Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/382

368 involves also an element of clannishness; as, when two such companies fall to fighting over the same supply of water. In fact, as I have already observed, this necessity of irrigation will make the deepest of all the differences in personal character and habits of thought between the East and the West. Nobody will doubt that the institution of property in land has an important influence on character. Why not, then, property in water? And while this may be said to exist in the East, it is rarely thought of, while in the far West it is the thing most thought of and talked about. It is the main factor in human sustenance.

The result is bound to be that East and West will take different views of life. Hence they are likely not to understand each other. At present this makes the less trouble, from the fact that the East can so easily outvote the West. I mean, of course, the arid West. I think it a safe proposition that, when the country is all settled to a density everywhere corresponding with its fertility, the arid lands will outvote the regions needing no irrigation. And long before that time they will hold the balance of power.

Already the irrigants have secured from the non-irrigants the concession of an appropriation for surveys, and the appointment of a senatorial committee, which is now on its travels, studying the advisability of a great system of irrigating reservoirs to be built, or at least surveyed, at national expense; and in the latter case the demand will doubtless be for such disposal of the affected public lands as will make it worth some private citizens' while to construct the reservoirs.

The desert-land act was intended to be a step in that direction. Under that law, the man who irrigates a square mile (six hundred and forty acres) of desert land within three years after filing his entry, may buy it at one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre. It must be land not capable of producing crops without irrigating, and twenty-five cents per acre must be paid at the date of entry. By the operation of this law, and by purchase of adjoining railroad lands, a single firm has acquired the ownership of four hundred thousand acres of as good land as ever lay out of doors. The owners have carried over it the most gigantic system of irrigation on this continent. They have divided up the waters of Kern River, and spread them out into a great artificial delta. They have now begun to sell their lands in small lots of ten, twenty, forty acres, and so on. I attended one of their auction sales, and saw land, which ten years ago was uninhabitable desert, knocked down at fifty, a hundred, and even a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. The water rate is extra, and is so much per inch used. An inch is the amount that will run through an orifice an inch square in the course of a year, under a four-inch pressure.