RECLAMATION
“There are no useless American acres,” Secretary Wilson is reported to have said. “The Government is seeking in all parts of the world for crops that have become acclimated to dry conditions, and it has been so successful that many places that were once accounted desert land are to-day supporting productive farms.” Says Guy Elliott Mitchell, secretary of the National Irrigation Association, in an article on “Resources of the American Desert,” contributed to The Technical World (Chicago):
“It has been estimated that in the neighborhood of 100,000,000 acres of the American desert can be reclaimed to most intensive agriculture through irrigation; yet Frederick V. Coville, the chief botanist of the Department of Agriculture, does not hesitate to say that in the strictly arid region are many millions of acres, now considered worthless for agriculture, which are as certain to be settled in small farms as were the lands of Illinois; and this without irrigation. This applies particularly to the great plateaus in the northern Rocky Mountain region. ‘I would confidently predict,’ said Mr. Coville, ‘that the transformation of these barren-looking lands into farms, through the introduction of desert plants, will be as extensive a work as the enormous reclamation through irrigation.’”
Moral wastes should be and can be reclaimed, as surely as the American deserts. There is no such thing as a wholly useless life. (Text.)
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See [Irrigation].
Doctor John Clifford, of London, tells this story about Gladstone. It relates to two young men who had got into drinking habits:
Gladstone knew of them, heard of the downward road they were traveling, and felt necessity laid upon him to try and reclaim them. He invited them to Hawarden, impressively appealed to them to mend their ways, and then knelt and fervently asked God to sustain and strengthen them in their resolve to abstain from that which had done them so much harm. “Never,” says one of the men in question, “can I forget the scene, and as long as I have memory the incidents of the meeting will be indelibly imprest upon my mind. The Grand Old Man was profoundly moved by the intensity of his solicitation. Neither of us from that day to this has touched a drop of intoxicating drink, nor are we ever likely to violate an undertaking so impressively ratified in Mr. Gladstone’s library.” (Text.)
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