Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/495

Rh The legislative bodies of these two governments must meet it again, for it is plainly not the present temper of the public to let it pass in uncertainty.

Any citizen of New York or Ontario may justly take a pride in the magnificent industrial development building up about Niagara Falls, even though it is all at the cost of the beauty and magnificence of the cataract. Nowhere else has nature afforded such tremendous power at once available to mankind and calling forth the highest play of his genius. If I could hold a brief for the development of these natural resources it would be the delight of my pen to paint the wealth, the contributions to human comfort which will flow from them. I might argue that nature created this tremendous fall of water for the express purpose of contributing to commercial power and industrial supremacy. Such a brief would lament, as I have heard a distinguished engineer lament, the actual waste of power during the ages in which the great river has been discharging itself in unutterable glory and construe it sinful to neglect the opportunity so lavishly afforded. Such a brief might deride and cachinnate at the possibility of ever diverting enough water from Niagara to make the Falls palpably less, and all these arguments it would not be difficult to enforce with specious reasoning and pleading facts.

The attitude of the man who is willing and ready to see Niagara entirely drained for the wealth it would produce, and only a dreary canyon left to speak of its splendid past, is wholly intelligible, or would be except for the potent facts that wealth and happiness and contentment are purely relative and that the natural forces of the world were not created for the use of man.

The question I have put has been not only asked, but answered. in New York, officially. The abstraction of water from Niagara Falls was condemned by a committee of the constitutional convention appointed to investigate this subject in 1894, when the public had begun to suspect that the legislature had been too free with its gifts of franchises to power companies. It was vigorously and effectively answered by Governor Odell in 1901, who stood out finely against a tremendous pressure brought to bear upon him by the industrial interests, not through any hostility to them, but for the simple sentimental reason that the Falls must be conserved. Few know the courage of this act, but it was a triumph of sentiment and morality which the citizens of New York may well applaud.

The editor of the has asked me to set forth the facts relating to the situation at Niagara Falls in such form that it may be made clear whether existing and impending conditions there constitute an actual menace to the cataract and its accompanying attractions, or whether public apprehension has been