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Show RECLAMATION OF THE ARID LANDS 671 showing thereby approval of its past decisions and confidence in those it might make in the future. Some Senators even thought it better to abandon the effort to provide relief to delinquent settlers than to sacrifice the power the Secretary of Interior had over the fund. But in the end the amendment carried 178-49.1OK The Extension Act of August 13, 1914, stated that persons whose lands thereafter acquired water from Federal projects were to pay 5 percent of the construction charge at the time of making their water right application, five annual payments of 5 percent beginning on December 1 of the 5th calendar year after the first payment and 10 annual payments thereafter of 7 percent. For settlers on existing projects the balance due was to be paid over the next 20 years, with 2 percent paid annually for the first 4 years, 4 percent for each of the next 2 years and 6 percent each for the last 14 years. Penalties of 1 percent a month were to be levied against delinquents and, if homesteaders, their entries were to be forfeited. No addition was to be made to the construction charge for water except in agreement with users of the water. Section 12 provided that owners of excess lands (over 160 acres) within a project who applied tor water must agree to dispose of all such excess land "upon terms and at not to exceed such price as the Secretary of the Interior may designate. . . . Landowners who refused to abide by this requirement were to be denied water for any of their land. Section 13 spelled out in detail the period in which excess lands or farm units should be sold.10" Acreage Limitations Provisions Little attention had been paid in the debates to the excess-lands provision in Section 12. Senator Marcus A. Smith of Arizona said of it: This bill stops the monopoly of the holdings within these irrigation districts and fcrces the unused land to pay its part in the development, and breaks up monopoly in speculative land.110 Smith clearly thought the section important and tried to resist an amendment offered by more conservative Senators that he thought would reduce its effectiveness, but otherwise there was no discussion of the section. Nor, for that matter, had the Director of the Reclamation Service given any special attention to the excess-lands provision, save to allow the project directors to include something very general about the disposal of excess lands in the contracts each water user was required to sign. About the North Dakota Pumping Project on the Great Northern Railroad we are informed that "more than half the acreage, both irrigated and unirrigated, is owned by non-residents. These nonresidents, waiting for the unearned increment, are responsible for the slow development of the project."111 On the whole the reports are chary of information concerning the proportion of lands held in large tracts and by whom they were held. There is no evidence that either the Geological Survey or the officials of the Reclamation Service felt there was any need of investigating the problem of the ownership of land other than to compile data showing what land was owned by public agencies and what by private individuals. In 1914 Director Newell was sufficiently troubled by critics who claimed that the reclamation program had "favored specu- 10SIbid., pp. 12974, 13010, 13359-64, 13453. 109 38 Stat. 686. 110 Cong. Record, 63d Cong., 2d sess., pp. 5028, 13362. 111 Reclamation Service, Fourteenth Annual Report, 1915, p. 225. On the Umatilla project a contract was made with a land company for the use of water with the only stipulation apparently being that it should improve a certain number of acres annually. Ibid., p. 239. |