The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-04-30

United States should be irl the hands of Uncle Sam. Indeed, 1t will need to be so controlled before the work can be done for the good of the country. As it s now 95 per cent of these lands are in the hands of private parties. They were relinquished by the general government to the states about fifty years ago on the understanding that the states would inaugurate works to reclaim them. Ths states sold them out to individuals on the same understanding, and as result tens of thousands and millions of acres passed away from She government for a few cents per acre.
 And now 1t is found that the work is necessarily a national one. Take this matter of the lower Mississippi. The swamps act as great reservoirs which regulate the flow of the river. They be- come filled at the times of the floods and seep out gradually into the main current. If the swamps are cut off the water must be all thrown back into the main channel and this will necessitate rais- ing the levees of the Mississippi and other rivers, and which have cost the government and the states tens of mil lions of dollars. There are more than 1900 miles of levees along the Missis- sfppi alone. The Yazoo basin has an un- broken dike, and there is great dam around the basin of the St. Francis. The government, national and state, has spent s34 ,000c0O within the last generation 10 cage the water of the Mississippi. And the swamps will have to be handled care fully to keep the cages intact
 Moreover, no state will allow a sister state to drain it's surplus flood waters into it's own territory, and the farmers will kick against receiving surplus water from their neighbors. These are some If the problems which confront the drain age positions, and make 1t impossible except through cooperation and national supervision. am told by Senator Newlands that he has treated of this matter in his new bill for the manage
 Drainage by States
 Some of the states have directly au- thorized the drainage of the swamps, and some have granted concessions to that end In the Yazoo basin a company had been organized and plans made to redeem in the neigh hborhood of half a million acres. The geological survey had prepared the maps which gave the basis of the working plans. The com pany was so capitalized and the or ganization so made that the bonds would be secured by the lands redeemed and all the farms be subject to the as-
 
 The bonds were issued at per cent, and the banks had agreed to take tn em when, for some reason or other, the bill was held up in the legislature and the work stopped. There are other schemes which are going on in other states, and in Florida q large amount of land has been drained by various companies. and especially by. the Diss- -ons. who have taken the water from hundreds of thousands of acres.
 Florida and the Everglades
 And this brings me to the Ever glades. The whole of Florida Is a great bed of coral. upon the upper part of which a dense vegetation has grown, forming the lands which now make the winter garden and fruit patch of the eastern United States. Lower Florida is largely a swamp and there are so many swamp lands scattered over the whole state that 1t has more marshes and morasses than any other part of the union.
 It has altogether almost one-fourth of the swamps of the whole country. their area amounting to something like 20. ,0O0 acres. or to about asH much as tho whole tstate1 of South CarolinG. some of these lands lie along the coasts