Why should there be a different rule in regard to occupants for
municipal preemption? The latter is, by the very tenor of the law, the
preferred object. Why should those interested in it be subject to
special disabilities of competing occupancy? I cannot conceive.
It is obvious that, in municipal settlement, as well as agricultural,
there must be space of time between the commencement and the
consummation of occupation. There will be a moment, when the equitable
right of the agricultural settler is fixed, although he have as yet
done nothing more in the way of inhabiting or improving than to cut a
tree or drive a stake into the earth. And it may be long before he
improves each one of all his quarter quarter-sections. So, in
principle, it is in the case of settlement for a town. We must deal
with such things according to their nature. Towns do not spring into
existence consummate and complete. Nor do they commence with eight
houses, systematically distributed, each in the centre of a forty-acre
lot. And in the case of a town settlement of three hundred and twenty
acres; as well as that of a farm site of one hundred and sixty acres,
all which can be lawfully requisite to communicate to the occupants
the right of preemption to the block of land, including every one of
its quarter quarter-sections,-- is improvement, or indication of the
improvement of the entire block,-- acts of possession or use regarding
it, consonant with the nature of the thing.
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