to destroy them bit by bit as they are able. Their arguments
are curiously like those of the devil, devised for the destruction of
the first garden--so much of the very best Eden fruit going to waste; so
much of the best Tuolumne water and Tuolumne scenery going to waste. Few
of their statements are even partly true, and all are misleading.

Thus, Hetch Hetchy, they say, is a "low-lying meadow." On the contrary,
it is a high-lying natural landscape garden, as the photographic
illustrations show.

"It is a common minor feature, like thousands of others." On the
contrary it is a very uncommon feature; after Yosemite, the rarest and
in many ways the most important in the National Park.

"Damming and submerging it 175 feet deep would enhance its beauty by
forming a crystal-clear lake." Landscape gardens, places of recreation
and worship, are never made beautiful by destroying and burying them.
The beautiful sham lake, forsooth, should be only an eyesore, a dismal
blot on the landscape, like many others to be seen in the Sierra. For,
instead of keeping it at the same level all the year, allowing Nature
centuries of time to make new shores, it would, of course, be full only
a month or two in the spring, when the snow is melting fast; then it
would be gradually drained, exposing the slimy sides of the basin and
shallower parts of the bottom, with the gathered drift and waste, death
and decay of the upper basins, caught here instead of being swept on to
decent natural burial along the banks of the river or in the sea. Thus
the Hetch Hetchy dam-lake would be only a rough imitation of a natural
lake for a few of the spring months, an open sepulcher for the others.

"Hetch Hetchy water is the purest of all to be found in the Sierra,
unpolluted, and forever unpollutable." On the contrary, excepting that
of the Merced below Yosemite, it is less pure than that of most of the
other Sierra streams, because of the sewerage of camp grounds draining
into it, especially of the Big Tuolumne Meadows camp ground, occupied by
hundreds of tourists and mountaineers, with their animals, for months
every summer, soon to be followed by thousands from all the world.

These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to
have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes
to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals
and chur