There had been, of course, strong objection on the part of the army of landholders and monopolists who were to be thrown out of their "easy money" livelihoods. Of this the excellent "leader" in the New York _Times_ of July 15th deals as follows: It would be alike idle and unjust to blame the people of Niagara Falls for this state of mind. They have done what the members of any other community would have done in making the most of their neighbourhood as a wonder of nature. Even the obstinate . . . who declines to be bought out, and insists upon his right to make merchandise out of the river, is entitled to respect for the tenacity with which he proposes to resist the acquisition of his property by the State upon the ground that the law authorising the acquisition is unconstitutional. He would very possibly be willing to acknowledge the right of eminent domain if it were proposed to take his land for a railroad, but the idea that it shall be taken in order that a river . . . shall be kept for dudes to look at undoubtedly strikes him as unmixed foolishness. However excusable this state of mind may have been, nobody who does not own a point of view or at least a hack at Niagara will dispute that its consequences have been deplorable. Though Niagara has continued to be a frequential resort it has by no means been as popular as it would have become with the increasing facilities of travel and the increasing advantages taken of them, if the fame of the gross and petty extortions had not been almost as widely spread as the fame of Niagara itself. While the local monopolies have deterred people from visiting the Falls, they have nevertheless been so lucrative that the most important of them is reported upon the authority of one of its managers to have returned a net annual profit, of thirty thousand dollars, and the report is not incredible, prodigious as the figure seems as a profit upon the mere command of a point of view. This hedging about and looking up of a boon of nature was perhaps the most objectionable incident of the private shore of Niagara. To a tourist who goes to Niagara from any other motive than that of saying that he had been there the importunity to which he had been subjected at every turn was absolutely destructive of the object of his visit. The prosaic and incongruous surroundings of the cataract completed the disillusion which importunity and extortion were calculated to produce. Many tourists would have been glad to pay down, once for all, as much as their persecutors could have reasonably hoped to extract from them for the privilege of being allowed to look without molestation upon the work of nature undisfigured by the handiwork of man. "For many years this has been impossible, and for several years it has been evident that