IRBiaATION PROBLEMS OF HONEy LAKE BASIN. 91 



The fault lies not with the people, not even with the lawj'ers, though the latter 

 inevitablj' fatten upon the misfortunes of the community. The fault lies with the 

 irrigation laws of California, which are notable alike for what they contain and what 

 they omit. If deliberately devised to plague the people, no system which man's evil 

 genius could invent would effect the result more surel}^ than that system which 

 invites them to make such reckless claims as we have seen in the case of Honey Lake 

 Valley, and then leaves them to fight it out to the bitter end. 



LITIGATION. 



The water laws of California were framed with only the slightest appreciation 

 of the ultimate character and importance of the irrigation industry. The source of 

 the present statutes was the English common law, and it goes without saying that 

 this took no account of the peculiar conditions of an arid or semiarid countrj-. In 

 England the doctrine of riparian proprietorship does not interfere with the vast 

 majority of people living away from the streams. The climate is humid and the 

 annual precipitation usually abundant. The farmer has no use for water beyond 

 domestic needs, except to get it off his land as quickly as possible, and to do this he 

 has frequently to resort to drainage. Streams are valuable for navigation and for 

 power, but for neither of these purposes is it often desirable to divert them from 

 their natural channels. The same conditions exist in the Eastern States, which 

 adopted the English common law as the fountlation of their jurisprudence. 



In man}' f)oi;tions of California the natural conditions are almost entirely reversed, 

 and in such places the limited rainfall is received almost entirely in the season when 

 least needed for the production of crops. Streams are not valuable for navigation, 

 as a rule, since the flow of water is largely concentrated in the flood season, after 

 which it dwindles to a slender volume or exposes dry channels. To assert the 

 riparian doctrine under these conditions, and to enforce it to its fullest extent, is to 

 make a dangerous monopoh* of the water supph- and to condemn to perpetual sterility 

 millions of fertile acres which might otherwise make homes for millions of pros- 

 perous people. Had the Napoleonic code, rather than the English common law, 

 been adopted by the earlj' law makers of California, very different results would be 

 shown by the irrigation industry to-day. 



The judicial decisions which have given irrigation laws and practice their present 

 character were based more upon the needs of mining than of agriculture. Mining 

 was the first great industry, and it gave to all the customs and institutions of Cali- 

 fornia a speculative color which they might otherwise have escaped. The first 

 struggle for water arose in connection with this industr}', and the glitter of gold 

 blinded the eyes of lawmakers and people to the superior claims of irrigation. Out 

 of these conditions came, not unnaturally, the assertion of propertv rights in water 

 apart from the land to which it is applied. The following excerpt from a decision 

 by Chief Justice Murray, in Hoffman v. Stone (7 Cal., 46-48), states both the doctrine 

 and its history concisely: 



The former decisions of this court in cases involving the right of parties to appropriate waters for 

 mining and other purposes have been based upon the wants of the community and the peculiar 

 condition of things in this State (for which there is no precedent) rather than any absolute rule of law 

 governing such cases. The absence of legislation on this subject has devolved on the courts the 



