Daily Arizona silver belt., 1908-12-09

country. The photographs also show the same rivers after they have passed through the mountains, the beds having become broad and sandy because of the deforestation of the mountains. One of the photographs shows a cara van passing through valley. Former ly, when the mountains were forested, it was thickly peopled by prosperous peasants. Now the floods have carried destruction all over the land and the valley is stony desert. Another photo graph shows mountain road covered with the stones and rocks that are brought down in the rainy season from the mountains which have already been deforestcd by human hands. Another shows pebbly river-bed in southern Manchuria where what was once a great stream has dried up owing to the deforestation of the mountains. Only some scrub wood is left, which will dis appear within half century. Yet an other shows the effects of one of the washouts, destroying an arable noun tain side, these washouts being due to tho remoyel of all vegetation; yes in this photograph the foreground shows that reforestation is still a possibility in places.
 What has thus happened in northern China, what has happened in central Asia, in Palestine, in north Africa, in parts of the Mediterranean countries of EuroTc, will surely happen in our country if we do rot exercise that wise forethought which should be one or the chief marks of any people calling itself civilized. Nothing should be permitted to stand in the way of the preservation of the forests, and it is criminal to per. init individuals to purchase a little gain for themselves through the destruction of forests when this destruction is fatal to the well-being of the whole country in the future.
 Inland Waterways.
 Action should be began forthwith, during the present session of the con gross, for the improvement. of our in. land waterways-action which will re- suit in giving us not only navigable but navigated rivers. We have spent hundreds of millionsi of dollars upon these waterways, yet the traffic on nearly all of them Is steadily declining. This condition is the direes result of the, absence of any comprehensive and far-seeing plan of waterway i'm. provement. Obviously we can not con. tinue thus to expend the revenues of the government without return. Ii is poor businss to spend money for inland navigation unless We get it.
 Inquiry into the condition of th, Mississippi and it's principal tributaries reveals very many instances of the utter waste caused by the methods which have hitherto obtained fer the tsoealied Improvement of naviga- ton. striking instance is supplied by the 'lmprovement" of the Ohio which. begun in 1894, was continued under A single plan for half a century. Tn 1875 new plan was adopted and followed TOT qrHrter of century. In 1892 stiii a 'dinerent plan was adopted and has since been pursued at rate which only promises navigable river in from twenty to one hundred years.
 Such shortsighted, vaeillating. and futile methods are accompanied by decreasing water-borne commerce. and increasing traffic congestion on lanJ by increasing floods, and by the waste of public money. The remedy lies in abandoning the methods which have so signally failed and adopting new ones m keeping with the needs and se. mands of our pople.
 in report on a measure introduced at the first session of the present con. gress, the secretary of war said: "Tbe chief defect in the methods hitherto pursued lies m the absence of executive pans covering the country or nat ural divisions there of" In this onin lon heartily concur. The present methods not only fail to give us inland navigation, but they are injurious to the army as we'll. What is virtually A permanent detail of the corps of enoi- neers to civilian duty necessarily i'm. pairs the efficiency of our military establishment. The military engineers nave undoubtedly done efficient work Tn actual construction, but they are necessarily unsuited by their training and traditions to take the broad view. and to gather and transmit to the congress the commercial and industrial information and forecasts, upon which waterway improvement must so largely rest. Furthermore, they have failed to grasp the great underlying fact that every stream is unit from it's source to its mouth, and that all its uses are interdependent. Prominent officers of the Engineer Corps have recently even gon so far as to assert in print that waterways are not dependent upon the conservation of the forests about their headwaters. This position is opposed to all the recent work of the scientif- ie bureaus of the government and to the general experience of mankind. A physician who disbelieved in vaccina. tion would not be the right man to handle an epidemic of smallpox, nor should We leave a doctor skeptical about the transmission of yellow fever by the Stegomyia mosquito in charge of sanitation at Havana or Panama. So with the improvement of our rivers; it is no longer wise or safe to leave this great work in the hands of men who fail to grasp the essential relations be- tween navigation and general develop ment and to assimilat and use the cen tral facts about our streams.
 Until the work of river improvement is undertaken in modern way it can not have results that will meet with the needs of this modern nation. These Deeds should be met without furthr