The Washington times., 1913-07-21
BIG WATER POWER DEVELOPMENTS.

1t seems but as yesterday when people who talked
of the wonderful future of water power were re-
garded visonaries. Before their accomplishment
such miracles summarizing aeroplanng, and wire
less telegraphing would have seemed no whit more
preposterous than that water power should take its
place thus early the huge economic factor it is
now everywhere recognized.
If the great anthracite fields of PENNSYLVANIA
were today within the control of the public, who,
knowing their history, would again that they
be aenated from that control? The answer is to be
found in the publics determination that the Alaska
fields shall not pass from the grip of National Ad-
minstration Yet water power is going to be vastly
more important than COAL throughout great sections
of the land
When it was frst proposed that the nation as
dominion over water powers, there protest
first that it had no right to such CONTROL and second
that its exercise would prevent development The
of events has completely dsproved both the
ories. The Supreme Court has settled the legal
question; the steady advance of investment and de-
velopment has proved that public control does not
mean atrophy of enterprise.
The Secretary of Agriculture has just issued a
permit to the Pacific Light and Power Company, a
Stone & Webster concern, for series of plants in
the Sierra national forest, California Four power
10000 horsepower, to be transported 240 miles into
Los Angeles striking features of the project On
the Feather river the Great Western Power Company
is constructing a forty-three-mile reservoir and will
produce $4,000 horsepower. All these and many
other enterprises will be executed by private capital
under rigid Government supervision, reaching down
to rates and charges
The nation is doing things differently nowadays
1t has let much of those resources get away from it,
which ought to have been retained for the general
welfare but il is keeping what is left, and learning
how TO administer and develop. The other day
Western railroad company asked a special act per-
nlitting it to buy of coal land to provide
power for the road. Price was not the point; abSo
lutte ownership the thing wanted. A Senate
committee held up the bill, the ground that such
resources are no longer being given in fee at any
price few years ago the most ardent conserva-
ZIONIST of today would hardly have thought of that
objection.
Look at todays forest policy, irrigation policy,
water power policy, Alaska policy, oil land policy,
grazing land policy; at the program of building rail-
roads in order Alaska and give it the best de-
veopment; at the national movement for flood CON-
troll and restoration of the rivers to commerce; at
the great work of the Departments of the Interior
and Agriculture-yes, paternalistic if You please
and realize how far we have come in a very few
years. With complete establishment, which is now
assured, of public control over great corporations of
public quaspublic character, the country will have
entered, almost without realizing it, on new era of
equal opportunity and safeguarded community in
terests in which it may confidently be predicted there
will be such growth, expansion, and freeing of ma
tional energies as even the marvellous development
of the nineteenth century could not parallel.