The material resources of the Territory are vast and varied. Its agricultural area is extensive and fertile, and parts of it are well timbered and watered. Within its ample borders abound mines of the useful and precious metals, as well as of coal and other minerals. It has more forests than Nebraska. It is true that irrigation is in some degree essential to successful agriculture, but Utah is not by any means the barren region it has often been represented to be. Most people think of it as a desert--a dry land, where no great multitude of human beings can ever find a prosperous home. But it has well been called _the American Syria_. Only let the soil have due irrigation, and it needs only to be tickled with the hoe, as the proverb says, in order to laugh into harvests. You may say the sage-bush, which is seen there in large quantities, is a mark of desolation; but irrigate the pastures covered with it, and you have bountiful harvests. As in Syria, when you irrigate the Jericho Plain you have most vigorous growths, and as on the plain of Gennesaret there were originally growths similar to the vegetation on the borders of the Nile, so to-day irrigation gives extraordinary fruitfulness to the cultivated lands of Utah. It is true that the Mormon settlements extend to the full limits of the Territory in every direction, following the natural sweep of the valleys at the base of the mountains from north to south. It was Brigham Young's policy to occupy the best land as quickly as possible, but only about 500,000 acres have yet been occupied; and estimating that there are 2,000,000 acres, or the one twenty-seventh part of the territory, susceptible of cultivation (and this is a small estimate), there yet remain 1,500,000 acres unappropriated for future settlement. And so, notwithstanding the pre-emption of a large portion of the best arable lands of the Territory by the Mormons, there is yet a large and fertile acreage open for settlement. To ensure the occupancy of these wide and inviting fields by thrifty, sturdy settlers opposed to the disloyal and unlawful tenets of Mormonism, the laws relating to land-grants might be so amended as to prevent sales to those who are not prepared to prove their intention to become without reserve supporters of law and order.