Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/506

502 under its old charter or with a new one if it can get it. Its intentions and organization are not a negligible quantity in contemplating what is going to happen to Niagara. Should it succeed in constructing its canal and works it is not likely that with an unrestricted charter the company will consume less than 10,000 cubic feet of water per second, and if we assume this as a fair expression of its mean consumption we must increase the mortgage on the Niagara waters by this amount. It then becomes 58,400 cubic feet per second.

These are then the demands upon the river which are actually in sight.

In the seventh annual report of the Commissioners of the Queen Victoria Niagara Falls Park (1903), Mr. Isham Randolph, of Chicago, advisory engineer for the commissioners, makes, at the request of the board, a report on the 'Further Development of the Niagara River for Power Purposes,' in which he suggests sites for four additional companies to consume in total 29,996 cubic feet of water per second. We may better construe this proposed abstraction as operations under consideration rather than merely as work suggested. If we add the amount to our last figure the result, 88,396 cubic feet per second, leaves the entire American channel as dry as bone.

Such is the situation. We are out in the open with these figures. They are the figures of the engineers themselves. The counter-argument to these statements has been, so far as the writer's experience goes, either incorrect premises or a rather bored smile. Putting aside entirely the merely proposed developments and considering only those actually in process we see how closely we are brought to the dead line for the American cataract.

What are we going to do about it? A small, very small proportion of the community in New York and Ontario is content to let the process continue, even to the extinction of Niagara. This element of these communities is largely directly or indirectly concerned with the industrial developments there. Outside the boundaries of these trustee governments this percentage is greatly less. In the country as a whole, speaking for the general intelligent public, the opposition to this procedure seems so overwhelming as to be practically unanimous. New York long ago recognized the necessity of conserving such of these natural beauties as have fallen to her share and the state reservation at Niagara is one of the most beautiful of parks, lamentably small in view of the present encroachment, but upon it she has spent some millions of dollars. The Province of Ontario joined hands in this endeavor and the Queen Victoria Park was once and will be again a beautiful spot, all the more beautiful, the commissioners think, after the installment of the power companies is complete.