THE IRRIGATION DISTRICT 

 SYSTEM. 



THE INHERENT DEFECTS WHICH HAVE CAUSED 



ITS FAILURE CAN ONLY BE REMEDIED 



BY A STATE SYSTEM. 



BY GEORGE H. MAXWELL. 



"The ditches are full of bright after thoughts/' is an Arabian pro- 

 verb which may well be applied to the situation in California with refer- 

 ence to the irrigation district system. The reasons for its failure are 

 now so manifest that it would seem as though they would naturally have 

 been generally foreseen, but they were not. Some, who were more far- 

 seeing than others, predicted them, but their objections were swept 

 away by the wave of the then popular demand for some system of public 

 construction and control of irrigation works, We have it on good au- 

 thority that Governor Washington Bartlett, one of the wisest and most 

 conservative governors California has ever had, hesitated long before 

 signing the bill known as the Wright Act, believing it to be a dangerous 

 measure, and that he finally did so only because he did not believe that 

 he ought to set his individual judgment as to the measure against what 

 seemed to be an almost universal, popular demand for its enactment. 

 After ten years of actual experience under the law it has proved to be a 

 disastrous and utter failure and is now as generally unpopular as it was 

 once popular. 



The New Year's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, published 

 in January 1P97, contained an exhaustive article giving a summary of the 

 operations and conditions in the various irrigation districts throughout 

 the state, which was republished in the issue of the California Advocate 

 for that month. Accompanying that article was a statistical table show- 

 ing that over fifty districts had been organized, which had authorized a 

 bonded debt of $16,000,000. About $8,000,000 of these bonds had been 

 actually issued, of which only five per cent had been sold for cash, the 

 balance having been traded for water rights and other property or used 

 in payment for construction work. The total area encumbered by this 

 huge debt was 2,000,000 acres, of which, as the sum total result of the 

 operations of all the districts, only about 100,000 acres in all had been 

 actually irrigated. 



No further facts would be necessary to utterly condemn the district 

 system. But as coming from an entirely disinterested and unprejudiced 

 observer, and resulting from a personal visit to California, the conclu- 

 sions of Capt. Hiram M. Chittenden, in his late Report on Federal Reser- 



