Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/619

Rh should not grow watermelons. The oft-repeated declaration on the part of manufacturers who are bound by trades-union regulations that they can not successfully compete with less favorably located factories free from such dominion is exceedingly significant to the future of glass-making. If it continue, the over-organization of labor promises to defeat its own purpose. The supremacy will pass from the center to the periphery. The scattering of the industry will be forwarded by the selfishness and short-sightedness of labor itself, as well as by those technical and physical conditions which have just been pointed out.

A final glance at the industry shows a manufacture well organized and well developed. It is one full of substantial promise, and full, too, of a power to transform itself greater than it has ever shown before. When the glance extends, as this does, so far back as Jamestown, and includes the long series of disasters which appears to have been the necessary prelude to our present success, the impression grows that, gratifying as this success must be, we have paid a very high price for it. But in this respect glass-making does not differ from the other American industries developed since Columbus.



HE United States Government expends annually over twenty million dollars, mostly in the Eastern half of the country, for the improvement of its rivers, harbors, and other surface waters. The Western half of our domain, which with the exception of the upper coast of the Pacific is known as the arid region, possesses no superabundance of surface waters to improve, but, upon the contrary, the scarcity of water for ordinary domestic and agricultural uses prevents the settlement and utilization of the remaining portion of the public lands. Even the semi-humid or Great Plains region, east of the Rocky Mountain front, has been retarded in development by this scarcity of surface water; and many settlers, who purchased alleged agricultural lands from the Government in this region, are begging Congress to apportion for the investigation of its underground resources a sum at least as large as that given for the smallest creek upon the River and Harbor Bill. Our national legislators have not been entirely neglectful in the matter, however. The rivers of the arid region have been gauged, and the rainfall ascertained, with the disheartening conclusion that, could every drop of the rainfall be utilized, it would still be insufficient to water the fertile