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 régime when face to face with disaster. We are led to think of a desert valley that has twelve thousand people, dependent to a great extent upon mining, and normally supporting four thousand people through irrigation alone, as living in a state of tension. Even after railroads have been built and life is organized as now, the rains and the floods cause so violent a shock to the economic structure of the valley that social and political changes immediately occur calling for emergency measures quickly and rigorously applied.

If the traveler come to such a valley in the midst of a drought, calamity seems scarcely to be afoot. The life is quict, even quicter than usual, in spite of the gencral anxicty, though if one knows where to look and how to inquire he is aware of the rigorous application of a law to the execution of which the government bends every effort. This is the law of the turno. It means that each man must take his turn in drawing off wa- ter from the river for the irrigating canals that supply his fields. The hour in which he may open the head of his main feed canal is indicated, and the number of hours that he may take water from the river is explicitly stated. He must then close his canal and wait for his next turn. The length of time that elapses between turns is dependent upon the flow of the river. All the people of the valley must share in the general distribution of water. If those down the valley receive no flow at all they make due complaints to the authorities, and there may follow a readjustment of the turno.

An irrigated valley thus becomes a social unit operating under a system far more rigorous than that which obtains even in the crowded city. The application of the turno to the water is like the traffic policeman’s signal to a line of vehicles, and, just as the violation of the policeman’s signal is considered to be the chief offense of a driver, so the violation of the turno is the chicf offense of the farmer. The greed of one person here in a very direct way means loss to a neighbor; and it is a loss that amounts to theft, for the one who takes more water than is his right is taking that which the law has already decreed should belong to his neighbor. It is really a communal organ- ization in which individual ownership of property in water