106 



Spain where land and water are united have, without exception, a 

 highly developed agriculture and contented and prosperous farmers. 

 Those provinces where the ownershij^ of land and the right to water 

 are separated are provinces with a decaying agriculture and a dis- 

 couraged and impoverished body of farmers. Formerly the same 

 statement was true of Italy, but since the assertion of governmental 

 control over streams and the fixing by the Government of the condi- 

 tions under which water is delivered to consumers, much has been 

 done to mitigate these evils. More is being done by the gradual con- 

 demnation and purchase of the old personal-property rights by farm- 

 ers' cooperative associations, thus bringing about a union of the water 

 right and land ownership. 



Along the Platte River the danger of separate ownership of land 

 and water is magnified bv the mistakes made in the establishment of 

 the amount of the early appropriations. Nearly all of these were for 

 greater volumes than had actually been used. These rights are per- 

 petual, and if they become separated from any particular place of 

 diversion or any particular place of use there is grave danger of a 

 water monopoly. The enormous aggregations of wealth in few hands 

 and the abuses which have attended the formation of trusts and 

 monopolies of other natural resources leave no question that legisla- 

 tion should seek to prevent the establishment of monopolistic control 

 of streams. A monopoly of water Avould be worse than a monopoly 

 of oil or iron, because in the case of either oil or iron new stores of 

 these materials may be found ; but whoever acquires a right to all 

 the water of a stream has a monopoly which can never be broken. 

 Water can not be shipped in from the outside, and there is no hope 

 of the discovery of additional supplies. 



The danger of transfers and the danger of sales of water rights 

 lie in the recognition of such ownership as will permit one individual 

 or one company to acquire all the rights to a river and fix the condi- 

 tions on which the supply will be disposed of to users. The ques- 

 tion we have to consider in these States is whether a right to use 

 water, as stated in their laws, means the same thing as a right to sell 

 water. In each of these States the foundation of an appropriation 

 is the use of the water, and the right granted is the right to use; and 

 if this is rigidly construed it would seem to mean that only a 

 usufructuary right is acquired. If this is true, when A irrigates 

 his land to acquire a right, all that he acquires is a right to divert 

 from the public water supplies the amount needed to continue that 

 irrigation, and the needs of the land will for all time be the measure 

 of the right. It is not maintained that this view has prevailed in the 

 establishment of rights or in the interpretation of their character by 

 the courts, but it is believed that to carry out the intention of the 



