Rob Bishop: “I appreciate the opportunity you have given us to speak for awhile about public lands and about how the public lands are…”

“I appreciate the opportunity you have given us to speak for awhile about public lands and about how the public lands are treated and how the future will and will not deal with those public lands. One of the facts that we have to deal with is how a government deals with property, whether personal property or public property, is a window to the soul of that government. Personal property is tangible and civil liberties are intangible, but both of them are at the center of the historic purpose of this American government, and the preservation of one is indeed the precondition for the preservation of the other. Sir Henry Maine once wrote a book called 'The Village Communities' in which he said: Nobody is at liberty to attack several property and to say at the same time he values civilization. The history of the two cannot be disentangled. The desire, the use of property, whether it is on land or whether it is the use of public property, that desire is what raises mankind from political slavery.”