30 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



another two hundred years and the iron one hundred years, but both 

 will come high in your time. We wish we did not have to mention the 

 oil and the natural gas, but we may as well tell you that we've sucked 

 them out of the earth almost completely and wasted them. 



Dear next generation, such is part of the shameful explanation truth 

 compels us to make to you concerning the waste and loss of your patri- 

 mony. We've skimmed the cream and have led jolly lives we do 

 sincerely hope you like skimmed milk, and little of it. When you are 

 shivering with the cold in a coalless country, when you are nursing one 

 blade of grass to grow for you where two grew for us, when you have 

 ceased automobiling on account of the high price of oil, then you'll 

 remember us in our riotous plenty. Don't be too angry with us. We 

 robbed you. We took the bread out of your mouths, you our babes, and 

 fed it to the vultures who were fattening upon our national dishonor. 

 But our sins have been the sins of ignorance rather than of wilfulness. 

 Your fathers were happy, devil-may-care fellows, whose courage, as 

 war patriots, you must in justice honor, but who never had any com- 

 prehension ^of the meaning of a civil patriot nor the slightest realization 

 that it required any of the qualities of courage, self-sacrifice for the 

 common good, and intelligence which in war patriotism we have exem- 

 plified." 



OUR WATER LAWS. 



Pointed statement from a letter by President Allison Ware, of the Chico 

 State Normal School. 



" Worst of all, the water running in our streams has been so care- 

 lessly handled by our laws, (patterned as they are after the laws of 

 England, where water is a pest and the only thought is to get it off the- 

 place as quickly as possible,) that most of it is now in private owner- 

 ship, much of it many times over, with results that have produced wide- 

 spread discomfort and that clearly throttle the growth of the State as 

 a land of farming. 



A few things, it seems to me, the people of California must speedily 

 come to understand. First, the wonderful value of water; what it 

 means to the farmer, to the manufacturer, to the main sources of wealth 

 of all sorts. Second, the endless litigation, fearful waste of water 

 wealth, harsh water-lordism, an uneconomic application of streams to 

 production; all the results of our foolish laws. Third, that there is a 

 remedy, partial because we have been slow to seek it, but still a remedy 

 that will save to the future the possibility of sustaining an agricultural 

 community of two million prosperous homes in California. 



As to this great subject of water in relation to agriculture in Cali- 

 fornia, Bulletin 100, Department of Agriculture, contains the whole 

 story and shows us our tardy remedy." 



