We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming the desert for a garden, with an effort of hands and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short of the original creative work which made the world--as if the divine fiat had been: “In our image, to have dominion; to subdue the earth; and to finish the work we leave undone.” And while we are finishing these acres and planting them with fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we continue stupidly and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead these eleven thousand acres of natural clam garden on the Massachusetts coast? If a vast irrigating work is the divine in man, by the same token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted and shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned plough-lands, and these lifeless flats of the shore the devils in him--here where no reclaiming is necessary, where the rain cometh down from heaven, and twice a day the tides flow in from the hills of the sea! There are none of us here along the Atlantic coast who do not think with joy of that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made yonder in the distant West. It means more, and cheaper, and still fairer fruit for us of the East; more musk-melons, too, we hope; but we know that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam, also, is good. Man cannot live on irrigated fruit alone. He craves clams--clams as juicy as a Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor of wind-blown spray. And he shall have them, for the clam farm--the restocked, restored flat of earlier times--has passed the stage of theory and experiment, being now in operation on the New England shore, a producing and very paying property. The clam farm is not strictly a new venture, however, but up to the present it has been a failure, because, in the first place, the times were not ripe for it; the public mind lacked the necessary education. Even yet the state, and the local town authorities, give the clam-farmer no protection. He can obtain the state’s written grant to plant the land to clams, but he can get no legal protection against his neighbor’s digging the clams he plants. And the farm has failed, because, in the second place, the clam-farmer has lacked the necessary energy and imagination. A man who for years has made his bread and butter and rubber boots out of land belonging to everybody and to nobody, by simply digging in it, is the last man to build a fence about a piece of land and _work_ it. Digging is only half as hard as “working”; besides, in promiscuous digging one is getting clams that one’s neighbor might have got, and there is something better than mere clams in that.