112 3Ir. John H. Balfour Broume [March 17, 



The creed of Socialism is that as no one made the land, or the 

 minerals in the land, no one can be the owner of them, and the 

 reverse of that curious coin is that labour makes all wealth ; there- 

 fore, to labour all wealth belongs. But these gentlemen should see 

 the lands of Lincolnshire, and they will discover that they have been 

 as much created by the labour of men and the capital of owners as 

 a steam-engine or a boat. But the lesson we should learn from these 

 floods, I suggest, is not only that we must find a means of getting 

 rid of land waters, which is poor economy in a country which, in 

 parts, suffers at times from severe periodic droughts, but that we 

 must come to some comprehensive conclusion as to a scheme by 

 which, while training the fury of the floods of winter — by domesti- 

 cating, as it were, our wild animal "water," and holding it in 

 reservoirs — we may have such a deposit as will prevent floods, and 

 tide us over periods of dry weather, and so make what is at present 

 the " curse " of rains, the blessing of abundant water supply. This 

 principle has been recognized in all our great impounding schemes, 

 but it wants to be carried into higher politics, as an economic prin- 

 ciple in relation to our water supply. But to do this effectively it 

 must be done not on a parochial, but on a national scale. The 

 importance of the management of water sources and of distribution 

 upon a large scale is only now, it seems, beginning to dawn upon the 

 obscurity of public opinion. In the early days water seemed to be 

 everywhere, and even when that delusion had been routed by dry 

 summers, the matter was still treated as a purely local question. A 

 town was on a river, and it dipped into it. It was on a water-bearing 

 strata and it sunk a well, but as I have shown by instances it is 

 evident that the purely local treatment of the water question must be 

 abandoned. Great towns, as we have seen, have gone to great dis- 

 tances and have appropriated areas which may in the words of the 

 Duke of Richmond's Commission of 1869 "naturally and geographi- 

 cally belong to districts nearer to such sources." And these enter- 

 prises have raised the large question which, as I said, is in a sense 

 political — the question of national water. The importance of this 

 larger treatment of the great subject first dawned upon the commer- 

 cial instincts of men. Eeservoirs were formed in many of the 

 Yorkshire and Lancashire valleys in which the mill-owners banked, 

 as it were, the winter floods to keep their wheels going in the summer 

 droughts, and before the days of railways when canals were still real 

 highways and not the peaceful sluggards of rural districts, where with 

 the lazy bulging barge they form the easy subject of the sketcher's 

 art. In those days when they were the sole highways of commerce, 

 many reservoirs were formed in the hills to feed the canals with the 

 water which was lost in lockage. Nothing could better illustrate the 

 importance of " large maps " in relation to water supply than a passage 

 from recent commercial history. During the last year the trade of 

 our eastern ports diminished. These ports are largely dependent on 



