122 THE IRRIGA TION A GE. 



Win. E. Smythe, the founder and former editor of THE AGE, seems 

 the best of all to meet the wants of modern times where people dread 

 isolation. It certainly has great advantages and no objections that I 

 can see because no one is obliged to live in the center. But there are 

 some things that settlers should be compelled to do, such as arrange 

 waste water ditches and plant timber along them so as to be at no ex- 

 pense for fuel, save the manure, use gates in the laterals instead of 

 dirt dams, etc. , etc. , etc. 



Another plan, proposed by Mr. Smythe, is of vast utility if the 

 details are worked out right. In fact it is almost indispensable. 

 Numbers of bankrupt works are now in extremis, with no money, no 

 experts, no officers who know anything; in the hands generally of 

 mere real estate men, or receivers who know still less. All are fight- 

 ing one another and none have any prospect of climbing out of the 

 hole for many a year to come. Few settlers will touch any land 

 under them because no one of sense wants land under a ditch that is 

 in much financial trouble and most people want to buy where it will 

 be easy to sell again if necessary. If these could all be joined in one 

 company, so that land sold under any of them would enure to the ben- 

 efit of all, none would be under any temptation to pull another down, 

 but all would be working for each one. Then one set of 'experts could 

 do the work for the whole and they could be men of the highest skill, 

 and paid salaries that would call forth their best efforts and constant 

 thought and attention, whereas now none of them can have any one 

 whose services are worth much. Colonization could then work to far 

 better advantage because if the settler has his choice of many differ- 

 ent localities he is not half so afraid of schemes and jobbery as he 

 now is. Now a colonist is beset by the agents of other enterprises 

 half starving for a "sucker"' of any kind, and the result generally is 

 that he is disgusted with the whole and goes somewhere else, or back 

 home. If all were united, with men at the head who could not afford 

 to lie, and were under no temptation to do so if they could, almost the 

 whole of this, which is probably the greatest obstacle to settlement, 

 could be avoided. It would add hundreds of thousands, probably 

 millions of acres, of, the most highly productive land to the producing 

 power of our country, and make cheap homes for thousands in the 

 cities that must soon be starved out of them. Philanthropy can have 

 no higher aim than this, for vast areas now supplied with water under 

 good systems lie as idle as the desert wastes still unclaimed around 

 them; and thousands of strong arms and willing hands are in the cities 

 wanting just such places yet not knowing how or where to find them, 

 or how to get them. 



