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Show CANADIAN BOUNDARY WATERS TREATY 389 lished a similar standing for a State, as the interests of the nation are more important than those of any State [citing cases]." For other litigation connected with the problems that gave rise to this suit, see pp. 639ff and 703ff post. In Niagara Falls Power Co. v. Federal Power Commission, 137 Fed. (2d) 787 (C. C. A. 2d, 1943), cert. den. 320 U.S.792 (1943), a case having to do with the capital accounting of the Niagara Falls Power Company, the Court said (p. 790): "On May 13,1910, when the Niagara River Treaty was proclaimed, none of the petitioner's three constituent companies had any inde- feasible right to divert water from the river. * * * When Congress passed the Federal Water Power Act in 1920 * * *, the petitioner's slate was wiped clean; it stood at discretion, so far as concerned any existing federal rights of diversion. Congress had absolute power to stop it from taking any water whatever, or to impose any terms it chose. For support of this we need look no further than Article V of the treaty itself which provided that 'no diversion of the waters of the Niagara River above the Falls from the natural course and stream thereof shall be permitted except for the purpose and to the extent hereinafter provided.' The United States was then allotted the privi- lege of diverting within the State of New York from above the Falls 'not exceeding in the aggregate a daily diversion at the rate of twenty thousand cubic feet of water per second.' When Congress set up the Commission with power to issue licenses for the 'utilization of power * * * from * * * any of the navigable waters of the United States' * * * the Commission was vested with the distribution of this allot- ment, and any rights acquired from the State of New York necessarily yielded to what it might do." In Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. v. Federal Poiver Commission, 202 Fed. (2d) 190 (C. A. D. C, 1952), affirmed 347 U.S. 239 (1954), a case having to do with the amortization reserve accounting of the Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation, the Court, after quoting Article V of the treaty, said (p. 204) : "We observe that, in restricting the temporary withdrawal of waters from the Niagara, the only purpose of the High Contracting Parties was to prevent the level of Lake Erie and the flow of the river from being appreciably affected by diversion for power purposes. It was therefore not the intention of the two governments to take away the water rights then existent under state law and then being actually utilized, but simply to keep those rights within the prescribed maxi- mum of 20,000 c.f.s. And in order to be sure that the Treaty should not be construed as having destroyed existing rights, the Parties wrote into it their desire '* * * to accomplish this object with the least possible injury to investments which have already been made in the construction of power plants on the United States side of the river under grants of authority from the State of New York * * *.' " The Court, after quoting a portion of the language of the opinion in Niagara Falls Power Co. v. Federal Power Commission set out above, further said (p. 206): "The language quoted above from the Second Circuit's opinion, which does not seem to have been necessary to decision, apparently as- sumes that the Treaty had the effect of destroying all diversionary |