er the Reclamation Act is not yet
as large as that for the Panama Canal, the engineering obstacles to be
overcome have been almost as great, and the political impediments many
times greater. The Reclamation work had to be carried on at widely
separated points, remote from railroads, under the most difficult
pioneer conditions. The twenty-eight projects begun in the years 1902
to 1906 contemplated the irrigation of more than three million acres
and the watering of more than thirty thousand farms. Many of the
dams required for this huge task are higher than any previously built
anywhere in the world. They feed main-line canals over seven thousand
miles in total length, and involve minor constructions, such as culverts
and bridges, tens of thousands in number.

What the Reclamation Act has done for the country is by no means limited
to its material accomplishment. This Act and the results flowing from it
have helped powerfully to prove to the Nation that it can handle its own
resources and exercise direct and business-like control over them. The
population which the Reclamation Act has brought into the arid West,
while comparatively small when compared with that in the more closely
inhabited East, has been a most effective contribution to the National
life, for it has gone far to transform the social aspect of the West,
making for the stability of the institutions upon which the welfare of
the whole country rests: it has substituted actual homemakers, who have
settled on the land with their families, for huge, migratory bands of
sheep herded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners.

The recent attacks on the Reclamation Service, and on Mr. Newell, arise
in large part, if not altogether, from an organized effort to repudiate
the obligation of the settlers to repay the Government for what it has
expended to reclaim the land. The repudiation of any debt can always
find supporters, and in this case it has attracted the support not only
of certain men among the settlers who hope to be relieved of paying what
they owe, but also of a variety of unscrupulous politicians, some highly
placed. It is unlikely that their efforts to deprive the West of
the revolving Irrigation fund will succeed in doing anything but
discrediting these politicians in the sight of all honest men.

When in the spring of 1911 I visited the Roosevelt Dam in Arizona, and
opened the reservoir, I made a short speech to the assembled people.
Among other thin