THE MIRACLE OF IRRIGATION 



which we have known in the East and central West, the 

 change which irrigation brings amounts to a revolution. 

 The bane of rural life is its loneliness. Even food, 

 shelter, and provision for old age do not furnish protec- 

 tion against social discontent where the conditions deny 

 the advantages which flow from human association. 

 Better a servant in the town than a proprietor in the 

 country ! such has been the verdict of recent genera- 

 tions who have grown up on the farm and left it to seek 

 satisfaction for their social instincts in the life of the 

 town. The starvation of the soul is almost as real as 

 the starvation of the body. 



Irrigation compels the adoption of the small-farm 

 unit. This is the germ of new social possibilities, and 

 we shall see to what extent they have already been real- 

 ized as we proceed. During the first and second eras of 

 colonization in this country the favorite size for a farm 

 was about four hundred acres, of which from a fourth 

 to a half was gradually cleared and the rest retained in 

 woodland. The Mississippi Valley was settled mostly in 

 quarter-sections, containing one hundred and sixty acres 

 each. The productive capacity of land is so largely in- 

 creased by irrigation, and the amount which one family 

 can cultivate by its own labor consequently so much re- 

 duced, that the small-farm unit is a practical necessity 

 in the arid region. 



Where settlement has been carried out upon the 

 most enlightened lines irrigated farms range from five 

 to twenty acres upon the average, rarely exceeding forty 

 acres at the maximum. It is perfectly obvious, of 

 course, that a twenty-acre unit means that neighbors 

 will be eight times as numerous as in a country settled 



