d a
soil fertility that is remarkable, this great section is slowly coming to
its own, through the method of irrigation, from the mountains and the
streams.

With characteristic western spirit the above author remarks, "Even in
humid regions nothing is so uncertain as the time and amount of the
rainfall. In the whole range of modern industry nothing is so crude,
uncalculating and unscientific as the childlike dependence on the mood of
the clouds for the moisture essential to the production of the staple
necessities of life." The superiority of irrigation as a certain means of
water supply which can be regulated at will is a thesis easy to maintain.
The results make a marvelous story. "The canal is an insurance policy
against loss of crops by drought, while aridity is a substantial guarantee
against injury by flood. The rich soils of the arid region produce from
four to ten times as largely with irrigation, as the soil of the humid
region without it. Twenty acres in the irrigated West should equal 100
acres elsewhere. Certainty, abundance, variety--all this upon an area so
small as to be within the control of a single family through its own area,
are the elements which compose industrial independence under irrigation."

The small farm unit, usually from five to twenty-five acres, brings
neighbors close together, abolishing loneliness and most of the social
ills of farm life in the East. Beautiful irrigated villages are springing
up which rival in comfort and privilege most places on earth, and combine
both city and country privileges, where rural and urban meet. The spirit
of cooperation is strong in irrigated communities, enforced by the common
dependence upon the common enterprise and water supply. This is well
illustrated by the Mormon commonwealth, the pioneer irrigators of the
West.

The enthusiastic irrigating farmer asserts that irrigation is "the
foundation of truly scientific agriculture." "The western farmer who has
learned to irrigate thinks it would be quite as illogical for him to leave
the watering of his potato patch to the caprice of the clouds as for the
housewife to defer her wash-day until she could catch rainwater in her
tubs." Irrigation certainly furnishes the ideal method for raising a
varied crop, giving each crop individual treatment, serving each of thirty
varieties of plants and trees with just the amount of daily moisture they
individually need, so as to produce maximum products. No wonder t