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Show -105- upper States is further insured by a sort of boomerang clause of the compact, first declaring against any impairment of present perfected rights of bene- ficial use of -waters of the Colorado River system, and then providing that all such rights of use in the lower basin shall be satisfied, if possible, out of stored water as soon as the same is available from dams of a given capacity to be erected in the main river. Subject to these very general limitations of the compact, each of the signatory States is left otherwise free to control within its own borders the appropriation, use and distribution of water from the Colorado River system. The lower States are permitted to increase their "beneficial consumptive use of such waters by one.million acre feet per annum" if, and as long as, there is that much unused and unapporticned water available„ The division of water between the States of each basin is left for future determination by compacts, which Congress has assented to and invited in the Boulder Canyon Project Actj or, if not by compact, then inevitably by suit in the United States Supreme Court. No provision is made for non-judicial adjustment of controversies, great; or small, arising under the Colorado River Compact except by a cumbersome and specially appointed commission in each case sans authority to make any settle- ment effective without ratification by the legislatures of all the interested States« The compact as a whole, however, is a worthy and creditable contribution to the difficult task of dividing among sovereigns, for the first time in world history, all the waters of a really great international river. That much remains to be. done does not detract from the initial achievement* Nothing has been found in this study to cast doubt upon the constitution- ality of the compact as a six-state treaty unless the Boulder Canyon Project Act should be held invalid and the consent of the United States to the six- state agreement adjudged to fall with it. This is unlikely* Nothing in the Act, or its history, indicates that the congressional approval of the six-state compact shall depend upon the validity of other provisions, or that Congress would have refused its consent without a project for improvement of the river. Congress has not prohibited a compact between States for more than a century .199 The right of six States or of any lesser number, with the consent of Congress, to dispose of their interests in the river by agreement is as high as the right of any State not to do so? None can force its own views or policy upon another. None alone, nor less than all, may insist that the river shall continue to flow undisturbed as by nature it is wont to run. In the arid west Congress may subordinate navigation to other uses without the consent of any State; and probably may do so elsewhere in the United States. Conceivably Mexico may complain of impaired navigable oapacity, if any there be to impair, in the Colorado River; but at most no more than a political Question for diplomatics 199inquiries of the Librarian of Congress, under whose direction researrch is periodically made, bring the information that no record has been found tfciere |
