ONE ASPECT OF SOCIAL REFORM. 



lous as the cities of Europe, and when, according to 

 the sayings of the wise men across the Atlantic, 

 such a government as this cannot possibly stand the 

 strain. Truly enough great changes are impending, 

 but the great republic will still stand, to the confu- 

 sion of kings and princes, and an example to their 

 people. There is still an abundance of room in this 

 transmontane region, but the western side of this 

 continent cannot be occupied on the same terms as 

 were the Atlantic States. So long as the discontented 

 laborer could at any time take to the woods, or to the 

 wild prairie.-, whenever the conditions were made too 

 hard for him, he could not be starved into uncondi- 

 tional surrender, and not even such philanthropists 

 as Pullman or Carnegie could crowd him into a very 

 tight corner, and the Pinkerton men, the militia and 

 the regular troops had no part whatever in the settle- 

 ment of the labor question. Until very recently even 

 the lazy, the shiftless and the ignorant could always 

 find plenty of room and live in some sort of rough 

 abundance, just beyond the frontiers of civilization, 

 but for immigrants of the traditional Pike County 

 sort there is no longer a place anywhere within the 

 United States, and least of all in the land of irriga- 

 tion. The lean-faced, yellow-skinned immigrant 

 from Pike County, with his hungry-looking wife and 

 dirty, ragged children, with the inevitable "yaller" 

 dog and the kind of a horse that always goes with 

 such an outfit ; such immigrants cannot invade arid 

 America at all; they would starve to death at the out- 

 set. California, Arizona and Nevada can never be 

 settled on the same plan as Missouri and Arkansas, 

 for example. It does seem as if Nature had reserved 

 this side of the Continent until American civiliza- 

 tion could furnish the right sort of immigrants in 

 sufficient numbers to suddenly occupy the land and 

 prepare the way perhaps for another great ad- 

 vance in social evolution. In most parts of the earth 

 Nature seems to tolerate all sorts of human kind, or, 

 at any rate, the process of weeding out the weak- 

 lings and incompetents seems to be exceedingly slow, 

 but in this land of the sunset, where civilization must 

 depend on irrigation, a certain and very respectable 

 degree of intelligence is demanded of the farmer as 

 the very first condition of success. In other irrigated 

 lands, where there are masters and slaves, it is only 

 necessary that the master should be intelligent, but 

 Jupiter Pluvius will never abdicate his functions in 

 favor of an ignorant clod-hopper. An irrigated farm 

 demands rather a superior grade of intelligence and 

 a greater degree of skill than a farm of the other 

 sort; it is about the same comparison as between a 

 fine Atlantic steamer and the ship in which Colum- 

 bus sailed for America. To be sure, with irrigation 

 the returns are far more certain, and beyond all com- 

 parison more bountiful, but as has been said so many 



times, the unintelligent, plodding, old-fashioned 

 mossback is much better off in New England than 

 he would be in California. Still one other very im'- 

 portant difference in the settlement of the extreme 

 West; the lone pioneer and the old-style Buffalo Bill 

 sort of frontiersman have no part nor place in 

 it. Colony settlement must be the rule, and the indi- 

 vidual pioneer, pushing out for himself far beyond 

 all settlements, will be the rare exception. The 

 rough frontier life, such as has been - known in all of 

 the older States, will never be seen in the dry valleys 

 of California. Civilization must invade these dry 

 deserts in force or not at all. The invaders must come 

 in bands and companies; the thin skirmish line of 

 rough frontiersmen can make no lodgment here. The 

 old familiar story of the early settlement of the Mis- 

 sissippi Valley States, in which fighting sheriffs, 

 horse thieves, vigilance committees and border ruffi- 

 ans make up so large a part, will never be repeated 

 in irrigated California. The transition between the 

 hot, dry desert, bare of every green thing, even of 

 weeds, and the finest gardens and orchards in the 

 world, is extremely sudden in these parts. Still one 

 further consideration which brings iriigated Cal- 

 ifornia at once and directly into line with the civili- 

 zation of the future, and that is the fact that irriga- 

 tion implies, and almost compels, co-operation or 

 association. It is not often that the solitary rancher 

 can find a water supply sufficiently abundant and re- 

 liable which he can monopolize. Water rights are 

 generally very valuable, and often very costly, prop- 

 erty, and many things are financially easy to the col- 

 ony which would be quite impossible to the individ- 

 ual, and it has been demonstrated again and again 

 that where one solitary family could not live at all a 

 large community can live in rich abundance. And 

 still further; in a land where nothing is possible 

 without water, and where almost everything is possi- 

 ble with water, this all-important fluid cannot be 

 made subject to monopoly, as there is a limit beyond 

 which even trust and corporations must not pass un- 

 der penalty of destruction. From force of circum- 

 stance, if from nothing else, the Californian must be 

 an active partner in many plans of co-operation. As 

 we have already noted, irrigation almost necessitates 

 co-operation, and the various fruit growers' unions 

 for drying, packing, shipping and selling the fruit 

 seems already to include the greater part of the busi- 

 ness in California. It is altogether probable that the 

 co-operative plan will be more and more extended 

 year by year, and made to include more departments 

 of business. As co-operation has been found suc- 

 cessful in a few things, the plan will be extended and 

 made to rule over many things, and this will furnish 

 a grand object lesson amid the disorder consequent 

 upon the breakdown of the competitive system. 



