AN IMPENDING REVOLUTION. 



89 



their boundaries, and hence acres are now sold at high 

 prices per front foot where cheap farms could have 

 been purchased a few years ago. This fact is due to 

 the double action of the human tide. The inflow 

 congested the cities and towns within their old 

 limits, while depopulating the farms not only of 

 America, but, unfortunately for us, of many foreign 

 countries as well. Whatever the cause, the result 

 has been to over populate the cities at the expense of 

 the country to a considerable extent. It has been 

 herein stated that this movement of population has 

 not been an unmixed evil. One of the features most 

 plainly observed has been to diminish the propor- 

 tionate number of producers from the soil, and to in- 

 crease the number of consumers. If this fact has not 

 added to the general prosperity beyond that which 

 would have resulted from more and better tilling of 

 ihe soil by a greater number of workers, it has no 

 doubt until lately, enabled soil tillers to find a better 

 market for their products. But conditions have 

 changed, and the idle masses in the cities must be re- 

 distributed. Not only this, but a general widening 

 of the circle of urban life is certain to result from 

 conditions and forces now existent and operative. 

 All this is not only needful, but in the highest 

 degree desirable on the score of material and moral 

 wellbeing; and the primal causes which are des- 

 tined to effect a peaceful and beneficent revolu- 

 tion in this direction are water and electricity. With 

 water for irrigation of small tracts near great centers 

 of population and business, and with electricity at 

 command for reaching them, it is safe to say that 

 hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, will 

 avail themselves of the opportunities thus offered to 

 breathe the pure fair of the country and to enjoy 

 more elbowroom than heretofore. There is some- 

 thing in the nature of every man which sooner or 

 later tends to draw him from the overcrowded haunts 

 of men to the quieter scenes of a rural environment. 

 All men long for a home in the country, and it is the 

 dream of most city men to one-day have a home acre 

 or more where grass and flowers, and fresh vege- 

 tables and fruits may be enjoyed in the knowledge 

 that they are the product of one's own land. Thanks 

 to the science of irrigation and electricity, millions of 

 day dreams of the past are now likely to prove sub- 



stantial realities. The wonderful productiveness, nat- 

 ural or otherwise, of almost any soil properly watered 

 and tended,has been so fully established in the irrigated 

 regions that it has given a new aspect to rural life, 

 and a thousand new hopes of human happiness are 

 daily born of legitimately wedded land and water. 

 The marvelous results achieved by tapping the great 

 reservoirs of electricity have resulted in bringing a 

 country residence fifteen miles from the city within 

 a half hour's journey, thus separating home and 

 business in a way most salutary to physical and 

 mental health. Thus water and electricity are 

 already at work changing for the better the relative 

 conditions of urban and rural life. So easily and 

 cheaply may electric roads now be built that they are 

 pushing out in all directions from the centers of 

 population and radically changing the relative 

 aspects of city and country. In a certain sense the 

 new devices in transportation have annihilated dis- 

 tance entirely and substituted for it the mere ques- 

 tion of time. A business man who lives on his little 

 irrigated five-acre plat, surrounded by all that is 

 desirable in home life, is no longer fifteen miles, but 

 thirty minutes, from his city office. A few years ago 

 he was practically as far away though living- on a 

 narrow city lot only ten blocks distant. 



Then, too, in addition to the highly advan- 

 tageous widening of strictly urban and surburban 

 lines, the electrical developments of the present time, 

 added to the wonderful progress made in the 

 knowledge of practical irrigation, largely through the 

 influence of THE IRRIGATION AGE, have made the 

 colony system of populating new regions, the re- 

 cognized mode of establishing the most thriving set- 

 tlements. Water and electricity thus act together 

 to more equitably distribute population and the 

 values of land, and easily and quickly accomplish what 

 public disapproval of faulty municipal systems, 

 and what paternal legislation of State or nation have 

 never been able to effect. It is scarcely too much to 

 say that no other human agency, operative during 

 the past fifteen hundred years, has been so beneficial 

 in its action and so comprehensive in its scope as the 

 full development of the irrigation idea on conservative 

 lines and the like development of transportation 

 agencies through the medium of electricity. 



HARVEST SCENE ON AN IRRIGATED FRUIT FARM IN IDAHO. 



