OCR Text |
Show THAT STRIP. Congress is liable at the present session to make a state of Arizona and New Mexico combined. com-bined. It would make a healthy state, so far as area is concerned. It would almost equal Texas, and would be equal to the six New England states, the four middle states, Maryland and Virginia, and have enough left to make a state larger than Massachusetts. It would, possibly, be the best thing to do, but the enabling act should be most explicit in its requirements. And before issuing the enabling act the strip north of the Colorado river, which now belongs to Arizona, should, on such terms as would be just, be ceded to Utah. The children of Israel were forty years wandering in the wilderness before the Holy Land was reached. Indeed, the last one of the original emigrants from Egypt died on the way and all that was granted to Moses was a glimpse of it from Pisgah. Every officer of Arizona who ever tried to serve papers on the strip must have said to himself before the business was over: "Moses and his company wandered forty years in searching search-ing for something they could have reached on a straight line in sixty days, but there is no straight line in this business for anything but a bird." The strip is valueless to Arizona; it is worth something to Utah, and ought, for the sake of order, to be under some jurisdiction through which a process could be served if necessary in a reasonable time and at reasonable expense. The . government should cede it to Utah and then make a reserve of it. |