32 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



January 



ditions of these intensely irrigated 

 tracts are recognized by writers and 

 travelers to be perhaps the most nearly 

 perfect of those of any community in 

 the world. 



AN EMPIRE: OF NEW HOMES. 



Now, the effect of the great Govern- 

 ment irrigation work, which contem- 

 plates the ultimate reclamation of some 

 hundred million western acres twen- 

 ty times the area now irrigated in 

 small tracts, and which is being pushed 

 rapidly forward, will be to create a 

 western empire of new homes, and at 

 the same time to incidentally educate 

 the people of the entire country on the 

 subject of irrigation. 



The consequence of this will be that 

 irrigation practices will gradually but 

 finally enthrall the eastern farmer. 

 The facts as they exist in European 

 countries show that irrigation can be 

 practiced with great profit upon land 

 which has sufficient natural rainfall to 

 grow paying crops. Irrigation is, in 

 fact, a crop-insurer, besides producing 

 doubles yields, and when it shall be ap- 

 plied to eastern farm lands, where the 

 conditions of water supply are much 

 better than they are in the West, the 

 same conditions will result which are 

 found in the arid region the farm 

 will be divided into smaller and better 

 tilled tracts. With the prosecution of 

 the government irrigation policy and 

 its great agricultural educational fea- 

 tures, must surely come the establish- 

 ment of rural colonies throughout the 

 entire country, home-acres for factory 

 employees, and the gradual trend of 

 the present inclination toward city con- 

 gestion, away from the tenement and 

 back to the land as the primal source 

 of all wealth. 



CHANGE NECESSARY IN EDUCATIONAL 

 SYSTEM. 



Necessary to, and working along 

 with tin's policy of intensive farming 

 and high cultivation, is found a move- 

 ment to i- 11 graft a practical agricultural 

 education, nature study, and handi- 

 craft work upon our common school 

 system, so that the working man of the 

 coming generation will both want and 



strive to own a home on a piece of 

 land, and when he secures it will have 

 some knowledge of how to make it 

 productive and attractive. It is be- 

 coming a well-recognized fact that our 

 present system of school education 

 leads the boys and girls away from 

 rather than back to the soil. 



A DISCORDANT NOTE FROM THE WEST. 



While the movement is thus gaining 

 headway throughout the East to ac- 

 complish this result, and the eastern 

 business men will doubtless vie with 

 the philanthropist and the student of 

 sociology to make the United States a 

 country of small home owners, the 

 speculative idea is still dominant in 

 many sections of the West, where large 

 tracts of land are still unreclaimed and 

 unsettled. The national irrigation law 

 is distinctively in its construction a 

 conservative eastern measure, although 

 it applies to western lands. Its provi- 

 sions are rigid, requiring actual settle- 

 ment of Government irrigated lands in 

 small tracts by men who will live upon 

 them and farm them, and various 

 schemes are continually being evolved 

 to evade its spirit and that of the old 

 homestead law, requiring five years of 

 residence as an evidence of good faith, 

 fathered by Galusha A. Grow and 

 signed by President Lincoln. Other 

 laws have crept upon the statute book 

 and are to-day in force which admit of 

 the absorption of great tracts of land 

 into single ownership, without im- 

 provement and without home-building. 



PERILS IN LAND MONOPOLY. 



At the recent National Irrigation 

 Congress at El Paso, Senator New- 

 lands, of Nevada, who originated the 

 fundamental principle of the national 

 irrigation law, sounded a note of warn- 

 ing to this country on the danger of 

 land monopoly a really live danger, 

 he contended, to-day confronting the 

 people of the United States, through 

 the operation of their land laws. Un- 

 der the timber and stone law, the com- 

 mutation clause of the homestead law, 

 the desert land law, and the forest 

 scrip law, enormous tracts of western 

 lands have been, and are to-day, being 



