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Show -63- while Colorado countered with a claim of sovereign right under international law to appropriate at pleasure all the waters within its borders, including the whole of the Arkansas River above the, Kansas boundary line. In this three-cornered fight, the first great sovereign controversy in America over diversion of waters for irrigation, the United States Supreme Court suggested much that is of great interest to the States of the arid west but decided only: that each of the two States has a sovereign interest in the utilization of the flow of the river; that the State holding the sources of the stream within its territory is not for that reason, or any other, entitled to ap- propriate completely and to take away permanently all the water from the "bed of the stream within the State, but is limited in right to diversion of a portion of the v/ater reasonable and equitable under all the circumstances; that the lower riparian State is not entitled to the full flow of the stream as it is "wont to run" but is governed by the same standard of reasonable diversion and use as the upper riparian State; that neither State is either dominant or servient in respect to these uses, or subject to coercion by the other State or by Congress; and that the interests of both States are subordinate to the right of the United States to preserve and improve the navigability of the river. Negatively, the Court emphatically declared that the United States has no power under the constitution to take possession or to assume control of the river for the purpose of reclaiming arid lands, either under the Reclamation Act-*-^ or otherwise; the only legitimate federal interest in the stream being the improvement and maintenance of State of Tennessee. The Court said* "When the States by their union made the forcible abatement of outside nuisanoe impossible to each, they did not thereby agree to submit to whatever might be done. They did not renounce the possibility of making reasonable demands on the grounds of their still remaining quasi-sovereign interests; and the alternate to force is a suit in this court. • • « "Some peculiarities necessarily mark a suit of this kind. If the State has a case at all, it is somewhat more certainly entitled to specific relief than a private party might be. It is not lightly to be required to give up quasi-sovereign rights for pay; and, apart from the difficulty of valuing such rights in money, if that be its choice it may insist that an infraction of them shall be stopped. The States by entering the Union did not sink to the position of private owners, subject to one system of private law. • • "it is a fair and reasonable demand on the part of a sovereign that the air over its territory should not be polluted on a great scale by sulphurous acid gas, that the forests on its mountains, be they better or worse whatever domestic destruction they have suffered, should not be further destroyed or threatened by the act of persons beyond its control, that the crops and orchards on its hills should not be endangered from the same source." Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., 206 U.S. 230, 237-238, 27 Sup. Ct» 618, 6l9, 51 L. Ed. 1038, IOI4J.1., 11 Ann. Cas* i+88, J489 (1907). 1^aAot of June 17, 1902, c. 1093, 32 Stat. at L. 388, supra at foot- notes #ll42a and II4.3. |