1 88 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



The fifteen years covering the life of these acts were 

 years of contention between power companies and 

 the government. 



The inability of early legislation to provide for 

 the disposition of power properties once created or 

 for the extension of grants upon termination, its 

 limited tenures, reserved rights and uncertain re- 

 quirements, made financing great power undertak- 

 ings exceedingly difficult. The power companies 

 insisted upon what they believed necessary if capital 

 was to be attracted to water power development; it 

 was the lack of faith in them by government, which 

 still failed to see ahead clearly, that was responsible 

 for the long delay. "It is simply national fore- 

 sight/' wrote Dr. George Otis Smith, Director of 

 the United States Geological Survey, in 1916, "to 

 see to it that the public utilities organized to-day for 

 private operation do not include promoters' hopes or 

 speculative land values in the capitalization upon 

 which future power users might be asked to pay re- 

 turns. Cheap power promises to be in some future 

 century this country's largest asset in the industrial 

 rivalry between nations. Our unsurpassed coal re- 

 serves (more than half of the earth's) reinforced 

 by these water power resources constitute a strong 

 line of national defense in that they form the real 

 basis for an industrial organization of the Nation's 

 workers." 



So conservatively did Congress approach this 

 new field of promise that it needed the flat failure 



