736 ' TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



great national problems — the Irish question — the owning and cultivating 

 of the soil by the people. The pursuits of agriculture are time-honored, 

 they are legitimate, they have received the sanction of Divine law, and 

 are commended by the best human intelligence. 



The art of agriculture, as it is practiced in California, is peculiar. It is 

 not like the art developed by experience among the Anglo-Saxon races in 

 other countries. Here in California we have had difficulty in adjusting 

 the principles of the English common law to the irrigation question, the 

 English common law with respect to riparian rights. 



The Anglo-Irish races, from which we derive our common law, inhabited 

 a country where there was not only abundance, but an excess of rainfall, 

 which made it exceedingly desirable to confine the rivers to their channels. 

 England is a low, fiat island, scarcely rising one hundred feet above the 

 level of the sea, except a few highlands in its northern portion, or on the 

 borders between England and Scotland. Scotland is somewhat more rug- 

 ged, but the mountains of Scotland are not such mountains as stand guard 

 and sentinel upon the borders of our great State. They would not pass for 

 respectable hills in Lake and Mendocino. Scotland is also a country of 

 heavy rainfall. Ireland, except in its extreme southwestern part, is low 

 and level. Its streams have sluggish currents. In fact, none of the rivers 

 of these islands present the torrential character of the rivers of moun- 

 tainous countries. The Thames, for example, is influenced by the tides 

 seventy miles above its mouth. The problem, then, which our ancestors 

 of the common law had to solve, was how to keep the water in its channels. 

 The necessity of distributing it to supply the deficiencies of rainfall and 

 the art of artificial irrigation were unknown to them. With the Latin 

 races the experience was different. The value of irrigation has been 

 understood in Italy and Spain for more than a thousand years. They 

 derive that knowledge from Egypt. 



Men inherit their aptitudes, and traditions long descended have their 

 influence upon faculty, or rather upon facility, for accomplishing an object. 

 The Anglo-Saxon race had, perhaps, its first experience of irrigation in the 

 Salt Lake Valley. Converts to Mormonism were the first of the Anglo- 

 Saxon races who attempted to people a country where the annual precipi- 

 tation of rain was not sufficient to mature agricultural crops. With that 

 superb faculty for organization which confers upon the English races their 

 genius for government, systems of irrigation were formed. There was no 

 common law within the Mormon hierarchy to obstruct the formation of a 

 public policy strictly in accordance with public rights and public interests, 

 and the great doctrine of the greatest good to the greatest number. The 

 Anglo-Saxons of the Wahsatch Mountains, not only succeeded in their 

 undertaking in a new field, but very soon surpassed in skill and the utili- 

 zation of capital and labor the experiments of the Latin races. 



People emigrating from one portion of the world to another necessarily 

 carry themselves; that is to say, they carry* their character, their traditions 

 and their aptitudes. Men are intolerant of differences, hence it is that the 

 emigration which has been passing from the east to the west during the 

 entire history of the races of men, so far as written history testifies, has 

 moved upon the same latitude. The northern races moved into northern 

 latitudes, because in seeking new countries and homes they found familiar 

 products, in the cultivation of which they were skilled by inherited 

 aptitudes, and by the education of tradition; therefore we find the Swede 

 and Norwegian settling in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Dakota, the English 

 and Irish in the middle and northern States, and the Spanish and French 

 occupying Florida, Louisiana, Mexico, and Central and South America. 



