TEE MENAGE TO NIAGARA. 491 



The legislative bodies of these two governments must meet it again, for 

 it is plainly not the present temper of the public to let it pass in un- 

 certainty. 



Any citizen of New York or Ontario may justly take a pride in 

 the magnificent industrial development building up about Niagara 

 Falls, even though it is all at the cost of the beauty and magnificence 

 of the cataract. Nowhere else has nature afforded such tremendous 

 power at once available to mankind and calling forth the highest 

 play of his genius. If I could hold a brief for the development of 

 these natural resources it would be the delight of my pen to paint the 

 wealth, the contributions to human comfort which will flow from 

 them. I might argue that nature created this tremendous fall of 

 water for the express purpose of contributing to commercial power 

 and industrial supremacy. Such a brief would lament, as I have 

 heard a distinguished engineer lament, the actual waste of power dur- 

 ing the ages in which the great river has been discharging itself 

 in unutterable glory and construe it sinful to neglect the opportunity 

 so lavishly afforded. Such a brief might deride and cachinnate at 

 the possibility of ever diverting enough water from Niagara to make 

 the Falls palpably less, and all these arguments it would not be difficult 

 to enforce with speciotts reasoning and pleading facts. 



The attitude of the man who is willing and ready to see Niagara 

 entirely drained for the wealth it would produce, and only a dreary 

 canyon left to speak of its splendid past, is wholly intelligible, or would 

 be except for the potent facts that wealth and happiness and con- 

 tentment are purely relative and that the natural forces of the world 

 were not created for the use of man. 



The question I have put has been not only asked, but answered. 

 in New York, officially. The abstraction of water from Niagara Falls 

 was condemned by a committee of the constitutional convention ap- 

 pointed to investigate this subject in 1894, when the public had begun 

 to suspect that the legislature had been too free with its gifts of 

 franchises to power companies. It was vigorously and effectively 

 answered by Governor Odell in 1901, who stood out finely against a 

 tremendous pressure brought to bear upon him by the industrial in- 

 terests, not through any hostility to them, but for the simple senti- 

 mental reason that the Falls must be conserved. Few know the courage 

 of this act, but it was a triumph of sentiment and morality which the 

 citizens of New York may well applaud. 



The editor of the Popular Science Monthly has asked me to 

 set forth the facts relating to the situation at Niagara Falls in such 

 form that it may be made clear whether existing and impending con- 

 ditions there constitute an actual menace to the cataract and its ac- 

 companying attractions, or whether public apprehension has been un- 



