GOV. DOWNEY S ADDRESS. 307 



tween the mountains and the sea. Individual communities and set 

 tlers have neither the means nor sagacity to utilize it, and therefore 

 the State should step in and say how it shall be done; whether the 

 State can do it through its proper officers, or how companies, under 

 proper restrictions as to charges, shall do it. There should be no 

 water allowed to run down to the sea in winter unutilized. It should 

 be carried in a thousand conduits through the valley, and, rain or no 

 rain, we should irrigate our lands in winter, thus destroying the ver 

 min that honeycomb our subsoil, and that destroy and break capil 

 lary attraction. If we thus throw into our land an additional num 

 ber of inches of water and break the surface as soon as a team can 

 walk over it after irrigation, we will, with any ordinary rainfall, se 

 cure an abundant small grain crop, and keep our lands forever reno 

 vated. Our streams must be sheet piled to the bed-rock at points 

 where they emerge from the foot-hills, so as to bring their full flow 

 to the surface, and then main ditches ramified from the dam in 

 wood, cement pipe, or sheet iron or earthen pipes. The loss from 

 evaporation and absorption is so great that our slovenly open ditch 

 system will not serve our purpose. 



It is unnecessary to review the practice of Egypt, Babylon and Syria 

 to show what irrigation did for those countries, nor to allude to the 

 perpetual renovation of the valley of the Nile from natural and artifi 

 cial irrigation. We have only to refer to the productiveness of com 

 parative sand hills here in this country, that have produced the same 

 crops for seventy years in succession without the aid of manure and 

 owe this to the ever-restoring qualities of irrigation; we refer to 

 England, Ireland and Scotland, that have a humid atmosphere and 

 an average rainfall of twenty-seven inches per annum and that have 

 called in the aid of irrigation as a restorative to their lands and made 

 their meadows yield ten tons of hay per acre when but one ton could 

 be produced before. It must be borne in mind that our ditches 

 should always keep full, that we should keep our dams always in re 

 pair, that tree planting and vine planting cannot be successfully 

 carried out unless your ditch is ready to run behind you, and that it 

 is no time to be called on to go to work on your ditches when you 

 should be plowing, planting and seeding, and that if you neglect 

 this you will all want water at the same time and cannot possibly 

 procure it. All who have the good fortune to have artesian wells 

 should have reservoirs; if not they are but little use, and are only a 

 willful waste of a gift of Providence, to be swallowed in the next 

 squirrel hole, or a nuisance to impede transit or devitalize some flat 

 that would otherwise be productive. 



The Legislature should take bold ground on this subject and com 

 pel well-owners to put on taps or build reservoirs to be called upon 

 at the proper time to perform their part in adding to the general 

 wealth of the State. It is a rational conclusion to come to that if 

 every man who bores a well and suffers the flow to be carried off by 

 our trade winds, perhaps to the valley of the Mississippi, we are the 

 losers, and the fountain of supply will be exhausted. This sugges 

 tion may look like interfering with the private rights of citizens, but 

 the maxim that partial evil is universal good comes in, and that 

 every civilized man must surrender a portion of his natural liberty 



