The power developed along the river will be transmitted electrically to substations properly located, and then distributed at a lower voltage to pumpingstations so situated as to furnish water for irrigation. The estimated cost of the dam and power-plants will be about $3,600,000, which will irrigate 200,000 acres of land.

An interesting circumstance has come to light in the building of this dam, where in the basin the government has built a little city, with its own electric-light and telephone service. It was found that in asking for bids for cement for this work that the freight-rates were so outrageous, that the government sent out a geologist who found all the necessary ingredients for first-class cement. A cement-mill was installed and Uncle Sam went into the cement business; and charging the cost of the whole plant against only the

first 200,000 barrels, the mill has already more than paid for itself. When the railroads found they did not after all have Uncle Sam by the throat, it was surprising how cheaply cement could be handled by those philanthropic railroad companies which do not like a rate-bill in Congress.

Perhaps the most interesting illustration of the government work is that on the Truckee-Carson project in Nevada. This state lies in a basin into which most of its rivers run and evaporate, there being no other outlets except in the sands and toward the sky. The Humboldt river, rising in the mountains dividing Nevada from Utah, drains the whole northwestern portion of the state through a thousand wandering miles to spread out into a large lake, there to evaporate. The Truckee, Walker and Carson rivers, formed of the melting snows of the Sierra

Nevada mountains in California, flow into lakes with no outlets, also to evaporate. These streams have carried great quantities of silt from the mountains and in high water have spread them over the parching plain, their immense potential fertilities awaiting the spell of the water. This project unites these four principal drainage systems of Nevada by means of great main canal and lateral canals and will redeem at an eventual cost of $9,000,000 about 400,000 acres of desert which, for a half-century, has been used as an emigrant graveyard and for milleniums before in no other capacity than that of holding the world together.

A dozen lakes in the foothills will be used as primary natural reservoirs and the great dams in the valleys will withhold the flood and distribute it through the network of canals over the eager acres. The Carson sink in the old days was

a forty-mile desert, through which lay the emigrant trail to the Pacific. Here lay a three days' journey from one end to the other without hope of a drop of water. It became a great wilderness grave. It was said that one could walk across it on the bones of the animals that strewed the trail with the white monuments of that awful torture it was left for the desert to invent, death from thirst. As for the men and women and children who were taken out of their canvascovered prairie schooners, dead for lack of a cup of water, sometimes their graves were marked by a gun-barrel or iron rod driven in the soil. In the digging of the main ditch, three wagon-loads of these were dug up and carried to the river. To add to the pathos of the many tragedies buried here and there across this waste of death, there is the heart-breaking fact that these bones lie within six

river where matters are steadily getting

worse.

Some years ago a Mexican corporation diverted the river on its right bank in Mexican territory. A part of the waters was conducted westerly and finally flowed into a depression known as the Salton Sink, this being in Southern California adjacent to Mexico. The sink and surrounding desert land extend down to nearly 300 feet below sea-level.

During the past year the Colorado river has gradually enlarged the temporary opening and has eaten into the bed and bottom of the artificial channel until now nearly the entire volume of the stream rushes down a relatively steep slope into this great depression. The water accumulating in the basin is slowly rising and had already inundated settlements and has forced the abandonment of many miles of the Southern Pacific track, the road being forced to build temporary tracks around the rising sea.

The river at the point where it escapes has now cut its bed down nearly nine feet below the usual level and the ancient channel of the river is being eaten backwards up towards Yuma, so that the canals which formerly took water upon the irrigable lands near Yuma are left high and dry and the people are being forced to abandon their homes and farms. The condition is serious, and unless Uncle Sam takes a vigorous hand and politely but firmly requires that the river be restored to its old channel there will be great losses to American citizens, both in the vicinity of Yuma and in the Salton Sink.

As the result of ill-considered private enterprise, a most deplorable condition exists also in the Pecos Valley near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which is set forth in resolutions passed at a meeting of the Carlsbad Commercial Club and forwarded through the Chief Engineer of the Reclamation Service to the Secretary of the Interior.

About 18,000 acres of irrigated land tributary to Carlsbad and dependent for

water upon the Pecos Irrigation Company, have been without water since the disastrous floods of 1904 carried out the dam and other works. The result as recited in the resolutions, has been the death of shade and fruit-trees and vines, the total failure of crops and great financial loss. Unless the Avalon dam is rebuilt in time to furnish water in the early spring to crops, all the property situated under the canal system, including the town of Carlsbad, the county-seat, and amounting to between two and three i millions of dollars, is threatened with total extinction.

The engineers of the Reclamation Service, at the urgent request of the people interested, have made detailed examinations and surveys and perfected plans for the relief of the settlers, subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior.

Much of the old private construction has not only been badly planned, but is temporary, faulty and incomplete. The government work is slow but thorough. It is designed to be permanent in its character and complete in its development. In many of the private enterprises head-works, flumes and other structures are usually built of wood. Ditches are dug to be enlarged. The government builds, however, with a view to all the land that can be developed and each structure is as strong as can be made in stone, concrete and steel.

The building and control of irrigationplants as a national enterprise is another silver-plated screw in the lead coffin of laissez-faire. It is revolutionary and epoch-making. The success of the nation is so overwhelmingly brilliant in its whole conception and prosecution of the enterprise that it will certainly lead to the building and control of other public utilities and benefits, and what is as inexorable as logic and inevitable as death, the eventual federal control of all human necessities.

This paper would be incomplete without a glimpse at the reverse side of the