Let us consider irrigation a moment historically. Certainly half of the world's population depend on it to-day. Modern Egypt has the most extensive system ever known, except the one recently unearthed in India, so massive in construction and vast in stretch that one writer has declared it would take the entire wealth of the British Empire to put it again in order. The Egyptian system cost $200,000,000, and two, sometimes three crops, are raised for one of former times. No division of the United States has a better credit in commercial circles than Utah, and this is not due to the peculiar institution of polygamy, but to the perfect system of irrigation. The careful husbanding of the waters that come down the Wahsatch Range on mountains, has transmuted a dreary desert of sand and sage brush into what most travellers regard as a garden, and what possibly to the faithful appears symbolically a Paradise. Senator Stewart, of the United States Irrigation Committee, stated that he had inspected nearly every irrigated region of the world, and knew of no place supplied by so vast a reservoir of water, with either the volume or the pressure of the artesian belt of Dakota. Much of the land in the Jim River Valley is comparatively level and susceptible of sub soil irrigation. It would take from two to three years to put the land in prime condition and to make each acre that is now valued at from three to ten dollars, worth fifty, at least, and probably seventy-five. Now, $5,000,000 would more than cover the cost of the suggested irrigation in the Northwest--a mere trifle, if the certainty of crops is thereby guaranteed. Nor is the certainty of crops the only object to be considered. According to dealers in Sioux City, Iowa, the quality of cattle, shipped from some places in Clay and Yankton Counties since the introduction of irrigation, has increased twenty-five per cent., which appears not improbable when we note the difference between the warm, sweet flow of artesian water and the icy, brackish stuff of a prairie slough.