THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



23 



it will have to be done by the state. A few hundred 

 thousand dollars spent in building houses, in level- 

 ing land for crops, and making loans to settlers 

 would give better results to the nation and create 

 far better social conditions in irrigated areas than 

 the expenditure of millions of dollars on dams and 

 canals. 



I have said that the condition of settlers under 

 many of these works calls for relief. On one proj- 

 ect the average indebtedness of all the settlers is 

 $1,000. They have exhausted their capital, reached 

 the limit of their credit, and have no way to com- 

 plete the improvement of their farms. On another, 

 three-fourths of the settlers must lose the fruits of 

 years of effort and all the capital spent in develop- 

 ment if aid is not soon forthcoming. On another, 

 85 per cent of the farms are mortgaged and the 

 mortgage debt averages $50 an acre over the whole 

 area. On another project one farm has been sold, 

 abandoned and resold five times. There are sev- 

 eral enterprises, government and private, where aid 

 to settlers must be had if a wholesale exodus is to 

 be averted. Out of hundreds of experiences of set- 

 tlers obtained from personal interview I will give 

 one, which is, however, typical of many. 



This settler brought with him from Wisconsin 

 $2000 gathered together through years of industry 

 and economy. He took up eighty acres of govern- 

 ment land of which 68 acres were irrigable. He 

 built a house at a cost of $200 and a shed in which 

 to keep his horses. He then bought furniture for 

 the house, implements to cultivate and level the 

 ground and then began the unproductive and un- 

 familiar labor of fencing his farm, building ditches 

 and leveling the land for cultivation. While he 

 worked at this 

 the remainder 

 of his capital 

 was being ab- 

 sorbed in liv- 

 ing expenses, 

 and before any 

 income could 

 be obtained his 

 capital was ex- 

 hausted and he 

 had no credit. 

 A man without 

 food will starve 

 to death in 

 about nine 



days ; and he had to give up the improvement of 

 his farm and go to work for wages to buy bread. 

 As he expressed it, he is "dead broke and in debt." 

 The wages he is getting only furnish a bare liveli- 

 hood. He has no more prospect of keeping that 

 farm without some financial aid from the state than 

 I have of flying to the moon ; but his two thousand 

 dollars is there and he hates to leave it and begin 

 life over again. 



I asked another settler, whose condition was 

 equally hopeless, why they had not presented their 

 situation to the public and asked for some compre- 

 hensive relief. He said they called a meeting to 

 consider it and were afraid if they did there would 

 be no chance of selling out, and they preferred to 

 keep still and take their chances of unloading on 

 some other "sucker." 



One of the artesian wells used for irrigating in McKinley county, New Mexico. 



All of these settlers believe that if the lands were 

 made ready for cultivation and the necessary stock 

 and equipment, they could pay the entire cost, pay 

 for water rights and become prosperous and con- 

 tented members of the community in a few years. 

 But until financial provision for doing this is made 

 it is neither honest nor humane to allow poor men 

 to settle on unimproved arid land. 



The most pathetic aspect of this situation is 

 the fact that nearly all this hardship, anxiety and 

 waste of time and money can be averted. I say 

 this with certainty, because of a personal knowledge 

 of what is being accomplished through state aided 

 development in other countries. I was for nearly 

 eight years a member of a commission that had 

 charge of government aid in irrigation settlement 

 in an Australian state. 



I accompanied the land minister in an investiga- 

 tion of state-aided development in Italy, Denmark 

 and Ireland, and saw in every case a return of the 

 people to the land, a contentment and a prosperity 

 that had never before been known and a new birth 

 of patriotism and affection for the state because of 

 gratitude for the service which it had rendered. 



When I went to Australia conditions there were 

 almost a direct counterpart of those now confront- 

 ing irrigation enterprises in this country. Costly 

 works had been built, but the land was not being 

 irrigated nor the water being used. The number of 

 farmers on irrigated areas was decreasing. Men 

 who were without any capital could not buy the 

 land and those with capital did not care to. The 

 government determined to change this. It began 

 an investigation to determine what the government 

 ought to do and could safely attempt. In other 



words, land 

 settlement was 

 studied from 

 the standpoint 

 of public wel- 

 fare rather than 

 from the stand- 

 point of profit 

 from land sales. 

 This pre- 

 liminary study 

 of the situation 

 showed that 

 the success of 

 a settler largely 

 depends on two 

 things: First, obtaining a living income from his 

 farm within a year; and, second, getting the whole 

 of his land into cultivation and production inside of 

 two years. The state's plan of irrigation develop- 

 ment included, therefore, building houses for set- 

 tlers, leveling and seeding a part of the farms, the 

 placing of a practical farm instructor over every 

 area of 20,000 acres or less and the lending of money 

 to the settler to complete the development. In all 

 this the public was amply protected. While the 

 settler was only required to pay a deposit of 3 per 

 cent on the land and was given 36 l / 2 years' time in 

 which to complete payments, he paid a 40 per cent 

 deposit of the cost of nearly all improvements and 

 was only loaned up to 60 per cent of the value of 

 improvements made by himself. 



I am quite sure that if those in charge of irri- 



