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Show -69- for municipal and domestic use. Brushing aside arguments as to the expediency, private riparian rights, impossibility-of ownership of running water, equal privileges of citizens of the States, and lack of sovereign title, the Court upheld the Hew Jersey statute upon the broad ground that a State, without assigning any reason, may preserve the waters of a stream wholly within its borders for the exclusive use of its own citizens; there being no conflict with the sovereign rights of any other State nor any question of interstate commerce or navigable -waters of the United States in the case,152 In this chronology of water controversies and adjustments between sover- eigns, it will be appropriate next to examine the most important-treaty re- lating to waterways which the United States has ever made with any foreign nation. This is the treaty of January 11, 1909, negotiated by Elihu Root and James Bryce to establish and adjust the rights, powers and privileges of the United States and Great Britain (Canada) in all the waterways through which the boundary between the two countries passes in its 3980-mile stretch from ^ Hudson County Water Co. v« McCarter, Att'y Gen, of New Jersey, 209 U.S. 349, 28 Sup» Ct. 529, 52 L* Ed. 828, l4 Ann. Cas. 560 (1908), aff'g McCarter v. Hudson County Water Co., 70 N.J.Sq. 695, 65 Atl. Ij.89, li+ L*R«A.. (N.SO 197, 113 Am. St. Rep* 75I4. (1906), aff'g 70 IW.Eq. 525, 6l Atl. 71O (19O5)« The stream was the Passaic River, flowing from Mew Jersey into New York Bay and non-navigable at the point of diversion. The Court said: "The problems of irrigation have no place here. Leaving them on one side, it appears to us that few public interests are more obvious indisputable and independent of particular theory than the interest of the public of a State to maintain the rivers that are wholly within it substantially undi- minished, except by such drafts' upon them as the guardian of the public welfare may permit for the purpose of turning them to a more perfect use* This public interest is omnipresent wherever there is a State, and grows more pressing a§ population grows. It is fundamental, and we are of the opinion, that the private property of riparian proprietors cannot be supposed to have deeper roots. . • "Vie are of opinion, further, that the constitutional power of the State to insist that its natural advantages shall remain unimpaired by its citizens is not dependent upon any nice estimate of the extent of present use or speculation as to future needs. The legal conception of the necessary is apt to be confined to somewhat rudimentary wants, and there are benefits from a great river that might escape a lawyer's view. But the State is not required to submit even to an aesthetic analysis. Any analysis may be inadequate. It finds itself in possession of what all admit to be a great public good, and what it has it may keep and give no one a reason for its will*" Hudson County Water Co. v. McCarter, AttTy Gen. of New Jersey, 209 U.S. 3^9* 356-357* 28 Sup. Ct. 529, 531, 52 L. Ed. 826, 832, 1I4. Ann. Cas. 56O, 56I (1908). (Italics added.) |