3oo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ington's waterway commissioners nor their successors took much ac- 

 count of water save as a way for commerce; they failed to recognize 

 water in itself as a resource and hence an object of property, except 

 vaguely under the imported common-law notion of riparian rights — 

 i. e., rights vesting essentially in the land with the water as an appur- 

 tenance thereto. Now as settlement extended into the arid regions, 

 the pioneers learned through the bitterest experiences within human 

 capacity that water itself is a primary value, indeed the greatest of all 

 values; and gradually a new concept arose, under which individuals, 

 then communities, and finally (in some cases) states came to recognize 

 actual ownership in water. 3 As the concept took form it became clear 

 that the value of land itself — the chief value reckoned by the founders 

 — is determined chiefly by the water on or in its substance, for if too 

 wet it is worthless, if too dry a menace to life ; indeed the market value 

 of each acre of arable land in the United States to-day is determined 

 within some ten per cent, by the associated water — i. e., the water-value 

 is nine when the land-value is one. 



The new concept of water as a primary value in its substance or 

 corpus is not yet crystallized in statute or even in custom; it has 

 come up with the natural growth and orderly development of the 

 country; and it is still an open question whether the powers of the 

 states or of the nation are paramount — though the view that the value 

 pertains to the people and is to be administered primarily by the nation 

 on account of its interstate quality, and secondarily by the states as an 

 appurtenance of the land, would seem to accord with the principles 

 framed into the constitution and interpreted by Marshall and con- 

 temporary jurists. Certainly a value of such magnitude as the 40.000,- 

 000,000 cubic feet of water flowing annually down to the sea is a 

 natural resource too closely connected with the peace and perpetuity 

 of the nation to long remain neglected; it alone would warrant con- 

 ference between the executives of state and nation. It is within the 

 memory of many now living that a man able to estimate the value 

 of a raft of logs or a patch of standing timber more closely than his 

 fellows, taking advantage of the fact that forests were still regarded 

 as little more than obstructions to settlement, began to buy small tracts 

 nominally as land but actually for the timber, and continued turning 

 over his growing capital and buying larger and larger tracts as the 

 pineries were despoiled, until he became an undercurrent of power in 

 legislative halls and at last gained wealth probably exceeding that of 

 any other individual in the world's history ; and he but exercised previs- 

 ion in taking freely that which was not at the time regarded as a 



3 Summarized by Hess in " An Illustration of Legal Development — the Pass- 

 ing of the Doctrine of Riparian Rights" (Am. Polit. Science Review, Vol. II., 

 November, 1907, pp. 15-31). 



