The Irrigation Schemes of the West. 205 



ture, and agriculture is depressed, its profits reduced, by every 

 increase of our cultivated area. 



Finally, what is to be done about it? It is too late now to 

 hope for repeal of the homestead laws and similar out-of-date 

 legislation in time to do much good. Ten years ago next October, 

 when the journal with which I have the honor of being connected 

 began the first regular attack that has ever been made on our 

 outgrown and now suicidal national policy of dealing with the 

 public domain, a very large area of arable land was still the prop- 

 erty of the nation, and the work of giving it away, to the un- 

 speakable injury of the owners, might well have been arrested. 

 But I am sorry to say that it was then, as it very largely still is. 

 quite impossible to rouse the class most directly interested, the 

 farmers of the older States, to any sort of energetic action for 

 the protection of their own well-being. Farmers' organizations. 

 as a rule, have devoted themselves to all sorts of rainbow chasing, 

 or have frittered away their energies on matters deserving enough, 

 perhaps, but of very trifling consequence in comparison with the 

 immense importance of attacking the one great evil. A^ery few in- 

 dividual farmers could be induced to call up the matter in granges 

 or similar bodies, or even to interview their own representatives 

 in Congress and urge them to acti(m. Considerably more than a 

 hundred millions of acres — just think of it, a hundred millions of 

 acres — have been given away since then, with hardly an audible 

 protest from the class who were daily robbed and impoverished 

 by the operation, until now it is almost within bounds to say 

 that there hardlv remains a desirable homestead in anv State 

 washed by the Mississippi or its affluents; and they are scarce 

 anywhere. As the last Year Book of the Department of Agricul- 

 ture says. " all the best parts of the public domain have been 

 appropriated, and comparatively very little good agricultural land 

 remains open to settlement." One might think we were within 

 sight of the beginning of the end of the mischief, and might lioi)e 

 now for a slow imjirovement, the supply of wild land being nearly 

 exhausted, while our population is increasing by leaps and 

 bounds. 



Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. We are merely 

 entering upon a second stage in the work of spoliation. Animated 

 by an intensely selfish and narrow desire for the so-called devel- 



