THE LAND SYSTEM NEEDED FOR THE ARID REGION. 41 
the United States is dependent upon irrigation, and practically all values 
for agricultural industries inhere, not in the lands but in the water. 
Monopoly of land need not be feared. The question for legislators to 
solve is to devise some practical means by which water rights may be 
distributed among individual farmers and water monopolies prevented. 
The pioneers in the ‘‘new countries” in the United States have inva- 
riably been characterized by enterprise and industry and an intense desire 
for the speedy development of their new homes. These characteristics are 
no whit less prominent in the Rocky Mountain Region than in the earlier 
“new countries”; but they are even more apparent. The hardy pioneers 
engage in a multiplicity of industrial enterprises surprising to the people of 
long established habits and institutions. Under the impetus of this spirit 
irrigation companies are organized and capital invested in irrigating canals, 
and but little heed is given to philosophic considerations of political econ- 
omy or to the ultimate condition of affairs in which their present enterprises 
will result. The pioneer is fully engaged in the present with its hopes of 
immediate remuneration for labor. The present development of the country 
fully occupies him. For this reason every effort put forth to increase the 
area of the agricultural land by irrigation is welcomed. Every man who 
turns his attention to this department of industry is considered a public 
benefactor. But if in the eagerness for present development a land and 
water system shall grow up in which the practical control of agriculture 
shall fall into the hands of water companies, evils will result therefrom that 
generations may not be able to correct, and the very men who are now 
lauded as benefactors to the country will, in the ungovernable reaction 
which is sure to come, be denounced as oppressors of the people. 
The right to use water should inhere in the land to be irrigated, and water 
rights should go with land titles. 
Those unacquainted with the industrial institutions of the far west, 
involving the use of lands and waters, may without careful thought suppose 
that the long recognized principles of the common law are sufficient to 
prevent the severance of land and water rights; but other practices are 
obtaining which have, or eventually will have, all the force of common 
law, because the necessities of the country require the change, and these 
OAR 
