6 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



best home market, and Colorado's hope of future 

 greatness rests upon her varied resources. But it 

 seems very plain that this is the time for studious 

 attention to her irrigation possibilities. 



In his speech at the World's Fair on Man- 

 hattan Day, Chauncey M. Depew, speak- 

 Deprw. j n g O f tne Dangers which confront New 

 New York and Chicago, used these words: "The de- 

 population of the country and the overcrowding of 

 the city present to each municipality problems of em- 





"* HON. MARTIN MOHLER. 

 Secretary of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture. 



ployment and support which unsolved are dangerous 

 to peace and property, and whose solutioners are not 

 yet in sight. The genius of the American people for 

 government will meet and overcome these perils, but 

 at present they confine the energies of municipalities 

 within their own limits." Mr. Depew belongs to a 

 class and to a section which does not know that in the 

 States and Territories of the arid West there is peace 

 and happiness for the surplus population which men- 

 aces the prosperity of great eastern cities. He and his 

 friends do not know the industrial history of Utah, of 

 the Greeley colony in Colorado, of the irrigation belt 

 of Southern California. Therefore they cannot realize 

 how families can be more independent on small irri- 

 gated farms than is he in his home on Madison ave- 

 nue. The development of a civilization which will 

 teach men to produce from their own acres, under 

 scientific cultivation by means of irrigation, every- 

 thing they consume, is the solution of the problem 

 which alarms Mr. Depew. The freest men who ever 



walked the earth will live under the most charming 

 social conditions that the human mind can conceive, 

 where deserts now turn their blank faces to rainless 

 skies. Nobody knows this better than the people of 

 Colorado. Why are they not telling it to Mr. Depew 

 and all the rest of their countrymen? 



The present year ought to be extremely 

 Calamity . . . , . . . . .. 



in successful in bringing colonization to the 



Opportunity. West It is an historical fact that busi- 

 ness depressions lend an impulse to the settlement of 

 agricultural lands. An army of wholly or partially 

 idle men, variously estimated at from 1,000,000 to 

 4,000,000, exists in this country to-day. Some of them 

 have savings, but all of them must live somewhere 

 and earn their bread by the sweat of their brows. Colo- 

 rado has water and lands enough to support every one 

 of them in reasonable luxury. She has the brains to 

 map out an industrial scheme by which each pne of 

 them, on a farm no larger than forty acres at the max- 

 imum, could produce almost everything they consume, 

 as well as a surplus for market. While we do not 

 doubt the sincerity of Governor Waite in his present 

 extraordinary course, it seems plain to us that he 

 would accomplish more for his State and more for hu- 

 manity if he had asked the Legislature, at its extra 

 session, to provide means for opening to settlement 

 homes for 1,000,000 people, and for putting into opera- 

 tion the agencies which would attract this new popu- 

 lation, and show them the means of prosperity when 

 they had arrived. His reply to this suggestion would 

 doubtless be that it is useless to ask men to raise more 

 products from the soil to be sold at the depreciated 

 prices which the gold standard imposes, but the reply 

 is that human appetite for food has not depreciated 

 with silver, and that the man who is in a position to 

 feed and clothe his family from the results of his own 

 industry is as in 'ependent as any who lives by clip- 

 ping coupons from Government bonds. 



Popular sentiment is clearly setting in 



A Coming , ., ,. , ., 



Idaho the direction of the ownership by the 

 Policy, people o f a ii public plants and franchises 

 in Western America. The difficulties surrounding 

 the adoption of this policy, where every avenue of 

 business is already occupied by private enterprise, 

 with large vested interests, are by no means as formi- 

 dable in the virgin field presented, in the main, by Arid 

 America. While the boundless and varied resources of 

 the new and greater West will always offer extraordi- 

 nary opportunities for individual enterprise, it is also 

 a fact that nowhere else in the world is there so favor- 

 able a ground for the out-working of what may be 

 termed the Nationalist Idea. And it is bound to be 

 tried. If it succeeds, it will thrive and grow; if it fails, 

 it will disappear. At this moment Idaho, seems likely 

 to play a leading part in this development. The 

 movement there gains prominence from the fact that 



