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public uses such as city water-supplies, unless it can be shown that the need is extreme, and can be met from no other source.
This is not at all the case in regard to a water supply for San Francisco. There are plenty of other available supplies. The
city wants to use the Hetch Hetchy Valley merely because it will probably cost less to get a water supply from that source
than from any of the nearer sources, and it can also make the Valley the source of saleable mechanical power. Thirdly, far
the west profitable use of the water which might be stored in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the interests of the whole state and
of the country being considered, would be its use for irrigation purposes on the farming lands which lie within easy reach
of the Valley. If any large amount of water is to be stored in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in the immediate or the remote future,
it should be for the irrigation use, and not for the urban and suburban uses of far-away San Francisco. The time may come
when the Hetch Hetchy Valley ought to be converted into a lake- to its great injury as a health and pleasure resort- but it
should be for the purpose of increasing this food supply raised on a large area of the state's arable but too dry lands. If
that time should come, it would be a heavy public loss if San Francisco had already secured its water supply from the Hetch
Hetchy Valley, and so made it impossible to convert hundreds of square miles of arid lands not far from the Valley into highly
productive agricultural areas. I venture to hope that you will become in the Senate a vigorous defender of all the national
parks we have and an advocate of new national parks in New England. Why should not the hilly, wooded parts of Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut supply some national parks? The 05605