In this instance, public protest shaped up a fight against the line, in which the Interior Department has become involved because of the Federally owned battlefield and the nearby C. & O. Canal. But often elsewhere, the great skeletal towers linked by thick transmission cables march where they please, indifferent to local objections. What is certain is that modern America needs the electricity transported thus, and the gases and liquids that run through great pipelines. Hope for the long run is offered by research that may open the possibility of putting high-voltage transmission lines underground, but in the meantime what is needed is an awareness on the part of utilities planners that scenic and historic values have to be given full weight in their computations. The kind of agriculture that has so much to do with the Basin's scenic appeal is not entirely healthy these days. We have mentioned the difficulty created near Washington--and around other Basin centers of population and in many places where vacation colonies are burgeoning--by skyrocketing speculation and a general absence of strongly based and well-defended plans of preservation. As the development value of land rises in such places, local systems of taxation based on that value rather than on actual use may drive farmers out of business whether they want to stay in or not. Since 1945 in Fairfax County, Virginia, for instance, the number of commercial farms has dropped from 1788 to about 200, and it is still going down. Even where the tax trouble has been recognized, as in Maryland, and taxation adjusted to reality for people who want to go on farming, few tillers of the soil are devoted enough to their acres to hold onto them in the face of the kind of cash that is often dangled before their eyes, for the flat and fertile tracts that make the best farms are also the easiest to subdivide and build on in standard fashion. For that matter, the usual form of tax relief on agricultural land can be used as a tax loophole by speculators. Thus, whenever tract values rise and development impends, good productive land, which the country may well miss later as populations grow and food supplies for them thin out, goes permanently under pavements and construction. Even though it is just in such places that protected, scenic, connotative rural landscapes might have the most meaning for the most people in the long run, their preservation presents some tough questions. Patterns of growth that would spare them could easily be worked out and would fit in well with watershed protection and open space needs, but the economics of compensating farm owners for the loss of the big money they might have received for them is another thing.