State Agricultural Society. 193 



in London as recent as September fifth, eighteen hundred and seventy- 

 three, it appears there has been expended by the Government in India 

 on irrigating canals what in our money would amount to fifty-one million 

 forty-five thousand dollars, and that at this time similar works in India 

 are in course of construction, which will actually cost fifty million five 

 hundred and eighty thousand dollars in addition. More than half of this 

 sum is to be expended within the next five years. 



The English are a cool, calculating, monej'-making, and money-saving 

 people. India has been the great source of their wealth for the past 

 century, and it seems destined to be for the next century. 



THE OWNERSHIP OP THE WATER. 



In most countries where irrigation has proven successful, the owner- 

 ship of the water remains in the sovereignty, and the sovereignty either 

 grants the right to its use to canal companies, or makes the canals and 

 rents water to those desiring to irrigate. Our American law of riparian 

 ownership, and the recognized doctrine that each navigable stream is a 

 highway, open alike to the use of the whole people, and especially the 

 ease by which private parties acquire title to great watercourses, will 

 necessarily cut a large figure in the disposition of this important ques- 

 tion. If the State owned and controlled the fee to all our watei"courses. 

 so that no private enterprise or individual could acquire a legal right 

 to any of the waters, any more than they could to a public highway, 

 then terms could be imposed (the fee remaining in the State), so that 

 large inducements could be offered to private capital to invest in irrigat- 

 ing canals, while a reasonable and just protection against monopoly 

 was assured to the people. 



There is still another view which presents itself for consideration. 

 The right to the use of a reasonable amount of water is incident to the 

 ownership of the land adjacent to it, and neither the State, nor any 

 individual or corporation in the State, ought to be permitted to divert 

 and take from its natural channel, or from the valley through which 

 it runs, the water of any of the streams of the State, if it be needed 

 there; but the amount only that is needed should be retained for riparian 

 owners. To say that the waters of the San Joaquin may be trans- 

 ferred from that great valley, and used for the purpose of irrigating 

 lands located either all upon the one side of the river or remote from it, 

 when it is required there, will be to admit that the people of one portion 

 of the State may do an act which will deprive the people of another 

 section of the means of subsistence. 



Yet the riparian ownership should be limited to the amount of water 

 that is actually needed. 



The man who owns the right to an article like water, in a climate like 

 ours, without taking any steps toward a useful appropriation of it, is as 

 great a monopolist as he who owns the water and uses it as a means of 

 oppression. 



In a country like this, where a large portion of the year is rainless, 

 a monopoly of the water is as dangerous to the prosperity of the coun- 

 try as a monopoly of the air we breathe; and yet, when we reflect that 

 it requires the expenditure of a sum of money greater far than any es- 

 timate has hitherto been made, to dig canals through our valleys large 

 enough and permanent enough to answer the purposes of irrigation on 



25— (aerf) 



