Life in the Far West is a continual series of the occurrence of such events as these. Its problems are largely solved by the civil engineer and the irrigation expert, who transform vast deserts to regions of blossoming beauty, change the course of a river, send railroad trains climbing the mountain peaks or penetrating beneath the range, and who are, in short, the modern magicians who work their will with the forces of nature. The National Reclamation Act is fairly recreating the entire Southwest.
The Gila River, which is the largest tributary of the Colorado, flows through the regions south of Florence, Arizona, and affords water to many fertile and beautiful valleys; and Florence, with the towns of Yuma, Tucson, Glendale, Bisbee, Winslow, and others, is fully abreast in modern life. Large department stores, public libraries, schools and churches, women's clubs, daily newspapers, good railroad facilities, free postal delivery,—all these make up the environment of a splendid and progressive citizenship. As the Governor of Arizona, Hon. Joseph H. Kirley, has recently said:
"Nowhere can a man who respects his neighbor's rights, with reasonably strict attention to his own business, go about with more freedom and with greater confidence of personal safety than in Arizona. Locked and barricaded doors are in most parts of Arizona a novelty. The professional thief is almost unknown in the territory."
The East—at least the portion of it that has not personally visited the magic land of Arizona—can form little idea of its marvellous resources and its potent achievements.
The statehood problem looms up on the social and political horizon, and there is a strong feeling that to force Arizona and New Mexico into union would do violence to the judgment and the feeling of the citizens of Arizona. For several years past the incipient possibility of statehood on these terms has aroused widespread opposition.
The local press voices almost daily the editorial convictions that such a union would be most disastrous to the interests of Arizona—a country which is simply a wonderland of treasure and rich and varied resources. Arizona is settled chiefly by people from the great South and from New England, the Middle West being hardly represented; its citizens are of the best quality of our national life, and to unite them with those of New Mexico—a large proportion of whom can hardly speak or understand the English language even, to say nothing of their divergence in race, requirements, and habits from the population of Arizona—would be imposing upon them a century's delay in realizing the grand ideals of education, moral progress, and economic development now prevailing in Arizona.
Phœnix has to-day a better public-school system than Boston, and other surprising degrees of progress might be related of many of the towns.
Hon. N. O. Murphy, twice a Governor of Arizona, has recently made an eloquent plea against forcing these two territories into union as a state. Ex-Governor Murphy was appointed by President Harrison (in 1889) Secretary of Arizona. Under President Cleveland he was elected the Delegate to Congress representing the territorial interests; and on the expiration of this term he was appointed by President McKinley the Governor of the territory. His experience has given him the most intimate knowledge and wide grasp of territorial conditions, and in a letter of three columns over his own signature to the "Washington Post," appearing under date of February 25, 1906, ex-Governor Murphy does not hesitate to say that were the Bill for united statehood then pending before Congress passed, it would be one of the greatest legislative outrages ever perpetrated in this country. "I refer particularly to the proposed merger of the territories of Arizona and New Mexico into a single state against the protests of the people of those territories," he added.
The ex-Governor points out these statistical facts:
"The area of New England, comprising six states, with twelve senators, is 66,465 square miles; the area of the territory of Arizona is nearly twice as great, being 113,916 square miles.
"The area of the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, now proposed to be merged, is 235,600 square miles, or greater than Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New Jersey, represented in the Upper House now by twenty-two senators."