58 ORANGE CULTURE IN CALIFORNIA. 



"What legal limitation is there to the representations of 

 speculators? What law is there to restrain them from prom- 

 ising water to a thousand purchasers, when they have only 

 sufficient for a hundred? If the settler wish to appeal to the 

 sense of justice and the human impulses of the company, he 

 often finds that the real company is at San Francisco, hundreds 

 of miles away, and that the men he has been dealing with are 

 but figure-heads and agents of the real power. He is situated, 

 in fact, like the Irish peasantry who occupy the estates of ab- 

 sentee landlords residing in England. The peasants may suffer, 

 and starve, and die, but the absentee does not hear their cries 

 or behold their wretchedness. 



"Water companies should be required to have their chief 

 office and their board meetings where the people live who de- 

 pend upon them for water. 



"I have thus far spoken of the condition of the settler, and 

 the claims of the water company ; but I would not for a moment 

 admit that the settler is destitute of legal protection, as the law 

 now stands. He is not so dependent as they would have him 

 believe. He has rights, clear and substantial, and such as can 

 be enforced. Great principles of law may be obscured, over- 

 looked and forgotten for a time, but when their need is felt they 

 stand forth in vindication of the right. 



"When Lord Mansfield judicially announced that 'slaves 

 could not be held on English soil,' he awakened, of the English 

 Constitution, a principle that had slept for centuries. When 

 the founders of our Government sought for its corner-stone, 

 they found it under the rubbish of ages. The principle of 

 'human equality' is a very old one as old as humanity itself; 

 but, like a choice gem, it needed a new setting, which they 

 gave it. 



"The growth of wealth, of corporations, and of new com- 

 binations of capital for great enterprises, attracted the attention 

 of law-makers for a time, as was very natural, to the partial neg- 

 lect of the individual and the masses ; and, as was natural, 

 powerful corporations magnified their prerogatives, and often 

 assumed powers the law never gave them, but which poor men 

 found it difficult to resist. But poor men have learned that 'in 



