the homesteads of actual settlers should be allotted to them severally or in common for the summer grazing of their stock.  Elsewhere it may be that a lease system would serve the purpose; the leases to be temporary and subject to the rights of settlement, and the amount charged being large enough merely to permit of the efficient and beneficial control of the range by the Government, and of the payment to the county of the equivalent of what it would otherwise receive in taxes.  The destruction of the public range will continue until some such laws as these are enacted.  Fully to prevent the fraud in the public lands which, through the joint action of the Interior Department and the Department of Justice, we have been endeavoring to prevent, there must be further legislation, and especially a sufficient appropriation to permit the Department of the Interior to examine certain classes of entries on the ground before they pass into private ownership.  The Government should part with its title only to the actual home-maker, not to the profit-maker who does not care to make a home.  Our prime object is to secure the rights and guard the interests of the small ranchman, the man who plows and pitches hay for himself.  It is this small ranchman, this actual settler and homemaker, who in the long run is most hurt by permitting thefts of the public land in whatever form.