The Irrigation Schemes of the West. I99 



those that surround us at the dawn of the twentieth; and that 

 many lines of public policy once eminently laudable have become 

 obnoxious and dangerous as times change. When a baby weighs 

 ten pounds, it has just one alternative before it — grow, or die; 

 when in after years the ten pounds has become two hundred, the 

 condition of affairs is changed; further increase is suggestive 

 rather of dropsy than of growth. The behavior most suitable to 

 the infant nation, just stretching its unformed limbs and not yet 

 quite certain what sort of creature it will grow to be, becomes in 

 the highest degree absurd and detrimental when maturity has 

 been attained, and the former infant has reached the understand- 

 ing and the enjoyment of the powers of manhood. Of this ob- 

 vious fact, in its relation to a rational management of the public 

 domain, sight has largely and most unfortunately been lost by 

 the American people. We go on hurrahing for every increase 

 that successive censuses show in our population, with very little 

 consideration of the quality of the people that have been added — 

 in our agricultural area, with very little consideration of its actual 

 value to the nation — and above all, in our production of crops, 

 without any consideration at all of the profit of growing them or 

 thp real financial condition of the men who are feeding half the 

 world. We go on turning round and round like the dog, merely 

 because our ancestors did so and we take it for granted that that 

 must be the proper thing. To sum it all up in a nutshell: Time 

 was when every enlargement of our agricultural area conduced to 

 the general welfare; such enlargement does not conduce to the 

 general welfare now — quite the reverse. All the same, we go on 

 tranquilly permitting if not actively encouraging such enlarge- 

 ment, and felicitating ourselves on that which is really, though 

 insidiously, bringing upon us a train of appalling evils. 



Before endeavoring to indicate definitelv what some of tbese 

 €vils aire, and the ponderousness of the weight that thr-y are 

 throwing upon onr financial prosperity, let me make a plain state- 

 ment of the speed and energy with which the government is dissi- 

 pating and worse than dissipating our priceless heritage of culti- 



