isolated farmer was unequal to the task of building and maintaining the dams and ditches needed, Powell proposed that Congress "authorize the organization of irrigation districts by homestead settlements upon the public lands requiring irrigation for agricultural purposes". Any nine or more persons applying for a tract of land with the intention of constructing irrigation works, were entitled to register for eighty acres each, in a continuous tract, the lands to be patented when evidence of successful irrigation was submitted. His observation of irrigation in Utah convinced Powell that a coöperative undertaking of this nature was not only practicable but the best means of preventing land monopoly, and he deemed such legislation essential "if these lands are to be reserved for actual settlers, in small quantities, to provide homes for poor men, on the principle involved in the homestead laws". Thus early was attention called to the inadequacy of the Desert Land Act, the desirability of encouraging a more democratic form of irrigation by coöperating communities, the necessity of attaching the water right to the land in order to guard against monopolization of both land and water, and the importance of a scientific classification of the public lands into irrigable, pasture, timber and mineral, so that the diverse interests might be promoted by appropriate legislation. Powell was, unfortunately, twenty years in advance of public sentiment, and his farseeing recommendations attracted little attention at Washington.

What might be accomplished by coöperative effort had already been demonstrated in the Mormon communities and in the Union Colony at Greeley, Colorado; but the first legislative enactment in furtherance of coöperative construction was the Wright Act, the California law of 1887. This provided that irrigation districts might be organized under state supervision wherever a majority of the resident freeholders should petition for the privilege. The district, once established, had authority to issue bonds, secured by a mortgage on the lands in question, for the purchase or construction of water-works, and further, to levy taxes assessed on the real estate represented sufficient to meet interest on the bonds and the annual costs of maintenance. The conduct of routine business was vested in elected trustees, but extraordinary contracts must be submitted to vote and ratified by the freeholders. Extravagant hopes were entertained of this system, and many districts were organized, but few have proven entirely successful. In many instances worthless or contested water rights were purchased, and

the district was involved in long and costly litigation. In others, engineering works of great difficulty were undertaken with small comprehension of the expense involved, and the original bond issue was swallowed up in the preliminary works. In order to get the water within reach of the farmers, a new issue was made necessary, and the trustees found the marketing of second mortgage bonds on property as yet undeveloped a piece of financiering quite beyond their powers. In the effort to push the enterprise through to completion, they not infrequently resorted to illegal means, and the district was in consequence dissolved. The crisis of 1893 involved in financial ruin still other districts that had been successfully managed up to that time.

Some of these difficulties were peculiar to California, where confusion as to water rights and the hostility of private companies presented well-nigh insuperable difficulties, but others are universal. It is not an easy matter to get a group of landowners, geographically selected with reference to drainage basin, to coöperate intelligently and to wait patiently the result of an engineering problem; and again, the resources of such a community are rarely adequate to the carrying through of any but the simpler works. The irrigation district has since been legalized in half a dozen western states, and many bankrupt companies have been bought out by farmers thus associated; but nowhere is the device regarded as the solution of the larger financial problems of irrigation. The irrigation district can only succeed where cost of construction is light, and where soil and climate render the lands highly productive, as in southern California. Western men were becoming convinced that if the homestead law was to have any meaning west of the hundredth meridian, government must come to the aid of the settler, first in the adjudication of water rights, and second in the construction of the more costly irrigation works.

Under the influence of Greeley and its daughter colonies, the state of Colorado (1876) had set aside the riparian right and announced the doctrine of appropriation, dedicating the water of every natural stream to the use of the people. A brief experience of the hardships and loss involved in water wars and law suits determined the farmers of Colorado to insist on the public adjudication of conflicting claims. The state is now divided into districts according to drainage, and disputes as to priority and the prorating of water are referred to the corresponding water commissioners, from whose decision the aggrieved may appeal to the

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courts. But Colorado has as yet made no provision for the scientific measurement of the flow of streams, the capacity of canals, the acreage of land served, and the agricultural duty of the water furnished. The early settlers were accustomed to put in claims. for a water supply far in excess of their needs, and the sum total of these claims was often in excess of the maximum output of the stream. The important water resources of the state are thus pledged to two and three times their utmost capacity, and the land now being developed can only be provided with water by the construction of mammoth reservoirs. Colorado, however, took the lead in adopting the principle of appropriation as fundamental to any final adjudication of water rights. This doctrine and the necessity of public control were soon recognized in Congressional legislation (e. g. the Desert Land Act and the Timber Culture Act), and these principles may be regarded as now fully established for the arid region.

The water code of Wyoming, adopted with its constitution in 1890, was the first thorough-going attempt to put the vexed question of water titles on a scientific and equitable basis and to render the water right inseparable from land ownership. Under this law, application for diversion of any portion of a lake or stream must be registered with the state engineer, and no claim has any validity until ratified by his office. The registration of a claim gives prescriptive right, but to secure legal title, the claimant must prove that the projected works have been constructed within the specified time and that the water is being used for a beneficent purpose. The state engineer is obliged to reject the application and to refuse registration in case the flow of the stream in question is all appropriated, or if he has reason to believe that the claimant is financially unequal to its development. Otherwise the certificate of registration might be used to promote a fraudulent undertaking. The adjudication of disputes is vested in a Board of Control made up of the state engineer and the superintendents of the four water districts. Evidence as to the capacity of the stream and of the several diversion ditches, together with the agricultural requirements of the lands to be furnished, are ascertained by scientific survey. The superintendent of the division in which the disputed claims lie, hears testimony as to priority of use, quantity utilized, etc., and prepares a list of existing claims. The decision of the Board of Control amounts to a formal decree defining all rights, and on this basis certificates of title are issued. Appeal may be

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made, however, from the Board of Control to the courts. comprehensive and highly satisfactory system has been adopted with various minor modifications in Nebraska, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, the two Dakotas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Oregon, and has gone far to straighten out the confused tangle of riparian rights, priority rights, excess claims, etc. The Wyoming plan has done all that law can do toward determining the legal status of irrigation in the commonwealths adopting it, and the practice of enforcing unauthorized claims by armed gangs and dynamiting the dams of rival companies is fast fading into the dramatic if disastrous past.

In southern

The legal problems of irrigation are thus in a fair way to settlement, but the financial problems remain. The furnishing of water by a private monopoly is no more satisfactory to an agricultural district than to a municipality, and the danger of inadequate supply and exorbitant charges is no less a menace. Spain, where this system obtains and water is sold at auction, the water rates mount in a dry season to an all but prohibitive point. In a wet summer, on the contrary, when the farmers have no need of the artificial supply, they fall so low that the company does not realize enough revenue to offset running expenses. The California law of 1862 empowered water companies "to establish, collect and receive rates, water rents or tolls, which shall be subject to regulation by the board of supervisors of the county or counties in which the work is situated, but which shall not be reduced by the supervisors so low as to yield to the stockholders less than one and one half per cent per month on the capital actually invested." This method of adjusting charges has not proven entirely satisfactory to either producer or consumer of the water supply. Eighteen per cent, a not unusual rate of profit in the early days of California, is excessive now that there is abundant capital on hand for such investments, while the "capital actually invested" means an overestimate of the present value of the property. No redress was provided in case the supply furnished is insufficient to meet all engagements, and in the not infrequent cases where the canal crosses county lines, the several boards of supervisors may come to different conclusions as to the justice of a given rate. Finally, the courts have ruled that a contract negotiated between company and water-user cannot be set aside by the dictum of a public officer, and many farmers have been induced to accept a

"contracting-out" clause which renders the arbitrament of the supervisors invalid. However, in the last analysis, the prosperity of the community served is recognized by sane promoters to be the ultimate source of revenue, and charges are regulated by what the farmer can afford to pay rather than by what the water monopoly might possibly extort, while in many districts the water works are owned and rates fixed by the farmers themselves.

On the other hand the financial future of the irrigation company is often far from reassuring. Irrigation works are usually built in advance of settlement, and returns sufficient to pay interest on the cost of construction cannot be expected until the number of consumers has reached the full capacity of the flow. Even where all conditions are favorable, water abundant, works adequately built, and soil and climate promising, the promoters of water companies aiming to supply settlers on public lands are often balked of dividends by the "sooners", who seek out each new project in advance of the constructing engineers and locate their claims as soon as the surveyors' stakes are driven. By more or less fraudulent compliance with the homestead act, they manage to get possession of the best land under the prospective canal. They have no intention of developing their holdings and use little or no water for irrigation, but hold their patents for a rise in value and thus retard legitimate settlement. An arrangement far more satisfactory both to the farmers and to the purveyor of water obtains where both land and water supply are owned by the same company. Thus the Crocker estate in the San Joaquin valley is being sold in small tracts of five, ten and twenty acres to actual colonists, and the deed of sale guarantees sufficient water for irrigation at the flat rate of one dollar per acre per year. The same terms are accorded under the Miller & Lux irrigation project and on some of the great California wheat ranches that are now being divided into fruit farms. The system is an admirable one, ensuring to the cultivator the indispensable water supply at a reasonable and unvarying price and to the owner of the works an adequate return on his investment.

Long and intimate acquaintance with the vexations that beset irrigation projects inspired Senator Carey of Wyoming to urge upon Congress the legislation which has finally put the private irrigation of public lands on a rational basis. Under the Carey Act (1894), the federal government offers to make over to any one of the arid states complying with certain provisions as to