vantages, it could not be overlooked, even if the water to some beneficial use. Nearly all riparian proprietors are appropriators in the sense here intended. They have put up their notices claiming water, and dug their ditches leading to their irrigated fields, or to tanks for stock. The decision of the Supreme Court is hurtful to such proprietors in most cases, for they need to irrigate over wider spaces more liberally than the limiting words of the Court perinit. Such riparian. appropriators are injured by the new departure in law, as much as any other. Water is so precious in this State that every means must be used to husband it. Every drop that falls into the sea has failed of its mission. In the Coast Range, where thin threads of water run, and are apt to dry up or sink away in the hot summers, it would be well to imitate the example of the old padres, who concreted the beds of the little streams, or made concrete ditches along their banks. This preserves the water, and it is appropriation as well. The doctrine of riparian ownership will be very difficult of application in this State, for other physical reasons than those existing in its climate. All the streams of Southern California, after they leave their rocky cañon beds, run through shifting sands. In many cases they have no defined banks or steady course, but shift their direction under the effects of storms. These shifting streams break away during high water from their temporary beds, and take new courses, often widely diverging from previous ones. The river affected by this suit will illustrate. In 1862, it ran below where Bakersfield now stands, southeasterly, and discharged into the east end of Kern Lake, when there was water enough to get through the sands so far. In 1867, it changed during a storm to what is now called Old River, and discharged through one fork at the west end of the lake, and through another still farther west into the slough connecting that lake with Buena Vista Lake. It now runs still farther west in New River, and discharges northwest of Buena Vista Lake into Buena Vista Slough, whence it drops back southerly to the lake, in an opposite direction from Buena Vista one. Swamp. The point of discharge in each case is about ten miles from the previous The original United States surveys, made in 1855, show a still wider divergence of this shifting channel. Such rivers refuse to be governed by the decrees of courts that "inseparably annex them to the soil, not as an easement or appurtenance, but as part and parcel of it." An appropriator easily adapts his means of diversion to such streams; but a riparian proprietor finds his inseparable annex nearly as fleeting as the clouds that sail over his land. In whatever light the matter is viewed, the conclusion comes irresistibly back, that the laws made for a country so different in all physical aspects as England is from California, cannot and ought not to be enforced here. In the foreign possessions of England, the practice of appropriation prevails over the doctrine of riparian rights, wherever irriga. tion is a necessity. It is so in India and in Australia. India has gigantic works for systematic irrigation. Three hundred and seventy millions of British money are being expended in that country to supplement a system older than our era. Professor George Davidson reports that the whole breadth of the base of the peninsula of India, sweeping in a great curve from the delta of the Ganges to the delta of the Indus, is the field of a vast system of irrigation. The supply of water is in the Himalayas, where snows ensure an unceasing supply. The Rocky and Sierra Nevada Mountains are the Himalayas of the arid region of the United States, while the broad areas of irrigable lands which adjoin them are perhaps equal in extent to the great plains of India. For over two thousand years the people of India have cultivated by means of canals and reservoirs, and English capital has projected and commenced great works, with better engineering science and wider reach. The effects are already seen in the world's markets by the competition of the wheat and cotton of India. The rains of India are usually confined to a single month. Though copious for that period, they do not give the continued moisture necessary for crops. In the densely populated parts of the country, two crops annually are necessary to feed the people, and these can be had only by utilizing by irrigation the water caused by the melting snow stored in the mountains. The alternative of less production is starvation, with the attendant fevers. The director of the Ganges Canal Water Works states, as a striking advantage of irrigation in that country, the substitution of a constant for a fluctuating re turn of produce. Alternations of production and failure consequent upon non-irrigable agriculture, are significant of enormous misery among the laboring classes. These have disappeared as the great works inaugurated by English capitalists have become operative. In a community dependent for its means of subsistence on the soil, the importance of having thus excluded the disturbing influence of variable seasons need not be insisted on. All the benefits of security for capital invested in cultivation are obtained; the revenue fluctuates only with the price of produce; and the working classes have cheap food and a constant demand for their labor. The horrible famines of India, the sickening details of which have from time to time reached our distant ears, cease where irrigation gives steady returns to the labors of the husbandman. In India the government possesses the right of property in all running waters whatsoever. It may dispose of them forever, if it thinks fit, and the doctrine of riparian rights has no part in the economy of that country. Irrigation is resorted, to in all countries. where much of the land must otherwise remain barren from drought. In Egypt it was practiced two thousand years before Christ, by means of great canals and artificial lakes. Extensive works, intended for the irrigation of large districts, existed in times of remote antiquity, in Persia, China, and other parts of the East; and such works still exist, and provide food or the teeming millions who would else perish. Irrigation is a powerful agent in the plains of northern Italy, and the government recognizes its economic importance, encourages it by every means, and is especially careful in the education of civil engineers, the highest grade among whom is the hydraulic engineer. The length of canals in Lombardy alone is over five thousand miles, and there is scarcely an acre of the Milanese that is without several intersecting canals. In round numbers there are a million acres irrigated in Lombardy. The system has been perfecting for seven hundred years, and has gone on under all changes of dynasty and all civil commotions. It has converted a barren waste into a garden. The right of property in all running waters, whether of rivers, streams, or torrents, appertains to the government. While the government disposes of the waters of all rivers and canals, it recognizes the claims of towns, or associa tions of proprietors, to the supplies which they have enjoyed by prescriptive title for long periods of time. Private rights to divert water have grown up to such extent, that the right asserted by the State is nearly a barren one, and its enforcement has reference rather to administration and police duties, than to direct financial considerations. In exercising its right of property in waters available for irrigation, the government of Lombardy follows one of three courses. First, it disposes of the water in absolute property, to parties paying certain established sums for the right to divert it. Second, it grants perpetual leases of the water on payment of a certain annual amount. Third, it grants a temporary lease for a variable time at a certain annual rate, the water reverting to the State on the termination of the lease. By far the most common of these courses is the first, and it operates the most beneficially. The origin of the system of irrigation was with the great landed proprietors upon their properties. With the revival of knowledge in Italy, the art of hydraulic engineering was called into existence, and the extensive de mand for skill in its details created early a supply of men familiar with all of these. Hence the remarkable number and great talent of executive engineers, by whose exertions a vast net-work of irrigation channels was spread over the face of the entire country. All this has operated powerfully in producing the social prosperity for which the irrigated districts are remarkable. In Spain and the south of France, and considerably in Belgium, irrigation is extensively practiced, so that it may be said that the great valleys of the Po, Adige, Tagus, and Douro are subjected to systematic irrigation, enormously adding to their productiveness. Such a system is entirely impossible, where the right of the land owner on a stream to own and control the water is admitted. The water is conducted for miles away from the stream, and from the land of the riparian proprietor. He may have his share on the terms of other users of the vital fluid; but he cannot claim a superior right because his land is nearer or better situated than another's. And he has no power to determine that the water shall run idly by him to the sea, and lose nothing by non-user. Such doctrines may do for humid countries, where water is an obstacle; not for arid countries, where it is the supreme blessing-the essential of the community's preservation. The climate, productions, and general characteristics of these countries resemble strongly those of California, especially of the southern part of the State. A system that has made possible their dense populations must be favorable, it must be indispensable, to our prosperity. Our population is thin compared with that of our sister States. We have a cultivable area equal to New England, New York, and Pennsylvania, with a population of a million, while theirs is fourteen millions. Compared to the populations of other countries of the world, which resort to irrigation, ours is insignificant. If we are to observe the law of growth, we must have its conditions. We cannot maintain a population beyond our means to feed. We cannot feed a large population without irrigation, or with irrigation. only on narrow ribbons along the river beds, which the Supreme Court permits to riparianists only. Imagination cannot depict the horrors of famine, misery, and death that would follow this rule, sternly applied to the plain of the Indus, or of the Ganges. would produce a revolution, if enforced in the basin of the Po. With similar climatic conditions, our present interests and future It THE STROLLING MINSTREL. DEACON BROWN had just left his house in bad humor. A small sum of money which was necessary to his business schemes could not be obtained. He had expected Mrs. Brown to offer him the needed funds from her own ample resources, and had presented to her most skillfully the advantages of the new enterprise; but he had evoked in return only a hearty wish that he might be able to borrow the desired amount "somewhere." Why did not the Deacon ask her plainly for the favor which he needed, and which she was abundantly able to grant? Why did she wait for him to ask her? Neither of them would have acknowledged the reason to any one, stranger or friend. As I discovered it, however, without their help, I can tell you without violating confidence. Before his marriage with Grace Atherton, Jotham Brown had been an admirer, and perhaps a lover, of pretty Mary Shaw. The fact that Grace was very wealthy in her own right, while Mary was poor in this world's goods, furnished the occasion for a few unpleasant remarks at the time of his marriage; but when Mary's death from consumption soon put an end to her poverty and sickness together, none spoke of the matter further. God had settled every troublesome question in taking unto Himself the fairest flower of the little village; for such Mary was admitted to be. But the questions which were forever settled for others still lived to plague Mr. and Mrs. Brown, though not one word upon the subject had been spoken by either during the thirty years of their wedded life. It troubled and stung Grace that she could not feel sure that she had been the first object of her husband's complete and unselfish love. Strange as it may seem, Jotham Brown could not have answered her questions if he had wished to do so. He had never been able to settle the doubt in his own mind. There had been much in Mary Shaw which he had never VOL. VIII.-3. been able to understand, much that was too delicate for his coarser nature to appreciate. Grace Atherton's bolder manner, hardier beauty, and less sensitive nature were more easily understood and enjoyed by him. And yet he had thought very much of Mary at one time, and had deemed that he was himself growing more delicate and sensitive under the stimulus of her regard for him. He could not feel certain, either, that Grace's fortune had, or that it had not, been the determining force which had caused him finally to ask her hand in marriage. Why should he trouble himself to settle such a useless question? If Mary's lovely face still haunted him, it was only a mark of the largeness of his heart, and the strength of his friendship. Even when she was alive, her absent face was continually shining in upon his mind with a power and sweetness which almost exceeded that of her actual presence, and in idealizing her, how easy he had found it to idealize everything else! Jotham sometimes smiled as he remembered what a moonstruck lad he had once been. Hence he was always charitable to gushing young lovers, and always insisted that they would get over it, and be all right again. Outwardly, Deacon and Mrs. Brown were certainly a model pair, industrious, affectionate and benevolent. Both were leaders in the church, and in the life of the village. Mrs. Brown had always kept the management of her money entirely in her own hands, and the Deacon had felt a certain satisfaction in having her do this. His hearty acquiescence in this arrangement seemed to himself to furnish a complete denial and refutation of that suspicion which troubled them both. Moreover, Grace never seemed to mistrust him, and was a pecuniary partner, without security, in most of his enterprises. Mrs. Brown's property consisted in part of a number of houses, in one of which the Shaws had been living at the time of Mary's |