THE IRRIGATION AGE. 49 



like it for one trip a year across the continent in a palace car to spend 

 a few days in the vicinity of the property. Then the company comes 

 into court and coolly ignoring the money it received for the sale of so 

 many acres of five dollar land for three hundred and fifty an acre be- 

 cause it was supplied with water, also coolly ignoring the tens of 

 thousands it received from the sale of town lots at ridiculous figures 

 because of the water, asks the court to have the rate annual rates 

 raised from the three and a half an acre which was the implied con- 

 tract with the purchaser. It asks to have the rates raised to seven 

 dollars an acre a year, on the ground that the three and a half does 

 not give the seven per cent interest on the cost of the plant required 

 by the constitution of California. The difference in the value of the 

 land dry and wet more than paid the entire cost of the works. Fat 

 dividends were paid out of it that helped send the stock to something 

 like double its par value. Those who took it for the land in the res- 

 voir, and those who paid in construction money not paid by sales of 

 land, could have sold out at any time during some two years for sev- 

 eral times what the stock cost them. Long after the boom one of the 

 projectors refused ninety thousand dollars for his stock, which was 

 about ninety times the value for any other purpose of the land he ex- 

 changed for it for reservoir purposes. 



This company also has several thousand acres of the same kind 

 of land left, so valuable with the water that it planted a thousand of 

 it in lemons for itself which it is now working Yet all this is ignored 

 and the proposition treated by the company itself as if its sole source 

 of reimbursement for the expense was the collection of annual rentals. 

 To say that such a thing is a failure of irrigation works even when 

 the company itself so alleges is nonsense. 



In the San Joaquin Valley, in Arizona, and other parts of the west 

 are companies that have in one way or another taken in large areas of 

 land under the arid land act. Sometimes this has been done by the 

 party making the entry deeding a portion of it to the company for the 

 water that is to make it possible to make his proof, and sometimes by 

 the land being entered by numerous relatives and friends of the mem- 

 bers of the company and then transferred to a sub-company, called an 

 Improvement Company or something of the sort, but consisting sub- 

 stantially of the same parties as the main company, or at any rate of 

 the controlling interest. These lands thus acquired are often very 

 extensive and without them the works would never have been built. 

 Most of these companies have large areas of this still left which they 

 could have sold for two, three and often five or six times what it cost 

 to put the water on. But it was not enough. They thought the boom 

 was only a natural healthy growth and wanted more. Why should 

 they charge this against irrigation? They still have the land. They 

 have the water to put on it, good farmers under the works on exactly 

 similar land are making good profit on it, the company itself could do 



