CHAPTER XXI
LEGISLATION—DRAINAGE COMPANIES.
England protects her Farmers.—Meadows ruined by Corporation dams.—Old Mills often Nuisances.—Factory Reservoirs.—Flowage extends above level of Dam.—Rye and Derwent Drainage.—Give Steam for Water-Power.—Right to Drain through land of others.—Right to natural flow of Water.—Laws of Mass.—Right to Flow; why not to Drain?—Land-drainage Companies in England.—Lincolnshire Fens.—Government Loans for Drainage.
Nothing more clearly shows the universal interest and confidence of the people of Great Britain, in the operation of land-drainage, than the acts of Parliament in relation to the subject. The conservatism of England, in the view of an American, is striking. She never takes a step till she is sure she is right. Justly proud of her position among the nations, she deems change an unsafe experiment, and what has been, much safer than what might be. Vested rights are sacred in England, and especially rights in lands, which are emphatically real estate there.
Such are the sentiments of the people, and such the sentiments of their representatives and exponents, the Lords and Commons.
Yet England has been so impressed with the importance of improving the condition of the people, of increasing the wealth of the nation, of enriching both tenant and landlord, by draining the land, that the history of her legislation, in aid of such operations, affords a lesson of progress even to fast Young America. Powers have been granted, by which encumbered estates may be charged with the expenses of drainage, so that remainder-men and reversioners, without their consent, shall be compelled to contribute to present improvements; so that careless or obstinate adjacent proprietors shall be compelled to keep open their ditches for outfalls to their neighbor's drains; so that mill-dams, and other obstructions to the natural flow of the water, may be removed for the benefit of agriculture; and, finally, the Government has itself furnished funds, by way of loans, of millions of pounds, in aid of improvements of this character.
In America, where private individual right is usually compelled to yield to the good of the whole, and where selfishness and obstinacy do not long stand in the pathway of progress, obstructing manifest improvement in the condition of the people; we are yet far behind England in legal facilities for promoting the improvement of land culture. This is because the attention of the public has not been particularly called to the subject.
Manufacturing corporations are created by special acts of legislation. In many States, rights to flow, and ruin, by inundation, most valuable lands along the course of rivers, and by the banks of ponds and lakes, to aid the water-power of mills, are granted to companies, and the land-owner is compelled to part with his meadows for such compensation as a committee or jury shall assess.
In almost every town in New England there are hundreds, and often thousands, of acres of lands, that might be most productive to the farmer; overflowed half the year with water, to drive some old saw-mill, or grist-mill, or cotton-mill, which has not made a dividend, or paid expenses, for a quarter of a century. The whole water-power, which, perhaps, ruins for cultivation a thousand acres of fertile land, and divides and breaks up farms, by creating little creeks and swamps throughout all the neighboring valleys, is not worth, and would not be assessed, by impartial men, at one thousand dollars. Yet, though there is power to take the farmer's land for the benefit of manufacturers, there is no power to take down the company's dam for the benefit of agriculture. An old saw-mill, which can only run a few days in a Spring freshet, often swamps a half-township of land, because somebody's great-grandfather had a prescriptive right to flow, when lands were of no value, and saw-mills were a public blessing.
There are numerous cases, within our own knowledge, where the very land overflowed and ruined by some incorporated company, would, if allowed to produce its natural growth of timber and wood, furnish ten times the fuel necessary to supply steam-engines, to propel the machinery carried by the water-power.
Not satisfied with obstructing the streams in their course, the larger companies are, of late, making use of the interior lakes, fifty or a hundred miles inland, as reservoirs, to keep back water for the use of the mills in the summer droughts. Thus are thousands of acres of land drowned, and rendered worse than useless; for the water is kept up till Midsummer, and drawn off when a dog-day climate is just ready to convert the rich and slimy sediment of the pond into pestilential vapors. These waters, too, controlled by the mill-owners, are thus let down in floods, in Midsummer, to overflow the meadows and corn-fields of the farmer, or the intervals and bottom-lands below.