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simple, inexpensive, and final determination of their relative rights to a stream, or for protection of those rights when once established. Sooner or later, therefore, the extension of the irrigated area leads to a lawsuit. This may take the form of a proceeding to quiet titles, an injunction against a rival ditch or canal, or a suit for damages for interfering with vested rights. It seldom if ever happens that the first suit includes all the appropriators on a stream. Usually one ditch-owner brings suit against a neighboring one above near enough to be seen. There may be scores of others fifty or one hundred miles away equally responsible for the shortage, but they are out of sight and are ignored. Meantime, no matter what the result of this litigation, the use of the stream is constantly being extended. There will be parched fields under other ditches, and other suits are instituted. Sometimes all the irrigators of one community will unite against a district above or below; and in one way or another the legal warfare over water rights goes on with little interruption. Where the number of these rights runs into the thousands, as they do on many rivers, the opportunities for controversy are simply unending. The same issues are fought over and over

again, the precedents in one case being overturned in another, and the result, instead of promoting a just and final settlement, too often makes it almost impossible.

Along some rivers assessments for meeting the expenses of lawsuits over water rights are levied against the shareholders of ditches as regularly as those for keeping the banks in repair. A volume could be filled with examples of the waste, uncertainty, and abuses which are inseparable from the present lack of public control of streams.

In 1890 a number of the irrigators on Spanish Fork River, in Utah, brought suit to quiet their title to its water. Two years later the decision establishing their rights was entered on record. In 1893 other irrigators on the same stream brought suit to have the titles to its waters again quieted. That lasted five years. In ten years the titles have been quieted four times, and another lawsuit to again settle them has just been instituted. Whether the water rights or the litigants will first be put to rest is as yet uncertain.

The fatal defect of all these court adjudications is the disregard of public interest in streams. The very fact that it is ignored makes it necessary that an effort

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A WYOMING SHEEP RANCH, BEFORE IRRIGATION

be made to explain what this involves. That the rain and snow from which rivers are formed are public property can scarcely be denied. That the river itself originally belonged to the public seems equally true. That the transfer of this property to private ownership or private control equivalent to ownership should be made by some public officer, and that the title itself should come from either State or General Government, seems reasonable, because they are the only agencies having sovereign powers. Water in the arid State is of far more value than land. Why should not rights to its use be determined, like titles to public land, by some tribunal specially created to represent the sovereign authority? The rights acquired in court adjudications are of a wholly different nature. There the assumption is that no one has any interest in streams except the litigants. The testimony on which decrees are based is all furnished by the

parties who want the property. It may be intelligent and honest, or it may be the reverse. In either case the rights and interests of the community outside the parties to the suit have no consideration. This is a direct temptation to collusion and fraud. Those seeking to acquire extravagant rights have been known to agree with each other as to the amount of water each will claim, and in accordance with this agreement sworn proofs of rights to many times the volume diverted or the capacity of the stream to furnish are submitted to the court and approved without protest.

Another evil is the fact that it affords no protection for the small appropriator of water against the assaults of stronger or more litigious claimants of the same supply. The creation of homes ought not to involve an unending lawsuit to preserve them, but that is what the building of an irrigation-ditch now too often does.

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The following extract from a brief filed in behalf of an appropriator of water for his farm of thirty acres, which had been taken away after an uninterrupted use of twenty-five years, is only one of scores of instances known to the writer where, as the outcome of this court warfare, the weak have gone down and the strong survived:

To permit the decision of the trial court to stand, simply means the ruination of the appellant's home, and becomes authority for future robberies. The corporation has been permitted, at the hands of the court, to obtain that which law, common sense, even a limited

consumers under his own canal, or he can rent or sell it to other canal-owners. Those familiar with the results of granting free and perpetual franchises in great cities can form some conclusion regarding the wisdom of this wholesale surrender to private control of the most vital element of Western development. It is a policy long since abandoned by the irrigation. countries of Europe, where the best results have not come from granting rights to ditches and canals at all, but to the lands on which the water is used. Some canal companies sell perpetual rights in the

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knowledge of irrigation, and the evidence in the case does not authorize.

Except in Wyoming and Nebraska, rights to streams can be acquired only by ditch-owners. Sometimes they also own the land watered, but not always. There is no provision, except in the two States above named, by which the owner of irrigated land, who is also a ditch-owner, can appropriate directly the water his land needs.

The ditch or canal owner, however, can acquire a perpetual right. He pays He pays nothing for it. Once acquired, he can sell or rent the water appropriated to

water they acquire to the owners of the land covered by their works. On one stream three canals furnish water to 1,356 farms. Why should the right to this water have been given to the three canal-owners, and not to the 1,356 settlers who applied it to beneficial use? Why is not the user of water as much entitled to liberal treatment as the canal-builder who diverts it?

Those who look on prevailing tendencies with apprehension believe that titles to water for irrigation should not belong to either individuals or corporations, but should be attached to the land where used, and be inseparable therefrom. They

believe this because to let one man own the water which another must have in order to live is almost certain to lead to acts of injustice and oppression. If, on the other hand, rights to water go with the land, the ownership of streams will always be divided, like the land, among a multitude of proprietors. Ditches and canals will be a great public utility, like the streets of a town, and compensation must be based on the service rendered. Such rights can work no injustice to any one, while water monopolies will be rendered impossible.

This issue is being fought out with an intensity of feeling commensurate with the value of the property to be controlled. The result will determine whether Western agriculture will be corporate or cooperative; whether rivers shall become an instrument for creating a great monopoly,

as the dominant element of Western society, or be a free gift to those who make a public return for their use.

The healthfulness and charm of the arid region, and the remarkable profits of irrigated agriculture, make it inevitable that its valleys are soon to be the home of a dense population. The time is not far distant when the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys of California will each support a million people. The Missouri and its tributaries will, within the next half-century, irrigate more acres than does the Nile to-day. In order to provide for this, the present haphazard development should give way to a system which will provide for the storage of floods, the public supervision of streams, and the enactment of laws which will give permanently to each farmer his just share of the river on which the returns for his labor depend.

The Channel Bell

By Julian Hinckley

Over the boundless ocean, over the silent sea,

'Mid the wet sail's flog in the dripping fog; with its wild note
ringing free,

Warning the ships with its solemn toll, ringing through storm

and calm,

Comes the solemn swell of the channel bell, sounding its dread
alarm.

Through the roar of the storm-swept ocean, and the break of
the foaming seas,

When the clouds sweep by in the stormy sky, behind the black
cross-trees,

When the dim lights swing at the ratlines, and lightnings gleam.
and flash,

Through this stormy hell, wild rings the bell above the thunder's
crash.

When winter holds her power, and the days are cold and short,
And the wave-tops freeze on the icy breeze, and the great ships

hold in port,

Alone on the dreary ocean, swung by the water's roll,

The channel bell has a tale to tell in each stroke of its solemn toll.

In the calm of the silent ocean, robed in the waves of fog,
When the days are dark and the skipper's mark is a cross upon

the log,

When never a breeze does stir the mist, and the dead waves
rise and fall,

Still comes the knell of the channel bell, with its ever-warning call.

I

By Mary Tracy Earle

N the marsh round the Island of Laurels, in far Cypress Creek, little Melanie Dolbert knew secret channels along which she could paddle in her pirogue, parting the reeds as she went. No one frequented these ways but Melanie, and she told no one, for there did not seem to be another person in the world who would have cared to slip silently through the marsh as she did, looking at all the still, slow things that live there, or to lie quite motionless and stare up at the blue sky while the fragrance of the slender marsh-lilies filled the air around her like companionship. At home they seldom asked Melanie where she went. Her mother, Madame Antoine Dolbert, was a small, active body, whom her creole neighbors called courageuse. She was always busy with the cooking or the sewing, while Hortense, the daughter next to Melanie, was equally busy taking care of the crowd of younger children who were not yet able to take care of themselves. Hortense was her mother in miniature, just as courageuse and almost as quick-tempered and sharp-tongued. But, although Melanie was the oldest child, she had none of these desirable qualities; her mother despaired of her; but her father, from a standpoint which Madame Antoine could not understand, was wont to call her his little saint. Father Henri, the visiting priest, could see both sides; he advised Madame Antoine to be patient, and, as Madame Antoine could not possibly be patient when an idle person was within sight or earshot, Melanie was allowed to roam at will with only an occasional capture or challenge as she slipped away from the house toward the woods or the creek landing. She never failed to come home when she was hungry, if she did not come before, and the family learned to content itself with that somewhat limited knowledge of her days.

Father Henri, priest of three parishes, did not hold services every Sunday in the little church below the ferry on Cypress Creek, and the Dolberts did not entertain him every time he held service, but now he was coming and they were to

entertain him, and the turmoil was unusually wild. In the midst of it Madame Antoine came to the cabin door.

"Where is Melanie ?" she demanded of the world at large in high-keyed French.

Antoine was chopping wood. He looked furtively at the creek landing. Melanie's pirogue was gone. He shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, she is going soon to return," he said, with an effort at nonchalance. "She is going to return in time to help."

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"I

Ah!" Madame Antoine mocked. expect her, me—yes! When the rice is hulled, and the chickens prepared, and the children made clean-when Father Henri himself is arriving, then the dear little Melanie is going to arrive to partake of the dinner is it not?"

Melanie meanwhile was paddling at ease through one of the broadest of her channels, and for once she was not alone. Victor Paul lay in the bottom of the pirogue, staring aimlessly to and fro after the waving reeds. Victor Paul was one of the many small Dolberts. He was two years and a half old, large, and habitually quiet. He could and did cry whenever he thought it worth while, but, having found nothing in life that struck him as worth talking about, he had never spoken a word. Just why he loved Melanie, who did not pay him the slightest voluntary attention, it would be hard to say; but perhaps, like his father, he was tranquilized by her quiet; that day he had shown his fondness by following her down to the creek and wailing as she pushed off. Melanie told him to go home. He understood well enough, but he stood immovable and grief-stricken, and lamented with a certain calmness which gave no promise of an end. Melanie did not wish to take him back to the house, for then she herself would be detained; but it would not do to leave him on the bank. The least of three evils was to place him expeditiously in the bottom of the pirogue, where he lay quite still and smiled.

It did not prove altogether unpleasant to have him there. She could depend upon his reticence, and he made an

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