1905 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



31 



the past few years to accomplish this 

 purpose, and although there has been 

 no national movement as yet crystal- 

 lized, the idea of Homes for Workers, 

 Working- Men's Gardens, Home Acres 

 for Factory Employees, and the like 

 has taken root in a great number of lo- 

 calities. In Europe, where the danger 

 of congestion of factory hands is much 

 more acute than in this country, the 

 matter has received wider attention. 

 An international congress in Paris last 

 year discussed the subject of extending 

 the work of allotting plots of agricul- 

 tural ground to working men. Belgi- 

 um had at that time provided 600 

 tracts in which plots had been allotted 

 to 3,000 persons, and France 6,100 

 tracts which had provided assistance to 

 43,000 persons. A prominent Ameri- 

 can sociologist has during the past 

 year, in a series of addresses, advoca- 

 ted the plan of providing home-acres 

 for factory employees, and further pro- 

 pounded the radical plan that employ- 

 ers should arrange for a double shift 

 of workers, each to work in the factory 

 half a day and devote the other half to 

 producing a living from his acre of 

 ground. This, he contended, would 

 give the laborer an opportunity to pro- 

 duce a living for himself and his fam- 

 ily from the soil and save his rent, two 

 items which, according to the statis- 

 tics of the Government Labor Bureau, 

 eat up more than fifty per cent, of the 

 wages paid the American working 

 man. At the same time, he maintain- 

 ed, the factory employer would secure 

 greater labor returns, while the semi- 

 independence created for his employ- 

 ees would largely reduce, if not entire- 

 ly do away with, the strike problem. 

 He advocated where possible the appli- 

 cation of irrigation to these home-acres 

 and presented facts and figures to 

 show that one acre of good, irrigated 

 land, tilled by an industrious man, will 

 produce a far better living for himself 

 and family than can be purchased by 

 sixty per cent, of the average wage 

 earning of the American factory hand. 



IRRIGATION A HOME-CREATOR. 



The educational features of the na- 



tional irrigation movement have a di- 

 rect bearing upon this subject. The 

 primal effect of this law will be the 

 creation of great numbers of small 

 homes out of worthless land in the 

 West, and as this work progresses year 

 by year the feasibility of applying irri- 

 gation to the eastern or humid portion 

 of the United States will come to be 

 generally recognized. The social side 

 of irrigation, wherever practised, can 

 be described in the single clause : 



Irrigation subdivides and re-subdi- 

 vides lands into small home tracts. 



The most highly developed irrigated 

 communities average the smallest 

 farms in the world. The West to-day 

 contains thousands of five and ten-acre 

 farms from which men are making 

 comfortable livings. In Utah, where 

 some very large ranches, thousands of 

 acres in extent, are included, the cen- 

 sus figures show the farm unit to be 

 twenty-seven acres. Many notable ex- 

 amples could be cited where men have 

 for years sustained themselves and 

 families upon single acres. Two years 

 ago I stood upon a commanding emi- 

 nence overlooking the community of 

 Riverside, in Southern California, the 

 home of the famous Riverside navel 

 orange, and viewed 22,000 acres. This 

 panoramic display, where it seemed 

 that almost every house was within a 

 stone's throw of its neighbor, suggest- 

 ed to me some immense suburb of a 

 city. The vast congregation of small 

 homes was self-supporting; churches 

 and school houses occurred frequent- 

 ly, good roads prevailed throughout 

 the valley, and the residents enjoyed 

 almost every privilege and advantage 

 of an urban community, while at the 

 same time they lived, worked and rear- 

 ed their children in the pure air and 

 under the blue sky of heaven with none 

 of the discomforts or unwholesome 

 conditions to be found in the cities ; 

 and all this created by the artificial use 

 of water out of land which twenty-five 

 years ago was valued for stock-graz- 

 ing purposes at $1.00 an acre. A hun- 

 dred similar examples could be cited in 

 Southern California. The social con- 



