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Show -101- turn which the decision took? Or was the situation of such compelling necess- ity!95 as to demonstrate the error of that interpretation of the commerce clause of the federal constitution which treats it as rising above the health or life of the inhabitants of the States unless rescued by the benevolence of Congress as emergencies appeal to it? Whatever may be the right answer to these queries, there is but little difference of opinion-even among the members of the Court itself-about the inadequacy, if not the futility, of judicial decisions to adjust interstate controversies over the control and use of American waters, if the necessities of increasing population progress while the federal constitution and the powers of the Court remain in the original mould. In truth, the solution of the im- mensely important problem of water diversion from Lake, Michigan at Chicago is still to be accomplished* Better progress has been made by the pursuit of different methods in re- spect to the Colorado River, which is the next and last topic for consider- ation here* The Colorado River rises in the high Rockies and flows 1700 miles across or between seven States and through a part of Mexico before emptying its murlcy waters into the Gulf of California« It traverses the most rugged, inaccessible and arid section of the United States• In the last part of its course, it winds perilously along the border of the greatest land depression on the con- tinent, a basin of more than 1,000 square miles once the northerly end of th© Gulf of California but shut off in past ages by deposits of silt washed down by the river,, leaving the land-locked Salton Sea to recede from the rich al- luvial deposits in the ancient bed of the Gulf more than 200 feet below sea level, inviting there agricultural enterprises with easy irrigation from the lofty river flowing along the upper rim of this "Imperial Valley"~~originally owned wholly, and still held in part, as public lands of the United States* Other public lands, less productive and farther from populous centers, lie here and there alonp- the course of the stream, with some of the rocky gorges be- tween them "reserved" by the United States as water-power sites when Congress admitted into the Union the States through which the river flows• 1938* a little more than thirty years after the United States first filed suit in I9O8 to accomplish the same purpose» (This report was confirmed, and a decree entered on April lL, l93O»~">Ed .) ^¦95in the closing paragraph of the "Defendants* Brief on Law,'1 p* 182, it is said a "Finally with all the millions of words of the record before us we see that injunction would do nothing for complainants. For defendants it would be a death warrant to thousands-mostly children. It would induce a financial and material catastrophe the like of which would not be measured by piling one 0*21 top of the other the San Francisco earthauake, the burning of Rome, and the destruction of Louvain, with that latest product and example of War Department hydraulic engineering-the Mississippi flood-added for good measure. This is no case for injunction and to apply the name of equity to this complaint and. prayer is a mockery of language*11 |
