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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11238 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION
+
+By
+
+GIFFORD PINCHOT
+
+
+
+1910
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+Introduction
+
+     I. Prosperity
+    II. Home-building for the Nation
+   III. Better Times on the Farm
+    IV. Principles of Conservation
+     V. Waterways
+    VI. Business
+   VII. The Moral Issue
+  VIII. Public Spirit
+    IX. The Children
+     X. An Equal Chance
+    XI. The New Patriotism
+   XII. The Present Battle
+  Index
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The following discussion of the conservation problem is not a systematic
+treatise upon the subject. Some of the matter has been published
+previously in magazines, and some is condensed and rearranged from
+addresses made before conservation conventions and other organizations
+within the past two years.
+
+While not arranged chronologically, yet the articles here grouped may
+serve to show the rapid, virile evolution of the campaign for
+conservation of the nation's resources.
+
+I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of _The World's Work, The
+Outlook_, and of _American Industries_ for the use of matter first
+contributed to these magazines.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+PROSPERITY
+
+The most prosperous nation of to-day is the United States. Our
+unexampled wealth and well-being are directly due to the superb natural
+resources of our country, and to the use which has been made of them by
+our citizens, both in the present and in the past. We are prosperous
+because our forefathers bequeathed to us a land of marvellous resources
+still unexhausted. Shall we conserve those resources, and in our turn
+transmit them, still unexhausted, to our descendants? Unless we do,
+those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery,
+degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.
+When the natural resources of any nation become exhausted, disaster and
+decay in every department of national life follow as a matter of course.
+Therefore the conservation of natural resources is the basis, and the
+only permanent basis, of national success. There are other conditions,
+but this one lies at the foundation.
+
+Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the American people is their
+superb practical optimism; that marvellous hopefulness which keeps the
+individual efficiently at work. This hopefulness of the American is,
+however, as short-sighted as it is intense. As a rule, it does not look
+ahead beyond the next decade or score of years, and fails wholly to
+reckon with the real future of the Nation. I do not think I have often
+heard a forecast of the growth of our population that extended beyond a
+total of two hundred millions, and that only as a distant and shadowy
+goal. The point of view which this fact illustrates is neither true nor
+far-sighted. We shall reach a population of two hundred millions in the
+very near future, as time is counted in the lives of nations, and there
+is nothing more certain than that this country of ours will some day
+support double or triple or five times that number of prosperous people
+if only we can bring ourselves so to handle our natural resources in the
+present as not to lay an embargo on the prosperous growth of the future.
+
+We, the American people, have come into the possession of nearly four
+million square miles of the richest portion of the earth. It is ours to
+use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy. The
+fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall we do with it?
+
+That question cannot be answered without first considering the condition
+of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day. As a
+people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources
+to be inexhaustible. To no other resource more frequently than coal has
+this stupidly false adjective been applied. Yet our coal supplies are so
+far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption
+shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to
+prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and
+of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. From the point of view
+of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important
+factors in our civilization within the immediate future. Not a few coal
+fields have already been exhausted, as in portions of Iowa and Missouri.
+Yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue to treat our coal as
+though there could never be an end of it. The established coal-mining
+practice at the present date does not take out more than one-half the
+coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower grade material to be made
+permanently inaccessible by the caving in of the abandoned workings.
+The loss to the Nation from this form of waste is prodigious and
+inexcusable.
+
+The waste in use is not less appalling. But five per cent, of the
+potential power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used.
+For example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred
+and fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the United
+States is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended
+unproductively or is lost. In the best incandescent electric lighting
+plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal
+is converted into light.
+
+Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the
+Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas
+continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the
+streams. Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were
+systematically burned in order to get rid of it.
+
+The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the
+face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can
+never be replaced. If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it
+might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the
+Nation's future.
+
+Many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more,
+as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the
+mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost
+or not at all. Similar waste in the case of other minerals is less
+serious only because they are less indispensable to our civilization
+than coal and iron. Mention should be made of the annual loss of
+millions of dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other
+furnaces now thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but
+to the serious injury of the community. In other countries these
+by-products are saved and used.
+
+We are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal hills
+as though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time and
+certain to furnish perpetual support for prosperous human life. This
+conclusion is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other
+natural resources. The waste of soil is among the most dangerous of all
+wastes now in progress in the United States. In 1896, Professor Shaler,
+than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this subject,
+estimated that in the upland regions of the states south of Pennsylvania
+three thousand square miles of soil had been destroyed as the result of
+forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate
+of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year. No seeing man can
+travel through the United States without being struck with the enormous
+and unnecessary loss of fertility by easily preventable soil wash. The
+soil so lost, as in the case of many other wastes, becomes itself a
+source of damage and expense, and must be removed from the channels of
+our navigable streams at an enormous annual cost. The Mississippi River
+alone is estimated to transport yearly four hundred million tons of
+sediment, or about twice the amount of material to be excavated from the
+Panama Canal. This material is the most fertile portion of our richest
+fields, transformed from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion.
+
+The destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the
+opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value of
+the public lands by one-half. This enormous loss of forage, serious
+though it be in itself, is not the only result of wrong methods of
+pasturage. The destruction of forage plants is accompanied by loss of
+surface soil through erosion; by forest destruction; by corresponding
+deterioration in the water supply; and by a serious decrease in the
+quality and weight of animals grown on overgrazed lands. These sources
+of loss from failure to conserve the range are felt to-day. They are
+accompanied by the certainty of a future loss not less important, for
+range lands once badly overgrazed can be restored to their former value
+but slowly or not at all. The obvious and certain remedy is for the
+Government to hold and control the public range until it can pass into
+the hands of settlers who will make their homes upon it. As methods of
+agriculture improve and new dry-land crops are introduced, vast areas
+once considered unavailable for cultivation are being made into
+prosperous homes; and this-movement has only begun.
+
+The single object of the public land system of the United States, as
+President Roosevelt repeatedly declared, is the making and maintenance
+of prosperous homes. That object cannot be achieved unless such of the
+public lands as are suitable for settlement are conserved for the actual
+home-maker. Such lands should pass from the possession of the Government
+directly and only into the hands of the settler who lives on the land.
+Of all forms of conservation there is none more important than that of
+holding the public lands for the actual home-maker.
+
+It is a notorious fact that the public land laws have been deflected
+from their beneficent original purpose of home-making by lax
+administration, short-sighted departmental decisions, and the growth of
+an unhealthy public sentiment in portions of the West. Great areas of
+the public domain have passed into the hands, not of the home-maker, but
+of large individual or corporate owners whose object is always the
+making of profit and seldom the making of homes. It is sometimes urged
+that enlightened self-interest will lead the men who have acquired large
+holdings of public lands to put them to their most productive use, and
+it is said with truth that this best use is the tillage of small areas
+by small owners. Unfortunately, the facts and this theory disagree. Even
+the most cursory examination of large holdings throughout the West will
+refute the contention that the intelligent self-interest of large owners
+results promptly and directly in the making of homes. Few passions of
+the human mind are stronger than land hunger, and the large holder
+clings to his land until circumstances make it actually impossible for
+him to hold it any longer. Large holdings result in sheep or cattle
+ranges, in huge ranches, in great areas held for speculative rise in
+price, and not in homes. Unless the American homestead system of small
+free-holders is to be so replaced by a foreign system of tenantry, there
+are few things of more importance to the West than to see to it that the
+public lands pass directly into the hands of the actual settler instead
+of into the hands of the man who, if he can, will force the settler to
+pay him the unearned profit of the land speculator, or will hold him in
+economic and political dependence as a tenant. If we are to have homes
+on the public lands, they must be conserved for the men who make homes.
+
+The lowest estimate reached by the Forest Service of the timber now
+standing in the United States is 1,400 billion feet, board measure; the
+highest, 2,500 billion. The present annual consumption is approximately
+100 billion feet, while the annual growth is but a third of the
+consumption, or from 30 to 40 billion feet. If we accept the larger
+estimate of the standing timber, 2,500 billion feet, and the larger
+estimate of the annual growth, 40 billion feet, and apply the present
+rate of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our
+supplies of timber of little more than a single generation.
+
+Estimates of this kind are almost inevitably misleading. For example,
+it is certain that the rate of consumption of timber will increase
+enormously in the future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies
+remain to draw upon. Exact knowledge of many other factors is needed
+before closely accurate results can be obtained. The figures cited are,
+however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the United States
+has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its
+blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. The rise
+in the price of lumber which marked the opening of the present century
+is the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to
+come. We must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber
+long before our supplies are completely exhausted.
+
+It is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we can
+draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per capita
+so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the suffering
+which will result from the progressive failure of our timber has been
+but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal.
+
+What will happen when the forests fail? In the first place, the business
+of lumbering will disappear. It is now the fourth greatest industry in
+the United States. All forms of building industries will suffer with it,
+and the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay the added
+cost. Mining will become vastly more expensive; and with the rise in the
+cost of mining there must follow a corresponding rise in the price of
+coal, iron, and other minerals. The railways, which have as yet failed
+entirely to develop a satisfactory substitute for the wooden tie (and
+must, in the opinion of their best engineers, continue to fail), will be
+profoundly affected, and the cost of transportation will suffer a
+corresponding increase. Water power for lighting, manufacturing, and
+transportation, and the movement of freight and passengers by inland
+waterways, will be affected still more directly than the steam railways.
+The cultivation of the soil, with or without irrigation, will be
+hampered by the increased cost of agricultural tools, fencing, and the
+wood needed for other purposes about the farm. Irrigated agriculture
+will suffer most of all, for the destruction of the forests means the
+loss of the waters as surely as night follows day. With the rise in the
+cost of producing food, the cost of food itself will rise. Commerce in
+general will necessarily be affected by the difficulties of the primary
+industries upon which it depends. In a word, when the forests fail, the
+daily life of the average citizen will inevitably feel the pinch on
+every side. And the forests have already begun to fail, as the direct
+result of the suicidal policy of forest destruction which the people of
+the United States have allowed themselves to pursue.
+
+It is true that about twenty per cent, of the less valuable timber land
+in the United States remains in the possession of the people in the
+National Forests, and that it is being cared for and conserved to supply
+the needs of the present and to mitigate the suffering of the near
+future. But it needs no argument to prove that this comparatively small
+area will be insufficient to meet the demand which is now exhausting an
+area four times as great, or to prevent the suffering I have described.
+Measures of greater vigor are imperatively required.
+
+The conception that water is, on the whole, the most important natural
+resource has gained firm hold in the irrigated West, and is making rapid
+progress in the humid East. Water, not land, is the primary value in the
+Western country, and its conservation and use to irrigate land is the
+first condition of prosperity. The use of our streams for irrigation and
+for domestic and manufacturing uses is comparatively well developed.
+Their use for power is less developed, while their use for
+transportation has only begun. The conservation of the inland waterways
+of the United States for these great purposes constitutes, perhaps, the
+largest single task which now confronts the Nation. The maintenance and
+increase of agriculture, the supply of clear water for domestic and
+manufacturing uses, the development of electrical power, transportation,
+and lighting, and the creation of a system of inland transportation by
+water whereby to regulate freight-rates by rail and to move the bulkier
+commodities cheaply from place to place, is a task upon the successful
+accomplishment of which the future of the Nation depends in a peculiar
+degree. We are accustomed, and rightly accustomed, to take pride in the
+vigorous and healthful growth of the United States, and in its vast
+promise for the future. Yet we are making no preparation to realize what
+we so easily foresee and glibly predict. The vast possibilities of our
+great future will become realities only if we make ourselves, in a
+sense, responsible for that future. The planned and orderly development
+and conservation of our natural resources is the first duty of the
+United States. It is the only form of insurance that will certainly
+protect us against the disasters that lack of foresight has in the past
+repeatedly brought down on nations since passed away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+HOME-BUILDING FOR THE NATION
+
+The most valuable citizen of this or any other country is the man who
+owns the land from which he makes his living. No other man has such a
+stake in the country. No other man lends such steadiness and stability
+to our national life. Therefore no other question concerns us more
+intimately than the question of homes. Permanent homes for ourselves,
+our children, and our Nation--this is a central problem. The policy of
+national irrigation is of value to the United States in very many ways,
+but the greatest of all is this, that national irrigation multiplies the
+men who own the land from which they make their living. The old saying,
+"Who ever heard of a man shouldering his gun to fight for his boarding
+house?" reflects this great truth, that no man is so ready to defend his
+country, not only with arms, but with his vote and his contribution to
+public opinion, as the man with a permanent stake in it, as the man who
+owns the land from which he makes his living.
+
+Our country began as a nation of farmers. During the periods that gave
+it its character, when our independence was won and when our Union was
+preserved, we were preeminently a nation of farmers. We can not, and we
+ought not, to continue exclusively, or even chiefly, an agricultural
+country, because one man can raise food enough for many. But the farmer
+who owns his land is still the backbone of this Nation; and one of the
+things we want most is more of him. The man on the farm is valuable to
+the Nation, like any other citizen, just in proportion to his
+intelligence, character, ability, and patriotism; but, unlike other
+citizens, also in proportion to his attachment to the soil. That is the
+principal spring of his steadiness, his sanity, his simplicity and
+directness, and many of his other desirable qualities. He is the first
+of home-makers.
+
+The nation that will lead the world will be a Nation of Homes. The
+object of the great Conservation movement is just this, to make our
+country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves and for our
+children, and for our children's children, and it is a task that is
+worth the best thought and effort of any and all of us.
+
+To achieve this or any other great result, straight thinking and strong
+action are necessary, and the straight thinking comes first. To make
+this country what we need to have it, we must think clearly and directly
+about our problems, and above all we must understand what the real
+problems are. The great things are few and simple, but they are too
+often hidden by false issues, and conventional, unreal thinking. The
+easiest way to hide a real issue always has been, and always will be, to
+replace it with a false one.
+
+The first thing we need in this country, as President Roosevelt so well
+set forth in a great message which told what he had been trying to do
+for the American people, is equality of opportunity for every citizen.
+No man should have less, and no man ought to ask for any more. Equality
+of opportunity is the real object of our laws and institutions. Our
+institutions and our laws are not valuable in themselves. They are
+valuable only because they secure equality of opportunity for happiness
+and welfare to our citizens. An institution or a law is a means, not an
+end, a means to be used for the public good, to be modified for the
+public good, and to be interpreted for the public good. One of the great
+reasons why President Roosevelt's administration was of such enormous
+value to the plain American was that he understood what St. Paul meant
+when he said: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." To
+follow blindly the letter of the law, or the form of an institution,
+without intelligent regard both for its spirit and for the public
+welfare, is very nearly as dangerous as to disregard the law altogether.
+What we need is the use of the law for the public good, and the
+construction of it for the public welfare.
+
+It goes without saying that the law is supreme and must be obeyed.
+Civilization rests on obedience to law. But the law is not absolute. It
+requires to be construed. Rigid construction of the law works, and must
+work, in the vast majority of cases, for the benefit of the men who can
+hire the best lawyers and who have the sources of influence in lawmaking
+at their command. Strict construction necessarily favors the great
+interests as against the people, and in the long run can not do
+otherwise. Wise execution of the law must consider what the law ought
+to accomplish for the general good. The great oppressive trusts exist
+because of subservient lawmakers and adroit legal constructions. Here is
+the central stronghold of the money power in the everlasting conflict of
+the few to grab, and the many to keep or win the rights they were born
+with. Legal technicalities seldom help the people. The people, not the
+law, should have the benefit of every doubt.
+
+Equality of opportunity, a square deal for every man, the protection of
+the citizen against the great concentrations of capital, the intelligent
+use of laws and institutions for the public good, and the conservation
+of our natural resources, not for the trusts, but for the people; these
+are real issues and real problems. Upon such things as these the
+perpetuity of this country as a nation of homes really depends. We are
+coming to see that the simple things are the things to work for. More
+than that, we are coming to see that the plain American citizen is the
+man to work for. The imagination is staggered by the magnitude of the
+prize for which we work. If we succeed, there will exist upon this
+continent a sane, strong people, living through the centuries in a land
+subdued and controlled for the service of the people, its rightful
+masters, owned by the many and not by the few. If we fail, the great
+interests, increasing their control of our natural resources, will
+thereby control the country more and more, and the rights of the people
+will fade into the privileges of concentrated wealth.
+
+There could be no better illustration of the eager, rapid, unwearied
+absorption by capital of the rights which belong to all the people than
+the water-power trust, perhaps not yet formed but in process of
+formation. This statement is true, but not unchallenged. We are met at
+every turn by the indignant denial of the water-power interests. They
+tell us that there is no community of interest among them, and yet they
+appear by their paid attorneys, year after year, at irrigation and other
+congresses, asking for help to remove the few remaining obstacles to
+their perpetual and complete absorption of the remaining water-powers.
+They tell us it has no significance that there is hardly a bank in some
+sections of the country that is not an agency for water-power capital,
+or that the General Electric Company interests are acquiring great
+groups of water-powers in various parts of the United States, and
+dominating the power market in the region of each group. And whoever
+dominates power, dominates all industry.
+
+Have you ever seen a few drops of oil scattered on the water spreading
+until they formed a continuous film, which put an end at once to all
+agitation of the surface? The time for us to agitate this question is
+now, before the separate circles of centralized control spread into the
+uniform, unbroken, Nation-wide covering of a single gigantic trust.
+There will be little chance for mere agitation after that. No man at all
+familiar with the situation can doubt that the time for effective
+protest is very short. If we do not use it to protect ourselves now, we
+may be very sure that the trust will give hereafter small consideration
+to the welfare of the average citizen when in conflict with its own.
+
+The man who really counts is the plain American citizen. This is the man
+for whom the Roosevelt policies were created, and his welfare is the end
+to which the Roosevelt policies lead.
+
+I stand for the Roosevelt policies because they set the common good of
+all of us above the private gain of some of us; because they recognize
+the livelihood of the small man as more important to the Nation than the
+profit of the big man; because they oppose all useless waste at present
+at the cost of robbing the future; because they demand the complete,
+sane, and orderly development of all our natural resources; because they
+insist upon equality of opportunity and denounce monopoly and special
+privilege; because, discarding false issues, they deal directly with the
+vital questions that really make a difference with the welfare of us
+all; and, most of all, because in them the plain American always and
+everywhere holds the first place. And I propose to stand for them while
+I have the strength to stand for anything.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+BETTER TIMES ON THE FARM
+
+Ever since I came to have first-hand knowledge of irrigation, I have
+been impressed with the peculiar advantages which surround the
+irrigation rancher. The high productiveness of irrigated land, resulting
+in smaller farm units and denser settlement, as well as the efficiency
+and alertness of the irrigator, have combined to give the irrigated
+regions very high rank among the most progressive farming communities of
+the world. Such rural communities as those of the irrigated West are
+useful examples for the consideration of regions in which life is more
+isolated, has less of the benefits of coöperation, and generally has
+lacked the stimulus found in irrigation farming.
+
+The object of education in general is to produce in the boy or girl,
+and so in the man or woman, three results: first, a sound, useful, and
+usable body; second, a flexible, well-equipped, and well-organized mind;
+alert to gain interest and assistance from contact with nature and
+coöperation with other minds; and third, a wise and true and valiant
+spirit, able to gather to itself the higher things that best make life
+worth while. The use and growth of these three things, body, mind, and
+spirit, must all be found in any effective system of education.
+
+The same three-fold activity is equally necessary in a group of
+individuals. Take for example the merchants of a town, who have
+established a Chamber of Commerce or Board of Trade. They have three
+objects: first, sound and profitable business; second, organized
+coöperation with each other to their mutual advantage, as in settling
+disputes, securing satisfactory rates from railroads, and inducing new
+industries to settle amongst them; and third, to make their town more
+beautiful, more healthful, and generally a better place to live in. Take
+a labor union as another example, and you will find the same three-fold
+purpose. A good union admits only good workmen to membership in its
+sound body; the members get from the Union the advantages of organized
+coöperation in selling their labor to the best advantage; and in
+addition they enjoy certain special advantages often of overwhelming
+importance.
+
+The practical value of organization and coöperation is obvious, and they
+are being utilized very widely in nearly every branch of our national
+life. But what is the case with the farmer? The farmers are the only
+great body of our people who remain in large part substantially
+unorganized. The merchants are organized, the wage-workers are
+organized, the railroads are organized. The men with whom the farmer
+competes are organized to get the best results for themselves in their
+dealings with him. The farmer is engaged, usually without the assistance
+of organization, in competing with these organizations of other groups
+of citizens. Thus the farmer, the man on whose product we all live, too
+often contends almost single-handed against his highly organized
+competitors.
+
+How have the agricultural schools and colleges and the Departments of
+Agriculture of State and Nation met this situation? Largely by the
+assertion, in word or in act, that there is only one thing to be done
+for the farmer. So far as his personal education is concerned, they have
+tried to give him a sound body, a trained mind, and a wise and valiant
+spirit. But so far as his calling is concerned, they have stopped with
+the body. They have said in effect: We will help the farmer to grow
+better crops, but we will take no thought of how he can get the best
+returns for the crops he grows, or of how he can utilize those returns
+so as to make them yield him the best and happiest life.
+
+It is not wise to stop the education of a boy or a girl with the body,
+and to neglect the mind and the spirit. But we have done the equivalent
+of that in dealing with farm life. Along the line of better crops we
+have done more for the farmer, and have done it more effectively, than
+any other Nation. But we have done little, and far less than many other
+Nations, for better business and better living on the farm. Hereafter we
+shall need in State and Nation not only the work of Departments of
+Agriculture such as we have now, but we shall need to have added to
+their functions such duties as will make them departments of rural
+business and rural life as well. Our Departments of Agriculture should
+cover the whole field of the farmer's life. It is not enough to touch
+only one of the three great country problems, even though that is the
+first in time and perhaps in importance.
+
+Of course we all realize that the growing of crops is the great
+foundation on which the well-being not only of the farmer but of the
+whole Nation must depend. First of all we must have food. But after that
+has been achieved, is there nothing more to be done? It seems to me
+clear that farmers have as much to gain from good organization as
+merchants, plumbers, carpenters, or any of the other trades and
+businesses of the United States. After we have secured better crops, the
+next logical and inevitable step is to secure better business
+organization on the farm, so that each farmer shall get from what he
+grows the best possible return.
+
+Consider what has been accomplished in Ireland through agricultural
+coöperation. The Irish have discovered that it is not good for the
+farmer to work alone. Since 1894 they have been organizing agricultural
+societies to give the farmer a chance to sell at the right time and at
+the right price. The result is impressive. In Ireland the coöperative
+creameries produce about half the butter exported. There are 40,000
+farmers in the societies for coöperative selling, which, as we know in
+this country, means better prices. There are about 300 agricultural
+credit societies with a membership of 15,000 and a capital of more than
+$200,000. In a word, in Ireland, which we have been apt to consider as
+far behind us in all that relates to agriculture, there are nearly 1,000
+agricultural societies with a total membership of 100,000 persons. Since
+1894 their total business has been more than $300,000,000.
+
+But, after the farmer has begun to make use of his right to combine for
+his advantage in selling his products and buying his supplies, is there
+nothing else he can do? As well might we say that, after the body and
+the mind of a boy have been trained, he should be deprived of all those
+associations with his fellows which make life worth living, and to which
+every child has an inborn right. Life is something more than a matter
+of business. No man can make his life what it ought to be by living it
+merely on a business basis. There are things higher than business. What
+is the reason for the enormous movement from the farms into the cities?
+Not simply that the business advantages in the city are better, but that
+the city has more conveniences, more excitement, and more facility for
+contact with friends and neighbors: in a word, more life. There ought
+then to be attractiveness in country life such as will make the country
+boy or girl want to live and work in the country, such that the farmer
+will understand that there is no more dignified calling than his own,
+none that makes life better worth living. The social or community life
+of the country should be put by the farmer--for no one but himself can
+do it for him--on the same basis as social life in the city, through the
+country churches and societies, through better roads, country
+telephones, rural free delivery, parcels post, and whatever else will
+help. The problem is not merely to get better crops, not merely to
+dispose of crops better, but in the last analysis to have happier and
+richer lives of men and women on the farm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+PRINCIPLES OF CONSERVATION
+
+The principles which the word Conservation has come to embody are not
+many, and they are exceedingly simple. I have had occasion to say a good
+many times that no other great movement, has ever achieved such progress
+in so short a time, or made itself felt in so many directions with such
+vigor and effectiveness, as the movement for the conservation of natural
+resources.
+
+Forestry made good its position in the United States before the
+conservation movement was born. As a forester I am glad to believe that
+conservation began with forestry, and that the principles which govern
+the Forest Service in particular and forestry in general are also the
+ideas that control conservation.
+
+The first idea of real foresight in connection with natural resources
+arose in connection with the forest. From it sprang the movement which
+gathered impetus until it culminated in the great Convention of
+Governors at Washington in May, 1908. Then came the second official
+meeting of the National Conservation movement, December, 1908, in
+Washington. Afterward came the various gatherings of citizens in
+convention, come together to express their judgment on what ought to be
+done, and to contribute, as only such meetings can, to the formation of
+effective public opinion.
+
+The movement so begun and so prosecuted has gathered immense swing and
+impetus. In 1907 few knew what Conservation meant. Now it has become a
+household word. While at first Conservation was supposed to apply only
+to forests, we see now that its sweep extends even beyond the natural
+resources.
+
+The principles which govern the conservation movement, like all great
+and effective things, are simple and easily understood. Yet it is often
+hard to make the simple, easy, and direct facts about a movement of this
+kind known to the people generally.
+
+The first great fact about conservation is that it stands for
+development. There has been a fundamental misconception that
+conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future
+generations. There could be no more serious mistake. Conservation does
+mean provision for the future, but it means also and first of all the
+recognition of the right of the present generation to the fullest
+necessary use of all the resources with which this country is so
+abundantly blessed. Conservation demands the welfare of this generation
+first, and afterward the welfare of the generations to follow.
+
+The first principle of conservation is development, the use of the
+natural resources now existing on this continent for the benefit of the
+people who live here now. There may be just as much waste in neglecting
+the development and use of certain natural resources as there is in
+their destruction. We have a limited supply of coal, and only a limited
+supply. Whether it is to last for a hundred or a hundred and fifty or a
+thousand years, the coal is limited in amount, unless through geological
+changes which we shall not live to see, there will never be any more of
+it than there is now. But coal is in a sense the vital essence of our
+civilization. If it can be preserved, if the life of the mines can be
+extended, if by preventing waste there can be more coal left in this
+country after we of this generation have made every needed use of this
+source of power, then we shall have deserved well of our descendants.
+
+Conservation stands emphatically for the development and use of
+water-power now, without delay. It stands for the immediate construction
+of navigable waterways under a broad and comprehensive plan as
+assistants to the railroads. More coal and more iron are required to
+move a ton of freight by rail than by water, three to one. In every case
+and in every direction the conservation movement has development for its
+first principle, and at the very beginning of its work. The development
+of our natural resources and the fullest use of them for the present
+generation is the first duty of this generation. So much for
+development.
+
+In the second place conservation stands for the prevention of waste.
+There has come gradually in this country an understanding that waste is
+not a good thing and that the attack on waste is an industrial
+necessity. I recall very well indeed how, in the early days of forest
+fires, they were considered simply and solely as acts of God, against
+which any opposition was hopeless and any attempt to control them not
+merely hopeless but childish. It was assumed that they came in the
+natural order of things, as inevitably as the seasons or the rising and
+setting of the sun. To-day we understand that forest fires are wholly
+within the control of men. So we are coming in like manner to understand
+that the prevention of waste in all other directions is a simple matter
+of good business. The first duty of the human race is to control the
+earth it lives upon.
+
+We are in a position more and more completely to say how far the waste
+and destruction of natural resources are to be allowed to go on and
+where they are to stop. It is curious that the effort to stop waste,
+like the effort to stop forest fires, has often been considered as a
+matter controlled wholly by economic law. I think there could be no
+greater mistake. Forest fires were allowed to burn long after the people
+had means to stop them. The idea that men were helpless in the face of
+them held long after the time had passed when the means of control were
+fully within our reach. It was the old story that "as a man thinketh, so
+is he"; we came to see that we could stop forest fires, and we found
+that the means had long been at hand. When at length we came to see that
+the control of logging in certain directions was profitable, we found it
+had long been possible. In all these matters of waste of natural
+resources, the education of the people to understand that they can stop
+the leakage comes before the actual stopping and after the means of
+stopping it have long been ready at our hands.
+
+In addition to the principles of development and preservation of our
+resources there is a third principle. It is this: The natural resources
+must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many, and not
+merely for the profit of a few. We are coming to understand in this
+country that public action for public benefit has a very much wider
+field to cover and a much larger part to play than was the case when
+there were resources enough for every one, and before certain
+constitutional provisions had given so tremendously strong a position to
+vested rights and property in general.
+
+A few years ago President Hadley, of Yale, wrote an article which has
+not attracted the attention it should. The point of it was that by
+reason of the XIVth amendment to the Constitution, property rights in
+the United States occupy a stronger position than in any other country
+in the civilized world. It becomes then a matter of multiplied
+importance, since property rights once granted are so strongly
+entrenched, to see that they shall be so granted that the people shall
+get their fair share of the benefit which comes from the development of
+the resources which belong to us all. The time to do that is now. By so
+doing we shall avoid the difficulties and conflicts which will surely
+arise if we allow vested rights to accrue outside the possibility of
+governmental and popular control.
+
+The conservation idea covers a wider range than the field of natural
+resources alone. Conservation means the greatest good to the greatest
+number for the longest time. One of its great contributions is just
+this, that it has added to the worn and well-known phrase, "the greatest
+good to the greatest number," the additional words "for the longest
+time," thus recognizing that this nation of ours must be made to endure
+as the best possible home for all its people.
+
+Conservation advocates the use of foresight, prudence, thrift, and
+intelligence in dealing with public matters, for the same reasons and in
+the same way that we each use foresight, prudence, thrift, and
+intelligence in dealing with our own private affairs. It proclaims the
+right and duty of the people to act for the benefit of the people.
+Conservation demands the application of common-sense to the common
+problems for the common good.
+
+The principles of conservation thus described--development,
+preservation, the common good--have a general application which is
+growing rapidly wider. The development of resources and the prevention
+of waste and loss, the protection of the public interests, by foresight,
+prudence, and the ordinary business and home-making virtues, all these
+apply to other things as well as to the natural resources. There is, in
+fact, no interest of the people to which the principles of conservation
+do not apply.
+
+The conservation point of view is valuable in the education of our
+people as well as in forestry; it applies to the body politic as well as
+to the earth and its minerals. A municipal franchise is as properly
+within its sphere as a franchise for water-power. The same point of view
+governs in both. It applies as much to the subject of good roads as to
+waterways, and the training of our people in citizenship is as germane
+to it as the productiveness of the earth. The application of
+common-sense to any problem for the Nation's good will lead directly to
+national efficiency wherever applied. In other words, and that is the
+burden of the message, we are coming to see the logical and inevitable
+outcome that these principles, which arose in forestry and have their
+bloom in the conservation of natural resources, will have their fruit in
+the increase and promotion of national efficiency along other lines of
+national life.
+
+The outgrowth of conservation, the inevitable result, is national
+efficiency. In the great commercial struggle between nations which is
+eventually to determine the welfare of all, national efficiency will be
+the deciding factor. So from every point of view conservation is a good
+thing for the American people.
+
+The National Forest Service, one of the chief agencies of the
+conservation movement, is trying to be useful to the people of this
+nation. The Service recognizes, and recognizes it more and more strongly
+all the time, that whatever it has done or is doing has just one object,
+and that object is the welfare of the plain American citizen. Unless the
+Forest Service has served the people, and is able to contribute to their
+welfare it has failed in its work and should be abolished. But just so
+far as by coöperation, by intelligence, by attention to the work laid
+upon it, it contributes to the welfare of our citizens, it is a good
+thing and should be allowed to go on with its work.
+
+The Natural Forests are in the West. Headquarters of the Service have
+been established throughout the Western country, because its work cannot
+be done effectively and properly without the closest contact and the
+most hearty coöperation with the Western people. It is the duty of the
+Forest Service to see to it that the timber, water-powers, mines, and
+every other resource of the forests is used for the benefit of the
+people who live in the neighborhood or who may have a share in the
+welfare of each locality. It is equally its duty to coöperate with all
+our people in every section of our land to conserve a fundamental
+resource, without which this Nation cannot prosper.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+WATERWAYS
+
+The connection between forests and rivers is like that between father
+and son. No forests, no rivers. So a forester may not be wholly beyond
+his depth when he talks about streams. The conquest of our rivers is one
+of the largest commercial questions now before us.
+
+The commercial consequences of river development are incalculable. Its
+results cannot be measured by the yard-stick of present commercial
+needs. River improvement means better conditions of transportation than
+we have now, but it means development too. We cannot see this problem
+clearly and see it whole in the light of the past alone.
+
+The actual problems of river development are not less worthy of our
+best attention than their commercial results. Every river is a unit from
+its source to its mouth. If it is to be given its highest usefulness to
+all the people, and serve them for all the uses they can make of it, it
+must be developed with that idea clearly in mind. To develop a river for
+navigation alone, or power alone, or irrigation alone, is often like
+using a sheep for mutton, or a steer for beef, and throwing away the
+leather and the wool. A river is a unit, but its uses are many, and with
+our present knowledge there can be no excuse for sacrificing one use to
+another if both can be subserved.
+
+A progressive plan for the development of our waterways is essential.
+Pending the completion of that plan, which should neither be weakened by
+excessive haste nor drowned in excessive deliberation, work should
+proceed at once on some of the greater projects which we know already
+will be essential under any plan that may be devised. First and
+foremost of these by unanimous consent is the improvement of the
+Mississippi River. A comprehensive and progressive plan of the kind we
+need can be made in one way only, and that is by a commission of the
+best men in the United States appointed directly by the President of the
+United States.
+
+Such a plan must consider every use to which our rivers can be put, and
+every means available for their control. It must deal with such great
+questions as the relation of the States and the Nation in the
+construction and control of the work, and with terminals and the
+coordination of rail and river transportation. The engineering
+difficulties may be larger than any we have yet solved. The adjustment
+of opposite demands between conflicting interests and localities, and
+other questions of large reach and often of great legal complexity will
+tax the powers of the best men we have. No part of the work will require
+greater temperance, wisdom, and foresight than certain questions of
+policy and law.
+
+I have observed in the course of some experience that difficulties
+originating with the law are peculiarly apt to foster misconceptions. It
+happens that the Forest Service has recently supplied a typical example.
+
+Certain men and certain papers have said that the Forest Service has
+gone beyond the law in carrying out its work. This assertion has been
+repeated so persistently that there is danger that it may be believed.
+The friends of conservation must not be led to think that before the
+Forest Service can proceed legally with its present work all the hazards
+and compromises of new legislation must be faced.
+
+Fortunately, the charge of illegal action is absolutely false. The
+Forest Service has had ample legal authority for everything it has done.
+Not once since it was created has any charge of illegality, despite the
+most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever led to
+reversal or reproof by either House of Congress or by any Congressional
+Committee. Since the creation of the Forest Service the expenditure of
+nearly $15,000,000 has passed successfully the scrutiny of the Treasury
+of the United States. Most significant of all, not once has the Forest
+Service been defeated as to any vital legal principle underlying its
+work in any Court or administrative tribunal of last resort. Thus those
+who make the law and those who interpret it seem to agree that the work
+has been legal.
+
+But it is not enough to say that the Forest Service has kept within the
+law. Other qualifications go to make efficiency in a Government bureau.
+A bureau may keep within the law and yet fail to get results.
+
+When action is needed for the public good there are two opposite points
+of view regarding the duty of an administrative officer in enforcing the
+law. One point of view asks, "Is there any express and specific law
+authorizing or directing such action?" and, having thus sought and
+found none, nothing is done. The other asks, "Is there any justification
+in law for doing this desirable thing?" and, having thus sought and
+found a legal justification, what the public good demands is done. I
+hold it to be the first duty of a public officer to obey the law. But I
+hold it to be his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the
+law will let him do for the public good, and not merely what the law
+compels or directs him to do.
+
+It is the right as well as the duty of a public officer to be zealous in
+the public service. That is why the public service is worth while. To
+every public officer the law should be, not a goad to drive him to his
+duty, but a tool to help him in his work. And I maintain that it is
+likewise his right and duty to seek by every proper means from the legal
+authorities set over him such interpretations of the law as will best
+help him to serve his country.
+
+Let the public officer take every lawful chance to use the law for the
+public good. The better use he makes of it the better public servant he
+becomes. One man with a jack-knife will build a ladder. Another with a
+full tool-chest cannot make a footstool. The man with the jack-knife
+will often reach the higher level. I am for the man with the jack-knife.
+I believe in the man who does all he can and the best he can, with the
+means at his command. That is precisely what the Forest Service has been
+trying to do with the money and law Congress has placed in its hands.
+
+Every public officer responsible for any part of the conservation of
+natural resources is a trustee of the public property. If conservation
+is vital to the welfare of this Nation now and hereafter, as President
+Roosevelt so wisely declared, then few positions of public trust are so
+important, and few opportunities for constructive work so large. Such
+officers are concerned with the greatest issues which have come before
+this Nation since the Civil War. They may hope to serve the Nation as
+few men ever can. Their care for our forests, waters, lands, and
+minerals is often the only thing that stands between the public good and
+the something-for-nothing men, who, like the daughters of the
+horse-leech, are forever crying, "Give, Give." The intelligence,
+initiative, and steadfastness that can withstand the unrelenting
+pressure of the special interests are worth having, and the Forest
+Service has given proof of all three. But the counter-pressure from the
+people in their own interest is needed far more often than it is
+supplied.
+
+The public welfare cannot be subserved merely by walking blindly in the
+old ruts. Times change, and the public needs change with them. The man
+who would serve the public to the level of its needs must look ahead,
+and one of his most difficult problems will be to make old tools answer
+new uses--uses some of which, at least, were never imagined when the
+tools were made. That is one reason why constructive foresight is one of
+the great constant needs of every growing nation.
+
+The Forest Service proposes to use the tools--obey the law--made by the
+representatives of the people. But the law cannot give specific
+directions in advance to meet every need and detail of administration.
+The law cannot make brains nor supply conscience. Therefore, the Forest
+Service proposes also to serve the people by the intelligent and
+purposeful use of the law and every lawful means at its command for the
+public good. And for that intention it makes no apology.
+
+Fortunately for the Forest Service, the point of view which it worked
+out for itself under the pressure of its responsibilities was found to
+be that of the Supreme Court. In the case of the U.S. vs. Macdaniel (7
+Pet., 13-14), involving the administrative powers of the head of a
+Department, the Supreme Court of the United States said:
+
+  "He is limited in the exercise of his
+  powers by the law; but it does not
+  follow that he must show statutory
+  provision for everything he does. No
+  government could be administered on
+  such principles. To attempt to regulate,
+  by law, the minute movements
+  of every part of the complicated machinery
+  of government, would evince a
+  most unpardonable ignorance on the
+  subject. Whilst the great outlines of
+  its movements may be marked out,
+  and limitations imposed on the exercise
+  of its powers, there are numberless
+  things which must be done, that can
+  neither be anticipated nor defined, and
+  which are essential to the proper action
+  of the government."
+
+Congress has given to the Secretary of Agriculture, acting through the
+Forest Service, the specific task of administering the National
+Forests, with full power to perform it, and has provided that he "may
+make such rules and regulations and establish such service as will
+ensure the objects of said reservations, namely, to regulate their
+occupancy and use and to preserve the forests thereon from destruction."
+Every exercise of the powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture by
+statute has been in accordance with the principles laid down by Chief
+Justice Marshall ninety years ago in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland
+(4 Wheat., 421), when he said as to powers delegated by the Federal
+Constitution to Congress:
+
+  "Let the end be legitimate, let it be
+  within the scope of the Constitution,
+  and all means which are appropriate,
+  which are plainly adapted to that end,
+  which are not prohibited, but consist
+  with the letter and spirit of the Constitution,
+  are constitutional."
+
+After the transfer of the National Forests from the Interior Department
+to the Forest Service in 1905, some things were done that had never been
+done before, such as initiating Government control over water-power
+monopoly in the National Forests, giving preference to the public over
+commercial corporations in the use of the Forests, and trying to help
+the small man make a living rather than the big man make a profit (but
+always with the effort to be just to both). Always and everywhere we
+have set the public welfare above the advantage of the special
+interests.
+
+Because it did these things the Forest Service has made enemies, of some
+of whom it is justly proud. It has been easy for these enemies to raise
+the cry of illegality, novelty, and excess of zeal. But in every
+instance the Service has been fortified either by express statutes, or
+by decisions of the Supreme Court and other courts, of the Secretary of
+the Interior, of the Comptroller, or the Attorney-General, or by
+general principles of law which are beyond dispute. If there is novelty,
+it consists simply in the way these statutes, decisions, and principles
+have been used to protect the public. The law officers of the Forest
+Service have had the Nation for their client, and they are proud to work
+as zealously for the public as they would in private practice for a fee.
+
+So I think the ghost of illegality in the Forest Service may fairly be
+laid at rest. But it is not the only one which is clouding the issues of
+conservation in the public mind. Another misconception is that the
+friends of conservation are trying to prevent the development of water
+power by private capital. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The
+friends of conservation were the first to call public attention to the
+enormous saving to the Nation which follows the substitution of the
+power of falling water, which is constantly renewed, for our coal, which
+can never be renewed. They favor development by private capital and not
+by the Government, but they also favor attaching such reasonable
+conditions to the right to develop as will protect the public and
+control water-power monopoly in the public interest, while at the same
+time giving to enterprising capital its just and full reward. They
+believe that to grant rights to water power in perpetuity is a wrongful
+mortgage of the welfare of our descendants, and to grant them without
+insisting on some return for value received is to rob ourselves.
+
+I believe in dividends for the people as well as taxes. Fifty years is
+long enough for the certainty of profitable investment in water power,
+and to fix on the amount of return that will be fair to the public and
+the corporation is not impossible. What city does not regret some
+ill-considered franchise? And why should not the Nation profit by the
+experience of its citizens?
+
+There is no reason why the water-power interests should be given the
+people's property freely and forever except that they would like to have
+it that way. I suspect that the mere wishes of the special interests,
+although they have been the mainspring of much public action for many
+years, have begun to lose their compelling power. A good way to begin to
+regulate corporations would be to stop them from regulating us.
+
+The sober fact is that here is the imminent battle-ground in the endless
+contest for the rights of the people. Nothing that can be said or done
+will suffice to postpone longer the active phases of this fight; and
+that is why I attach so great importance to the attitude of
+administrative officers in protecting the public welfare in the
+enforcement of the law.
+
+From time to time a few strong leaders have tried to unite the people in
+the fight of the many for the equal opportunities to which they are
+entitled. But the people have only just begun to take this fight, in
+earnest. They have not realized until recently the vital importance and
+far-reaching consequences of their own passive position.
+
+Now that the fight is passing into an acute stage it is easily seen that
+the special interests have used the period of public indifference to
+manoeuvre themselves into a position of exceeding strength. In the first
+place, the Constitutional position of property in the United States is
+stronger than in any other nation. In the second place, it is well
+understood that the influence of the corporations in our law-making
+bodies is usually excessive, not seldom to the point of defeating the
+will of the people steadily and with ease. In the third place, cases are
+not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making
+the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of
+evils in the body politic, an unjust judge.
+
+When an interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered
+impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy,
+to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has
+been made. Fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness
+which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point of view,
+have failed to see the essential fact in this great conflict. They do
+not understand that this is far more than an economic question, that in
+its essence and in every essential characteristic it is a moral
+question.
+
+The present economic order, with its face turned away from equality of
+opportunity, involves a bitter moral wrong, which must be corrected for
+moral reasons and along moral lines. It must be corrected with justness
+and firmness, but not bitterly, for that would be to lower the Nation to
+the moral level of the evil which we have set ourselves to fight.
+
+This is the doctrine of the Square Deal. It contains the germ of
+industrial liberty. Its partisans are the many, its opponents are the
+few. I am firm in the faith that the great majority of our people are
+Square Dealers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+BUSINESS
+
+The business of the people of the United States, performed by the
+Government of the United States, is a vast and a most important one; it
+is the house-keeping of the American Nation. As a business proposition
+it does not attract anything like the attention that it ought.
+Unfortunately we have come into the habit of considering the Government
+of the United States as a political organization rather than as a
+business organization.
+
+Now this question, which the Governors of the States and the
+representatives of great interests were called to Washington to consider
+in 1908, is fundamentally a business question, and it is along business
+lines that it must be considered and solved, if the problem is to be
+solved at all. Manufacturers are dealing with the necessity for
+producing a definite output as a result of definite expenditure and
+definite effort. The Government of the United States is doing exactly
+the same thing. The manufacturer's product can be measured in dollars
+and cents. The product of the Government of the United States can be
+measured partly in dollars and cents, but far more importantly in the
+welfare and contentment and happiness of the people over which it is
+called upon to preside.
+
+The keynote of that Conservation Conference in Washington was
+forethought and foresight. The keynote of success in any line of life,
+or one of the great keynotes, must be forethought and foresight. If we,
+as a Nation, are to continue the wonderful growth we have had, it is
+forethought and foresight which must give us the capacity to go on as we
+have been going. I dwell on this because it seems to me to be one of
+the most curious of all things in the history of the United States
+to-day that we should have grasped this principle so tremendously and so
+vigorously in our daily lives, in the conduct of our own business, and
+yet have failed so completely to make the obvious application in the
+things which concern the Nation.
+
+It is curiously true that great aggregations of individuals and
+organized bodies are apt to be less far-sighted, less moral, less
+intelligent along certain lines than the individual citizen; or at least
+that their standards are lower; a principle which is illustrated by the
+fact that we have got over settling disputes between individuals by the
+strong hand, but not yet between nations.
+
+So we have allowed ourselves as a Nation, in the flush of the tremendous
+progress that we have made, to fail to look at the end from the
+beginning and to put ourselves in a position where the normal operation
+of natural laws threatens to bring us to a halt in a way which will
+make every man, woman, and child in the Nation feel the pinch when it
+comes.
+
+No man may rightly fail to take a great pride in what has been
+accomplished by means of the destruction of our natural resources so far
+as it has gone. It is a paradoxical statement, perhaps, but nevertheless
+true, because out of this attack on what nature has given we have won a
+kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are
+new in the world. For example, nothing like the rapidity of the
+destruction of American forests has ever been known in forest history,
+and nothing like the efficiency and vigor and inventiveness of the
+American lumberman has ever been developed by any attack on any forests
+elsewhere. Probably the most effective tool that the human mind and hand
+have ever made is the American axe. So the American business man has
+grasped his opportunities and used them and developed them and invented
+about them, thought them into lines of success, and thus has developed
+into a new business man, with a vigor and effectiveness and a
+cutting-edge that has never been equalled anywhere else. We have gained
+out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor
+and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud.
+
+Now that is done. We have accomplished these big things. What is the
+next step? Shall we go on in the same lines to the certain destruction
+of the prosperity which we have created, or shall we take the obvious
+lesson of all human history, turn our backs on the uncivilized point of
+view, and adopt toward our natural resources the average prudence and
+average foresight and average care that we long ago adopted as a rule of
+our daily life?
+
+The conservation movement is calling the attention of the American
+people to the fact that they are trustees. The fact seems to me so
+plain as to require only a statement of it, to carry conviction. Can we
+reasonably fail to recognize the obligation which rests upon us in this
+matter? And, if we do fail to recognize it, can we reasonably expect
+even a fairly good reputation at the hands of our descendants?
+
+Business prudence and business common-sense indicate as strongly as
+anything can the absolute necessity of a change in point of view on the
+part of the people of the United States regarding their natural
+resources. The way we have been handling them is not good business.
+Purely on the side of dollars and cents, it is not good business to kill
+the goose that lays the golden egg, to burn up half our forests, to
+waste our coal, and to remove from under the feet of those who are
+coming after us the opportunity for equal happiness with ourselves. The
+thing we ought to leave to them is not merely an opportunity for equal
+happiness and equal prosperity, but for a vastly increased fund of
+both.
+
+Conservation is not merely a question of business, but a question of a
+vastly higher duty. In dealing with our natural resources we have come
+to a place at last where every consideration of patriotism, every
+consideration of love of country, of gratitude for things that the land
+and the institutions of this Nation have given us, call upon us for a
+return. If we owe anything to the United States, if this country has
+been good to us, if it has given us our prosperity, our education, and
+our chance of happiness, then there is a duty resting upon us. That duty
+is to see, so far as in us lies, that those who are coming after us
+shall have the same opportunity for happiness we have had ourselves.
+Apart from any business consideration, apart from the question of the
+immediate dollar, this problem of the future wealth and happiness and
+prosperity of the people of the United States has a right to our
+attention. It rises far above all matters of temporary individual
+business advantage, and becomes a great question of national
+preservation. We all have the unquestionable right to a reasonable use
+of natural resources during our lifetime, we all may use, and should
+use, the good things that were put here for our use, for in the last
+analysis this question of conservation is the question of national
+preservation and national efficiency.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE MORAL ISSUE
+
+The central thing for which Conservation stands is to make this country
+the best possible place to live in, both for us and for our descendants.
+It stands against the waste of the natural resources which cannot be
+renewed, such as coal and iron; it stands for the perpetuation of the
+resources which can be renewed, such as the food-producing soils and the
+forests; and most of all it stands for an equal opportunity for every
+American citizen to get his fair share of benefit from these resources,
+both now and hereafter.
+
+Conservation stands for the same kind of practical common-sense
+management of this country by the people that every business man stands
+for in the handling of his own business. It believes in prudence and
+foresight instead of reckless blindness; it holds that resources now
+public property should not become the basis for oppressive private
+monopoly; and it demands the complete and orderly development of all our
+resources for the benefit of all the people, instead of the partial
+exploitation of them for the benefit of a few. It recognizes fully the
+right of the present generation to use what it needs and all it needs of
+the natural resources now available, but it recognizes equally our
+obligation so to use what we need that our descendants shall not be
+deprived of what they need.
+
+Conservation has much to do with the welfare of the average man of
+to-day. It proposes to secure a continuous and abundant supply of the
+necessaries of life, which means a reasonable cost of living and
+business stability. It advocates fairness in the distribution of the
+benefits which flow from the natural resources. It will matter very
+little to the average citizen, when scarcity comes and prices rise,
+whether he can not get what he needs because there is none left or
+because he can not afford to pay for it. In both cases the essential
+fact is that he can not get what he needs. Conservation holds that it is
+about as important to see that the people in general get the benefit of
+our natural resources as to see that there shall be natural resources
+left.
+
+Conservation is the most democratic movement this country has known for
+a generation. It holds that the people have not only the right, but the
+duty to control the use of the natural resources, which are the great
+sources of prosperity. And it regards the absorption of these resources
+by the special interests, unless their operations are under effective
+public control, as a moral wrong. Conservation is the application of
+common-sense to the common problems for the common good, and I believe
+it stands nearer to the desires, aspirations, and purposes of the
+average man than any other policy now before the American people.
+
+The danger to the Conservation policies is that the privileges of the
+few may continue to obstruct the rights of the many, especially in the
+matter of water power and coal. Congress must decide immediately whether
+the great coal fields still in public ownership shall remain so, in
+order that their use may be controlled with due regard to the interest
+of the consumer, or whether they shall pass into private ownership and
+be controlled in the monopolistic interest of a few.
+
+Congress must decide also whether immensely valuable rights to the use
+of water power shall be given away to special interests in perpetuity
+and without compensation instead of being held and controlled by the
+public. In most cases actual development of water power can best be done
+by private interests acting under public control, but it is neither
+good sense nor good morals to let these valuable privileges pass from
+the public ownership for nothing and forever. Other conservation matters
+doubtless require action, but these two, the conservation of water power
+and of coal, the chief sources of power of the present and the future,
+are clearly the most pressing.
+
+It is of the first importance to prevent our water powers from passing
+into private ownership as they have been doing, because the greatest
+source of power we know is falling water. Furthermore, it is the only
+great unfailing source of power. Our coal, the experts say, is likely to
+be exhausted during the next century, our natural gas and oil in this.
+Our rivers, if the forests on the watersheds are properly handled, will
+never cease to deliver power. Under our form of civilization, if a few
+men ever succeed in controlling the sources of power, they will
+eventually control all industry as well. If they succeed in controlling
+all industry, they will necessarily control the country. This country
+has achieved political freedom; what our people are fighting for now is
+industrial freedom. And unless we win our industrial liberty, we can not
+keep our political liberty. I see no reason why we should deliberately
+keep on helping to fasten the handcuffs of corporate control upon
+ourselves for all time merely because the few men who would profit by it
+most have heretofore had the power to compel it.
+
+The essential things that must be done to protect the water powers for
+the people are few and simple. First, the granting of water powers
+forever, either on non-navigable or navigable streams, must absolutely
+stop. It is perfectly clear that one hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five
+years ago our present industrial conditions and industrial needs were
+completely beyond the imagination of the wisest of our predecessors. It
+is just as true that we can not imagine or foresee the industrial
+conditions and needs of the future. But we do know that our descendants
+should be left free to meet their own necessities as they arise. It can
+not be right, therefore, for us to grant perpetual rights to the one
+great permanent source of power. It is just as wrong as it is foolish,
+and just as needless as it is wrong, to mortgage the welfare of our
+children in such a way as this. Water powers must and should be
+developed mainly by private capital and they must be developed under
+conditions which make investment in them profitable and safe. But
+neither profit nor safety requires perpetual rights, as many of the best
+water-power men now freely acknowledge.
+
+Second, the men to whom the people grant the right to use water-power
+should pay for what they get. The water-power sites now in the public
+hands are enormously valuable. There is no reason whatever why special
+interests should be allowed to use them for profit without making some
+direct payment to the people for the valuable rights derived from the
+people. This is important not only for the revenue the Nation will get.
+It is at least equally important as a recognition that the public
+controls its own property and has a right to share in the benefits
+arising from its development. There are other ways in which public
+control of water power must be exercised, but these two are the most
+important.
+
+Water power on non-navigable streams usually results from dropping a
+little water a long way. In the mountains water is dropped many hundreds
+of feet upon the turbines which move the dynamos that produce the
+electric current. Water power on navigable streams is usually produced
+by dropping immense volumes of water a short distance, as twenty feet,
+fifteen feet, or even less. Every stream is a unit from its source to
+its mouth, and the people have the same stake in the control of water
+power in one part of it as in another. Under the Constitution, the
+United States exercises direct control over navigable streams. It
+exercises control over non-navigable and source streams only through its
+ownership of the lands through which they pass, as the public domain and
+National Forests. It is just as essential for the public welfare that
+the people should retain and exercise control of water-power monopoly on
+navigable as on non-navigable streams. If the difficulties are greater,
+then the danger that the water powers may pass out of the people's hands
+on the lower navigable parts of the streams is greater than on the upper
+non-navigable parts, and it may be harder, but in no way less necessary,
+to prevent it.
+
+It must be clear to any man who has followed the development of the
+Conservation idea that no other policy now before the American people is
+so thoroughly democratic in its essence and in its tendencies as the
+Conservation policy. It asserts that the people have the right and the
+duty, and that it is their duty no less than their right, to protect
+themselves against the uncontrolled monopoly of the natural resources
+which yield the necessaries of life. We are beginning to realize that
+the Conservation question is a question of right and wrong, as any
+question must be which may involve the differences between prosperity
+and poverty, health and sickness, ignorance and education, well-being
+and misery, to hundreds of thousands of families. Seen from the point of
+view of human welfare and human progress, questions which begin as
+purely economic often end as moral issues. Conservation is a moral issue
+because it involves the rights and the duties of our people--their
+rights to prosperity and happiness, and their duties to themselves, to
+their descendants, and to the whole future progress and welfare of this
+Nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+PUBLIC SPIRIT
+
+Violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own
+remedies. They grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and
+usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs.
+But the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of
+importance. The quiet turning point, reached and passed often with
+slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less
+decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld
+in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical
+character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can
+say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was
+actually accomplished.
+
+The United States has been in the midst of such a period of decision
+since the Spanish War called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and
+we are still face to face with questions of the most vital bearing upon
+our future. The changes now in progress are accompanied by no
+convulsions, yet the whole character of our civilization is being
+rapidly crystallized anew as our country takes its inevitable place in
+the world.
+
+So quietly are the great forces at work that some of our most vital
+problems have remained almost unrecognized by the public until the last
+two years. Yet the fact that these decisions are being made is almost
+appalling in its magnitude, and their indescribable consequence not only
+to the United States, but to all the nations of the earth, needs to be
+vividly realized by every one of us, for it is one of the great
+compelling reasons why the public spirit of young men is needed so
+urgently and at once. And more specific reasons press upon us from every
+side.
+
+Recently the attention of our people, thanks largely to President
+Roosevelt, was focussed upon the presence or absence of the common
+virtues and the common decencies in public life. The revelation of
+corruption in politics, in business, and here and there in the public
+service, is a testimony not of unwonted wickedness in high places, but
+of unwonted sensitiveness in public opinion, and so far as it goes it is
+a most hopeful sign; but it does not yet go far enough.
+
+The opportunity to set a new standard in political morality is here now.
+Public sensitiveness on every subject ebbs and flows and must be taken
+at the flood if the use of it is to be really effective. Decision made
+now as to the character of our public life will be valid for many years,
+for it is but seldom that the question comes so clearly before us. The
+war for righteousness is endless, but this is one of the great battles,
+and its results will endure.
+
+We are now in the throes of decision on the whole question of business
+in politics, of politics for business purposes, and we must take our
+share in determining whether the object of our political system is to be
+unclean money or free men. The present strong movement to prevent the
+political control of public men, law-courts, and legislatures by great
+commercial enterprises will either flash in the pan or it will succeed;
+it will leave either the man or the dollar in control. The decision will
+be made by the young men, and it is not far ahead.
+
+The question of efficiency in public office has been brought to the
+front as never before in the history of the Nation. As a whole, our
+public service is honest, but we should be able to take honesty for
+granted. What we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes
+great enterprises succeed. The national house-keeping, the Government's
+vast machinery, should be the cleanest, the most effective, and the best
+in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the Nation at
+every point is constant and vital.
+
+There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are
+more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of
+land. Under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by
+obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in
+the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question
+whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants
+under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or
+free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance
+of the decision.
+
+We have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether
+the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has
+followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by
+protecting the timberlands we shall assure the prosperity of all of the
+users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply.
+Nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the
+country is in the balance. No other conservation question compares with
+this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national
+life.
+
+Other great questions only less vital I cannot even refer to, but one of
+the central ones remains--our whole future is at stake in the education
+of our young men in politics and public spirit. The greatest work that
+Theodore Roosevelt did for the United States, the great fact which will
+give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone
+to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in
+settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in
+business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the attitude of
+the American people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward
+public questions and public life. The time was, not long ago, when it
+was not respectable to be interested in politics. The time is coming,
+and I do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable
+not to be interested in public affairs. Few changes can mean so much.
+
+Among the first duties of every man is to help in bringing the Kingdom
+of God on earth. The greatest human power for good, the most efficient
+earthly tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is without
+question the United States; and the presence or absence of a vital
+public spirit in the young men of the United States will determine the
+quality of that great tool and the work that it can do. This is the
+final object of the best citizenship. Public spirit is the means by
+which every man can help toward this great end. Public spirit is
+patriotism in action; it is the application of Christianity to the
+commonwealth; it is effective loyalty to our country, to the brotherhood
+of man, and to the future. It is the use of a man by himself for the
+general good.
+
+Public spirit is the one great antidote for all the ills of the Nation,
+and greatly the Nation needs it now. In a day when the vast increase in
+wealth tends to reduce all things, moral, intellectual and material, to
+the measure of the dollar; in a day when we have with us always the man
+who is working for his own pocket all the time; when the monopolist of
+land, of opportunity, of power or privilege in any form, is ever in the
+public eye--it is good to remember that the real leaders are the men who
+value the right to give themselves more highly than any gain whatsoever.
+
+It is given to few men to serve their country as greatly as President
+Roosevelt has done, yet vastly smaller services are still tremendously
+worth while. I question whether there has ever been a time and place
+(except in violent crises) when the demand for public spirit was greater
+than now and the results of it more assured. Public spirit is never
+needed more than in times of prosperity, and it is never more effective.
+It is the boat which is floating easily and rapidly with the stream that
+is most in danger of striking the rocks.
+
+The reasons why public opinion may be so effective in the United States
+are not far to seek. The extreme sensitiveness of our form of government
+to political control is one of the commonplaces that has real meaning.
+We seldom realize that ours is actually what it pretends to be--a
+representative government--and our legislatures are extraordinarily
+sensitive to what the people, the politically effective people, really
+want. The Senators and Representatives in Congress do actually and
+accurately represent the men who send them there, and they respond like
+lightning to a clear order from the controlling element at home. It is
+in the power of public spirit to say whether men or money shall control.
+
+If public spirit is in the saddle, the fundamental purpose of all the
+people, which is good, will govern. If not, the bosses and the great
+private interests will have their way. Without the backing of the public
+spirit of good men, even the President himself loses by far the greater
+portion of his power. For the power to do what we hope to see
+accomplished, we must look most of all to the public spirit of the young
+men.
+
+But some one will say that great service is beyond his individual power.
+I do not believe that great service is beyond the power of any young
+man. This is not a matter in which obstacles decide. The man for whom
+all the barriers to success have been broken down is not, as a rule, the
+man who succeeds. On the contrary, conflict is the condition of
+success. The quality of the man himself decides. The more I study men,
+which is the daily occupation of every man in affairs, the more firmly I
+am assured that the great fundamental difference between men, the reason
+why some fail and some succeed, is not a difference in ability or
+opportunity, but a difference in vision and in relentless loyalty to
+ideals--vision to see the great object, and relentless, unwavering,
+uninterrupted loyalty in its service. What young men determine to do at
+whatever cost of effort, self-denial, and endurance, provided that their
+objects are good and within the possibility of attainment, they will
+surely accomplish in so large a proportion of cases that the failures
+are negligible. If all that a man has or is, if his death and his daily
+life, are wholly and relentlessly at the service of his ideal, without
+hesitancy or reservation, then he will achieve his object. Either by
+himself or his successors he will achieve it, for he disposes of the
+greatest power to which humanity can attain. Under such conditions there
+is no man among us who cannot render high service to our beloved
+country.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE CHILDREN
+
+The success of the conservation movement in the United States depends in
+the end on the understanding the women have of it. No forward step in
+this whole campaign has been more deeply appreciated or more welcomed
+than that which the National Society of the Daughters of the American
+Revolution and other organizations of women have taken in appointing
+conservation committees.
+
+Patriotism is the key to the success of any nation, and patriotism first
+strikes its roots in the mind of the child. Patriotism which does not
+begin in early years may, though it does not always, fail under the
+severest trials. I say "not always," for many men and women have proved
+their patriotic devotion to this country although they were born
+elsewhere. Yet, as a rule, it must begin with the children. And almost
+without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of
+the child. It is her duty. The growth of patriotism is first of all in
+the hands of the women of any nation. In the last analysis it is the
+mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny.
+
+The fundamental task of patriotism is to see to it that the Nation
+exists and endures in honor, security, and well-being. Fortunately there
+is no question as to our existing in honor, and little if any as to our
+continuing to exist in security.
+
+The great fundamental problem which confronts us all now is this: Shall
+we continue, as a Nation, to exist in well-being? That is the
+conservation problem.
+
+If we are to have prosperity in this country, it will be because we have
+an abundance of natural resources available for the citizen. In other
+words, as the minds of the children are guided toward the idea of
+foresight, just to that extent, and probably but little more, will the
+generations that are coming hereafter be able to carry through the great
+task of making this Nation what its manifest destiny demands that it
+shall be.
+
+Women should recognize, if this task is to be carried out, one great
+truth above all others. That this Nation exists for its people, we all
+admit; but that the natural resources of the Nation exist not for any
+small group, not for any individual, but for all the people--in other
+words, that the natural resources of the Nation belong to all the
+people--that is a truth the whole meaning of which is just beginning to
+dawn on us. There is no form of monopoly which exists or ever has
+existed on any large scale which was not based more or less directly
+upon the control of natural resources. There is no form of monopoly that
+has ever existed or can exist which can do harm if the people
+understand that the natural resources belong to the people of the
+Nation, and exercise that understanding, as they have the power to do.
+
+It seems to me that of all the movements which have been inaugurated to
+give power to the conservation idea, the foresight idea, there is none
+more helpful than that the women of the United States are taking hold of
+the problem. We must make all the people see that now and in the future
+the resources are to be developed and employed, yet at the same time
+guarded and protected against waste--not for small groups of men who
+will control them for their own purposes, but for all the people through
+all time.
+
+The question of the conservation of our natural resources is not a
+simple question, but it requires, and will increasingly require,
+thinking out along lines directed to the fundamental economic basis upon
+which this Nation exists. I think it can not be disputed that the
+natural resources exist for and belong to the people; and I believe that
+the part of the work which falls to the women (and it is no small part)
+is to see to it that the children, who will be the men and women of the
+future, have their share of these resources uncontrolled by monopoly and
+unspoiled by waste.
+
+What specific things can the women of the Nation do for conservation?
+The Daughters of the American Revolution have begun admirably in the
+appointment of a Conservation Committee, and other organizations of
+women are following their example. Few people realize what women have
+already done for conservation, and what they may do. Some of the
+earliest effective forest work that was done in the United States, work
+which laid the lines that have been followed since, was that of the
+Pennsylvania Forestry Association, begun and carried through first of
+all by ladies in Philadelphia. One of the bravest, most intelligent and
+most effective fights for forestry that I have known of was that of the
+women of Minnesota for the Minnesota National Forest. It was a superb
+success, and we have that forest to-day. I have known of no case of
+persistent agitation under discouragement finer in a good many ways than
+the fight that the women of California have made to save the great grove
+of Calaveras big trees. As a result the Government has taken possession
+of that forest and will preserve it for all future generations.
+
+Time and again, then, the women have made it perfectly clear what they
+can do in this work. Obviously the first point of attack is the stopping
+of waste. Women alone can bring to the school children the idea of the
+wickedness of national waste and the value of public saving. The issue
+is a moral one; and women are the first teachers of right and wrong. It
+is a question of seeing what loyalty to the public welfare demands of
+us, and then of caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal
+advantage first. It is a question of inspiring our future citizens while
+they are boys and girls with the spirit of true patriotism as against
+the spirit of rank selfishness, the anti-social spirit of the man who
+declines to take into account any other interest than his own; whose one
+aim and ideal is personal success. Women both in public and at home, by
+letting the men know what they think, and by putting it before the
+children, can make familiar the idea of conservation, and support it
+with a convincingness that nobody else can approach.
+
+However important it may be for the lumberman, the miner, the
+wagon-maker, the railroad man, the house-builder,--for every
+industry,--that conservation should obtain, when all is said and done,
+conservation goes back in its directest application to one body in this
+country, and that is to the children. There is in this country no other
+movement except possibly the education movement--and that after all is
+in a sense only another aspect of the conservation question, the seeking
+to make the most of what we have--so directly aimed to help the
+children, so conditioned upon the needs of the children, so belonging to
+the children, as the conservation movement; and it is for that reason
+more than any other that it has the support of the women of the Nation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+AN EQUAL CHANCE
+
+The American people have evidently made up their minds that our natural
+resources must be conserved. That is good, but it settles only half the
+question. For whose benefit shall they be conserved--for the benefit of
+the many, or for the use and profit of the few? The great conflict now
+being fought will decide. There is no other question before us that
+begins to be so important, or that will be so difficult to straddle, as
+the great question between special interest and equal opportunity,
+between the privileges of the few and the rights of the many, between
+government by men for human welfare and government by money for profit,
+between the men who stand for the Roosevelt policies and the men who
+stand against them. This is the heart of the conservation problem
+to-day.
+
+The conservation issue is a moral issue. When a few men get possession
+of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural
+resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to
+extort undue profits, as in the recent cases of the Sugar Trust and the
+beef-packers, they injure the average man without good reason, and they
+are guilty of a moral wrong. It does not matter whether the undue profit
+comes through stifling competition by rebates or other crooked devices,
+through corruption of public officials, or through seizing and
+monopolizing resources which belong to the people. The result is always
+the same--a toll levied on the cost of living through special privilege.
+
+The income of the average family in the United States is less than $600
+a year. To increase the cost of living to such a family beyond the
+reasonable profits of legitimate business is wrong. It is not merely a
+question of a few cents more a day for the necessaries of life, or of a
+few cents less a day for wages. Far more is at stake--the health or
+sickness of little babies, the education or ignorance of children,
+virtue or vice in young daughters, honesty or criminality in young sons,
+the working power of bread-winners, the integrity of families, the
+provision for old age--in a word, the welfare and happiness or the
+misery and degradation of the plain people are involved in the cost of
+living.
+
+To the special interest an unjust rise in the cost of living means
+simply higher profit, but to those who pay it, that profit is measured
+in schooling, warm clothing, a reserve to meet emergencies, a fair
+chance to make the fight for comfort, decency, and right living.
+
+I believe in our form of government and I believe in the Golden Rule.
+But we must face the truth that monopoly of the sources of production
+makes it impossible for vast numbers of men and women to earn a fair
+living. Right here the conservation question touches the daily life of
+the great body of our people, who pay the cost of special privilege. And
+the price is heavy. That price may be the chance to save the boys from
+the saloons and the corner gang, and the girls from worse, and to make
+good citizens of them instead of bad; for an appalling proportion of the
+tragedies of life spring directly from the lack of a little money.
+Thousands of daughters of the poor fall into the hands of the
+white-slave traders because their poverty leaves them without
+protection. Thousands of families, as the Pittsburg survey has shown us,
+lead lives of brutalizing overwork in return for the barest living. Is
+it fair that these thousands of families should have less than they need
+in order that a few families should have swollen fortunes at their
+expense? Let him who dares deny that there is wickedness in grinding
+the faces of the poor, or assert that these are not moral questions
+which strike the very homes of our people. If these are not moral
+questions, there are no moral questions.
+
+The people of this country have lost vastly more than they can ever
+regain by gifts of public property, forever and without charge, to men
+who gave nothing in return. It is true that, we have made superb
+material progress under this system, but it is not well for us to
+rejoice too freely in the slices the special interests have given us
+from the great loaf of the property of all the people.
+
+The people of the United States have been the complacent victims of a
+system of grab, often perpetrated by men who would have been surprised
+beyond measure to be accused of wrong-doing, and many of whom in their
+private lives were model citizens. But they have suffered from a curious
+moral perversion by which it becomes praiseworthy to do for a
+corporation things which they would refuse with the loftiest scorn to
+do for themselves. Fortunately for us all that delusion is passing
+rapidly away.
+
+President Hadley well said that "the fundamental division of powers in
+the Constitution of the United States is between voters on the one hand
+and property-owners on the other." When property gets possession of the
+voting power also, little is left for the people. That is why the unholy
+alliance between business and politics is the most dangerous fact in our
+political life. I believe the American people are tired of that
+alliance. They are weary of politics for revenue only. It is time to
+take business out of politics, and keep it out--time for the political
+activity of this Nation to be aimed squarely at the welfare of all of
+us, and squarely away from the excessive profits of a few of us.
+
+A man is not bad because he is rich, nor good because he is poor. There
+is no monopoly of virtue. I hold no brief for the poor against the rich
+nor for the wage-earner against the capitalist. Exceptional capacity in
+business, as in any other line of life, should meet with exceptional
+reward. Rich men have served this country greatly. Washington was a rich
+man. But it is very clear that excessive profits from the control of
+natural resources, monopolized by a few, are not worth to this Nation
+the tremendous price they cost us.
+
+We have allowed the great corporations to occupy with their own men the
+strategic points in business, in social, and in political life. It is
+our fault more than theirs. We have allowed it when we could have
+stopped it. Too often we have seemed to forget that a man in public life
+can no more serve both the special interests and the people than he can
+serve God and Mammon. There is no reason why the American people should
+not take into their hands again the full political power which is theirs
+by right, and which they exercised before the special interests began
+to nullify the will of the majority. There are many men who believe, and
+who will always believe, in the divine right of money to rule. With such
+men argument, compromise, or conciliation is useless or worse. The only
+thing to do with them is to fight them and beat them. It has been done,
+and it can be done again.
+
+It is the honorable distinction of the Forest Service that it has been
+more constantly, more violently and more bitterly attacked by the
+representatives of the special interests in recent years than any other
+Government Bureau. These attacks have increased in violence and
+bitterness just in proportion as the Service has offered effective
+opposition to predatory wealth. The more successful the Forest Service
+has been in preventing land-grabbing and the absorption of water power
+by the special interests, the more ingenious, the more devious, and the
+more dangerous these attacks have become. A favorite one is to assert
+that the Forest Service, in its zeal for the public welfare, has played
+ducks and drakes with the Acts of Congress. The fact is, on the
+contrary, that the Service has had warrant of law for everything it has
+done. Not once since it was created has any charge of illegality,
+despite the most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever
+led to reversal or reproof by either House of Congress or by any
+Congressional Committee. Not once has the Forest Service been defeated
+or reversed as to any vital legal principle underlying its work in any
+court or administrative tribunal of last resort. It is the first duty of
+a public officer to obey the law. But it is his second duty, and a close
+second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good,
+and not merely what the law directs or compels him to do. Unless the
+public service is alive enough to serve the people with enthusiasm,
+there is very little to be said for it.
+
+Another, and unusually plausible, form of attack, is to demand that all
+land not now bearing trees shall be thrown out of the National Forests.
+For centuries forest fires have burned through the Western mountains,
+and much land thus deforested is scattered throughout the National
+Forests awaiting reforestation. This land is not valuable for
+agriculture, and will contribute more to the general welfare under
+forest than in any other way. To exclude it from the National Forests
+would be no more reasonable than it would be in a city to remove from
+taxation and municipal control every building lot not now covered by a
+house. It would be no more reasonable than to condemn and take away from
+our farmers every acre of land that did not bear a crop last year, or to
+confiscate a man's winter overcoat because he was not wearing it in
+July. A generation in the life of a nation is no longer than a season in
+the life of a man. With a fair chance we can and will reclothe these
+denuded mountains with forests, and we ask for that chance.
+
+Still another attack, nearly successful two years ago, was an attempt
+to prevent the Forest Service from telling the people, through the
+press, what it is accomplishing for them, and how much this Nation needs
+the forests. If the Forest Service can not tell what it is doing the
+time will come when there will be nothing to tell. It is just as
+necessary for the people to know what is being done to help them as to
+know what is being done to hurt them. Publicity is the essential and
+indispensable condition of clean and effective public service.
+
+Since the Forest Service called public attention to the rapid absorption
+of the water-power sites and the threatening growth of a great
+water-power monopoly, the attacks upon it have increased with marked
+rapidity. I anticipate that they will continue to do so. Still greater
+opposition is promised in the near future. There is but one
+protection--an awakened and determined public opinion. That is why I
+tell the facts.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE NEW PATRIOTISM
+
+The people of the United States are on the verge of one of the great
+quiet decisions which determine national destinies. Crises happen in
+peace as well as in war, and a peaceful crisis may be as vital and
+controlling as any that comes with national uprising and the clash of
+arms. Such a crisis, at first uneventful and almost unperceived, is upon
+us now, and we are engaged in making the decision that is thus forced
+upon us. And, so far as it has gone, our decision is largely wrong.
+Fortunately it is not yet final.
+
+The question we are deciding with so little consciousness of what it
+involves is this: What shall we do with our natural resources? Upon the
+final answer that we shall make to it hangs the success or failure of
+this Nation in accomplishing its manifest destiny.
+
+Few Americans will deny that it is the manifest destiny of the United
+States to demonstrate that a democratic republic is the best form of
+government yet devised, and that the ideals and institutions of the
+great republic taken together must and do work out in a prosperous,
+contented, peaceful, and righteous people; and also to exercise, through
+precept and example, an influence for good among the nations of the
+world. That destiny seems to us brighter and more certain of realization
+to-day than ever before. It is true that in population, in wealth, in
+knowledge, in national efficiency generally, we have reached a place far
+beyond the farthest hopes of the founders of the Republic. Are the
+causes which have led to our marvellous development likely to be
+repeated indefinitely in the future, or is there a reasonable
+possibility, or even a probability, that conditions may arise which will
+check our growth?
+
+Danger to a nation comes either from without or from within. In the
+first great crisis of our history, the Revolution, another people
+attempted from without to halt the march of our destiny by refusing to
+us liberty. With reasonable prudence and preparedness we need never fear
+another such attempt. If there be danger, it is not from an external
+source. In the second great crisis, the Civil War, a part of our own
+people strove for an end which would have checked the progress of
+development. Another such attempt has become forever impossible. If
+there be danger, it is not from a division of our people.
+
+In the third great crisis of our history, which has now come squarely
+upon us, the special interests and the thoughtless citizens seem to have
+united together to deprive the Nation of the great natural resources
+without which it cannot endure. This is the pressing danger now, and it
+is not the least to which our National life has been exposed. A nation
+deprived of liberty may win it, a nation divided may reunite, but a
+nation whose natural resources are destroyed must inevitably pay the
+penalty of poverty, degradation, and decay.
+
+At first blush this may seem like an unpardonable misconception and
+over-statement, and if it is not true it certainly is unpardonable. Let
+us consider the facts. Some of them are well known, and the salient ones
+can be put very briefly.
+
+The five indispensably essential materials in our civilization are wood,
+water, coal, iron, and agricultural products.
+
+We have timber for less than thirty years at the present rate of
+cutting. The figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have
+increased twice as fast as our population.
+
+We have anthracite coal for but fifty years, and bituminous coal for
+less than two hundred.
+
+Our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil, and natural gas are being rapidly
+depleted, and many of the great fields are already exhausted. Mineral
+resources such as these when once gone are gone forever.
+
+We have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to impoverish
+and, over thousands of square miles, to destroy our farms. The
+Mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than 400,000,000 tons
+of the richest soil within its drainage basin. If this soil is worth a
+dollar a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from
+soil-wash to the farmers and forest-owners of the United States is not
+far from a billion dollars a year. Our streams, in spite of the millions
+of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty
+years ago, and the soil lost by erosion from the farms and the
+deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason. The great cattle and
+sheep ranges of the West, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an
+average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and
+should still. Their condition affects the price of meat in practically
+every city of the United States.
+
+These are but a few of the more striking examples. The diversion of
+great areas of our public lands from the home-maker to the landlord and
+the speculator; the national neglect of great water powers, which might
+well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our
+non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from
+the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by
+caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the
+cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively
+slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use
+of the rail instead--these are other items in the huge bill of
+particulars of national waste.
+
+We have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, and it
+has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaustible. Even
+now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing itself upon us
+in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are still asserting,
+if not always in words, yet in the far stronger language of action, that
+nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are inexhaustible.
+
+It is this national attitude of exclusive attention to the present, this
+absence of foresight from among the springs of national action, which is
+directly responsible for the present condition of our natural resources.
+It was precisely the same attitude which brought Palestine, once rich
+and populous, to its present desert condition, and which destroyed the
+fertility and habitability of vast areas in northern Africa and
+elsewhere in so many of the older regions of the world.
+
+The conservation of our natural resources is a question of primary
+importance on the economic side. It pays better to conserve our natural
+resources than to destroy them, and this is especially true when the
+national interest is considered. But the business reason, weighty and
+worthy though it be, is not the fundamental reason. In such matters,
+business is a poor master but a good servant. The law of
+self-preservation is higher than the law of business, and the duty of
+preserving the Nation is still higher than either.
+
+The American Revolution had its origin in part in economic causes, and
+it produced economic results of tremendous reach and weight. The Civil
+War also arose in large part from economic conditions, and it has had
+the largest economic consequences. But in each case there was a higher
+and more compelling reason. So with the third great crisis of our
+history. It has an economic aspect of the largest and most permanent
+importance, and the motive for action along that line, once it is
+recognized, should be more than sufficient. But that is not all. In
+this case, too, there is a higher and more compelling reason. The
+question of the conservation of natural resources, or national
+resources, does not stop with being a question of profit. It is a vital
+question of profit, but what is still more vital, it is a question of
+national safety and patriotism also.
+
+We have passed the inevitable stage of pioneer pillage of natural
+resources. The natural wealth we found upon this continent has made us
+rich. We have used it, as we had a right to do, but we have not stopped
+there. We have abused, and wasted, and exhausted it also, so that there
+is the gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been bought
+at the price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants. We may now
+fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural
+interest in those who are to come after us. No patriotic citizen expects
+this Nation to run its course and perish in a hundred or two hundred,
+or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in
+influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the
+happiness and prosperity of our people. But we have as little reason to
+expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been for
+the men who established this Nation to expect that a United States would
+grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. It was their duty
+to found this Nation, and they did it. It is our duty to provide for its
+continuance in well-being and honor. That duty it seems as though we
+might neglect--not in wilfulness, not in any lack of patriotic devotion,
+when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere thoughtlessness and
+inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of the moment long
+enough to realize that what we do now will decide the future of the
+Nation. For, if we do not take action to conserve the Nation's natural
+resources, and that soon, our descendants will suffer the penalty of
+our neglect.
+
+Let me use a homely illustration: We have all known fathers and mothers,
+devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and limited by the
+household routine of daily life. Such parents were actively concerned
+with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed in bringing
+up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all unusual. Fathers
+and mothers such as these often remain serenely unaware while some
+dangerous malady or injurious habit is fastening itself upon a favorite
+child. Once the evil is discovered, there is no sacrifice too great to
+repair the damage which their unwitting neglect may have allowed to
+become irreparable. So it is, I think, with the people of the United
+States. Capable of every devotion in a recognized crisis, we have yet
+carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and waste of resources to
+find lodgment. It is our great good fortune that the harm is not yet
+altogether beyond repair.
+
+The profoundest duty that lies upon any father is to leave his son with
+a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life and an untarnished name.
+So the noblest task that confronts us all to-day is to leave this
+country unspotted in honor, and unexhausted in resources, to our
+descendants, who will be, not less than we, the children of the Founders
+of the Republic. I conceive this task to partake of the highest spirit
+of patriotism.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+THE PRESENT BATTLE
+
+Conservation has captured the Nation. Its progress during the last
+twelve months is amazing. Official opposition to the conservation
+movement, whatever damage it has done or still threatens to the public
+interest, has vastly strengthened the grasp of conservation upon the
+minds and consciences of our people. Efforts to obscure or belittle the
+issue have only served to make it larger and clearer in the public
+estimation. The conservation movement cannot be checked by the baseless
+charge that it will prevent development, or that every man who tells the
+plain truth is either a muck-raker or a demagogue. It has taken firm
+hold on our national moral sense, and when an issue does that it has
+won.
+
+The conservation issue is a moral issue, and the heart of it is this:
+For whose benefit shall our natural resources be conserved--for the
+benefit of us all, or for the use and profit of the few? This truth is
+so obvious and the question itself so simple that the attitude toward
+conservation of any man in public or private life indicates his stand in
+the fight for public rights.
+
+All monopoly rests on the unregulated control of natural resources and
+natural advantages, and such control by the special interests is
+impossible without the help of politics. The alliance between business
+and politics is the most dangerous thing in our political life. It is
+the snake that we must kill. The special interests must get out of
+politics, or the American people will put them out of business. There is
+no third course.
+
+Because the special interests are in politics, we as a Nation have lost
+confidence in Congress. This is a serious statement to make, but it is
+true. It does not apply, of course, to the men who really represent
+their constituents and who are making so fine a fight for the
+conservation of self-government. As soon as these men have won their
+battle and consolidated their victory, confidence in Congress will
+return.
+
+But in the meantime the people of the United States believe that, as a
+whole, the Senate and the House no longer represent the voters by whom
+they were elected, but the special interests by whom they are
+controlled. They believe so because they have so often seen Congress
+reject what the people desire, and do instead what the interests demand.
+And of this there could be no better illustration than the tariff.
+
+The tariff, under the policy of protection, was originally a means to
+raise the rate of wages. It has been made a tool to increase the cost of
+living. The wool schedule, professing to protect the wool-grower, is
+found to result in sacrificing grower and consumer alike to one of the
+most rapacious of trusts.
+
+The cotton cloth schedule was increased in the face of the
+uncontradicted public testimony of the manufacturers themselves that it
+ought to remain unchanged.
+
+The Steel interests by a trick secured an indefensible increase in the
+tariff on structural steel.
+
+The Sugar Trust stole from the Government like a petty thief, yet
+Congress, by means of a dishonest schedule, continues to protect it in
+bleeding the public.
+
+At the very time the duties on manufactured rubber were being raised,
+the leader of the Senate, in company with the Guggenheim Syndicate, was
+organizing an international rubber trust, whose charter made it also a
+holding company for the coal and copper deposits of the whole world.
+
+For a dozen years the demand of the Nation for the Pure Food and Drug
+bill was outweighed in Congress by the interests which asserted their
+right to poison the people for a profit.
+
+Congress refused to authorize the preparation of a great plan of
+waterway development in the general interest, and for ten years has
+declined to pass the Appalachian and White Mountain National Forest
+bill, although the people are practically unanimous for both.
+
+The whole Nation is in favor of protecting the coal and other natural
+resources in Alaska, yet they are still in grave danger of being
+absorbed by the special interests. And as for the general conservation
+movement, Congress not only refused to help it on, but tried to forbid
+any progress without its help. Fortunately for us all, in this attempt
+it has utterly failed.
+
+This loss of confidence in Congress is a matter for deep concern to
+every thinking American. It has not come quickly or without good
+reason. Every man who knows Congress well knows the names of Senators
+and members who betray the people they were elected to represent, and
+knows also the names of the masters whom they obey. A representative of
+the people who wears the collar of the special interests has touched
+bottom. He can sink no farther.
+
+Who is to blame because representatives of the people are so commonly
+led to betray their trust? We all are--we who have not taken the trouble
+to resent and put an end to the knavery we knew was going on. The brand
+of politics served out to us by the professional politician has long
+been composed largely of hot meals for the interests and hot air for the
+people, and we have all known it.
+
+Political platforms are not sincere statements of what the leaders of a
+party really believe, but rather forms of words which those leaders
+think they can get others to believe they believe. The realities of the
+regular political game lie at present far beneath the surface; many of
+the issues advanced are mere empty sound; while the issues really at
+stake must be sought deep down in the politics of business--in politics
+for revenue only. All this the people realize as they never did before,
+and, what is more, they are ready to act on their knowledge.
+
+Some of the men who are responsible for the union of business and
+politics may be profoundly dishonest, but more of them are not. They
+were trained in a wrong school, and they cannot forget their training.
+Clay hardens by immobility--men's minds by standing pat. Both lose the
+power to take new impressions. Many of the old-style leaders regard the
+political truths which alone insure the progress of the Nation, and will
+hereafter completely dominate it, as the mere meaningless babble of
+political infants. They have grown old in the belief that money has the
+right to rule, and they can never understand the point of view of the
+men who recognize in the corrupt political activity of a railroad or a
+trust a most dangerous kind of treason to government by the people.
+
+When party leaders go wrong, it requires a high sense of public duty,
+true courage, and a strong belief in the people for a man in politics to
+take his future in his hands and stand against them.
+
+The black shadow of party regularity as the supreme test in public
+affairs has passed away from the public mind. It is a great deliverance.
+The man in the street no longer asks about a measure or a policy merely
+whether it is good Republican or good Democratic doctrine. Now he asks
+whether it is honest, and means what it says, whether it will promote
+the public interest, weaken special privilege, and help to give every
+man a fair chance. If it will, it is good, no matter who proposed it. If
+it will not, it is bad, no matter who defends it.
+
+It is a greater thing to be a good citizen than to be a good Republican
+or a good Democrat.
+
+The protest against politics for revenue only is as strong in one party
+as in the other, for the servants of the interests are plentiful in
+both. In that respect there is little to choose between them.
+
+Differences of purpose and belief between political parties to-day are
+vastly less than the differences within the parties. The great gulf of
+division which strikes across our whole people pays little heed to
+fading party lines, or to any distinction in name only. The vital
+separation is between the partisans of government by money for profit
+and the believers in government by men for human welfare.
+
+When political parties come to be badly led, when their leaders lose
+touch with the people, when their object ceases to be everybody's
+welfare and becomes somebody's profit, it is time to change the leaders.
+One of the most significant facts of the time is that the professional
+politicians appear to be wholly unaware of the great moral change which
+has come over political thinking in the last decade. They fail to see
+that the political dogmas, the political slogans, and the political
+methods of the past generation have lost their power, and that our
+people have come at last to judge of politics by the eternal rules of
+right and wrong.
+
+A new life is stirring among the dry bones of formal platforms and
+artificial issues. Morality has broken into politics. Political leaders,
+Trust-bred and Trust-fed, find it harder and harder to conceal their
+actual character. The brass-bound collar of privilege has become plain
+upon their necks for all men to see. They are known for what they are,
+and their time is short. But when they come to be retired it will be of
+little use to replace an unfaithful public servant who wears the collar
+by another public servant with the same collar around his neck. Above
+all, what we need in every office is free men representing a free
+people.
+
+The motto in every primary--in every election--should be this: No
+watch-dogs of the Interests need apply.
+
+The old order, standing pat in dull failure to sense the great forward
+sweep of a nation determined on honesty and publicity in public affairs,
+is already wearing thin under the ceaseless hammering of the progressive
+onset. The demand of the people for political progress will not be
+denied. Does any man, not blinded by personal interest or by the dust of
+political dry rot, suppose that the bulk of our people are anything else
+but progressive? If such there be, let him ask the young men, in whose
+minds the policies of to-morrow first see the light.
+
+The people of the United States demand a new deal and a square deal.
+They have grasped the fact that the special interests are now in control
+of public affairs. They have decided once more to take control of their
+own business. For the last ten years the determination to do so has been
+swelling like a river. They insist that the special interests shall go
+out of politics or out of business--one or the other. And the choice
+will lie with the interests themselves. If they resist, both the
+interests and the people will suffer. If wisely they accept the
+inevitable, the adjustment will not be hard. It will do their business
+no manner of harm to make it conform to the general welfare. But one way
+or the other, conform it must.
+
+The overshadowing question before the American people to-day is this:
+Shall the Nation govern itself or shall the interests run this country?
+The one great political demand, underlying all others, giving meaning to
+all others, is this: The special interests must get out of politics. The
+old-style leaders, seeking to switch public attention away from this one
+absorbing and overwhelming issue are pitifully ridiculous and out of
+date. To try to divert the march of an aroused public conscience from
+this righteous inevitable conflict by means of obsolete political
+catchwords is like trying to dam the Mississippi with dead leaves.
+
+To drive the special interests out of politics is a vast undertaking,
+for in politics lies their strength. If they resist, as doubtless they
+will, it will call for nerve, endurance, and sacrifice on the part of
+the people. It will be no child's play, for the power of privilege is
+great. But the power of our people is greater still, and their
+steadfastness is equal to the need. The task is a tremendous one, both
+in the demands it will make and the rewards it will bring. It must be
+undertaken soberly, carried out firmly and justly, and relentlessly
+followed to the very end. Two things alone can bring success. The first
+is honesty in public men, without which no popular government can long
+succeed. The second is complete publicity of all the affairs in which
+the public has an interest, such as the business of corporations and
+political expenses during campaigns and between them. To these ends,
+many unfaithful public servants must be retired, much wise legislation
+must be framed and passed, and the struggle will be bitter and long. But
+it will be well worth all it will cost, for self-government is at stake.
+
+There can be no legislative cure-all for great political evils, but
+legislation can make easier the effective expression and execution of
+the popular will. One step in this direction, which I personally believe
+should be taken without delay, is a law forbidding any Senator or Member
+of Congress or other public servant to perform any services for any
+corporation engaged in interstate commerce, or to accept any valuable
+consideration, directly or indirectly, from any such corporation, while
+he is a representative of the people, and for a reasonable time
+thereafter. If such a law would be good for the Nation in its affairs, a
+similar law should be good for the States and the cities in their
+affairs. And I see no reason why Members and Senators and State
+Legislators should not keep the people informed of their pecuniary
+interest in interstate or public service corporations, if they have any.
+It is certain such publicity would do the public no harm.
+
+This Nation has decided to do away with government by money for profit
+and return to the government our forefathers died for and gave to
+us--government by men for human welfare and human progress.
+
+Opposition to progress has produced its natural results. There is
+profound dissatisfaction and unrest, and profound cause for both. Yet
+the result is good, for at last the country is awake. For a generation
+at least there has not been a situation so promising for the ultimate
+public welfare as that of to-day. Our people are like a hive of bees,
+full of agitation before taking flight to a better place. Also they are
+ready to sting. Out of the whole situation shines the confident hope of
+better things. If any man is discouraged, let him consider the rise of
+cleaner standards in this country within the last ten years.
+
+The task of translating these new standards into action lies before us.
+From sea to sea the people are taking a fresh grip on their own affairs.
+The conservation of political liberty will take its proper place
+alongside the conservation of the means of living, and in both we shall
+look to the permanent welfare by the plain people as the supreme end.
+The way out lies in direct interest by the people in their own affairs
+and direct action in the few great things that really count.
+
+What is the conclusion of the whole matter? The special interests must
+be put out of politics. I believe the young men will do it.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  AMERICAN REVOLUTION, Economic Results of,
+    Daughters of,
+
+
+  BETTER TIMES ON THE FARM,
+  BUSINESS AND POLITICS, Unholy Alliance,
+  BUSINESS PROBLEM, A,
+
+
+  CHILDREN AND PATRIOTISM,
+  CITIZENSHIP AND PUBLIC SPIRIT,
+  CIVILIZATION, Essentials of,
+  COAL, Resources,
+    Waste in Mining,
+    Necessity of Civilization,
+    Control of,
+  CONGRESS, Loss of Confidence in,
+  CONSERVATION, Means Prosperity,
+    of Public Lands,
+    Nation's first duty,
+    Principles of,
+    Misconceptions about,
+    and the Future,
+    First Principle of,
+    Covers Wide Field,
+    and Common Sense,
+    of Waterways,
+    President Roosevelt's Views,
+    a Business Problem,
+    Key-note of,
+    Foresight,
+    Welfare of Average Man,
+    a Democratic Movement,
+    Danger to,
+    Woman's Work for,
+    and Patriotism,
+    Economic Side of,
+  CORPORATIONS, Strategy of
+  COST OF LIVING, Increase of,
+  COUNTRY LIFE, Problem of,
+
+
+  DAUGHTERS OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION,
+  DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, Scope of,
+  DESTRUCTION, Period of,
+  DIVIDENDS FOR THE PEOPLE,
+
+
+  EDUCATION, Object of,
+  EFFICIENCY, National,
+    Lack of Tradition of,
+  EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, The Real Issue,
+  EROSION, Losses from,
+    Soil,
+
+
+  FARMER, Backbone of the Nation,
+    Organization and Coöperation,
+  FARMS, Abandonment of,
+  FORESIGHT, A Conservation Principle,
+  FORESTRY, Beginning of Conservation,
+    Leads Conservation Fight,
+    Pennsylvania Association,
+  FORESTS, Duration of Supply,
+    Perils of Exhaustion,
+    Fires, Control of,
+    and Rivers,
+    Minnesota National,
+  FOREST SERVICE, Value to the West,
+    and the Law,
+    Powers of,
+    Attacks on,
+    and Publicity,
+  FRANCHISES, Limits on,
+  FUTURE, Disregard of,
+    and Conservation,
+
+
+  GOLDEN RULE AND POLITICS,
+  GOVERNORS, Convention of,
+  GRAZING, Evils of Overgrazing,
+
+
+  HOME-BUILDING FOR THE NATION,
+
+
+  IRELAND, Agricultural Coöperation in,
+  IRON ORE,
+  IRRIGATION, Value of,
+    Better Times on the Farm,
+
+
+  LAND HUNGER,
+  LAW, Not Absolute,
+    Forest Service and the,
+
+
+  MARSHALL, Chief Justice, Opinion,
+  MINERAL FUELS, Waste of,
+  MINING, Wastes in,
+  MINNESOTA NATIONAL FORESTS,
+  MISSISSIPPI, Plan for Development of,
+  MONOPOLY, of Water Power,
+    of Natural Resources,
+  MORAL ISSUES INVOLVED,
+
+
+  NATION, Preservation of,
+    Conservation first duty of,
+    Home-building for the,
+  NATURAL RESOURCES, Development of,
+    Water,
+    Monopolization of, Moral Wrong,
+    Belong to the People,
+    Pillage of,
+
+
+  OVERGRAZING, Evils of,
+
+
+  PATRIOTISM AND CONSERVATION,
+    Children and,
+    A New,
+  PENNSYLVANIA FORESTRY ASSOCIATION,
+  PITTSBURG SURVEY,
+  POLITICS, Golden Rule and,
+    Protest Against for Revenue only,
+  POPULATION, Forecast of,
+  PRIVATE INTERESTS, Water Power and,
+  PROPERTY AND VOTING POWER,
+  PROSPERITY, The Basis of,
+    Destruction of,
+  PUBLICITY, Forest Service and,
+  PUBLIC LANDS, Conservation of,
+    Evils of Present System,
+    Menace of Tenantry,
+  PUBLIC MORALITY, New Standard,
+  PUBLIC SPIRIT, Fostering of,
+    Roosevelt and,
+    and the "Bosses,"
+    and Citizenship,
+
+
+  RESOURCES, Not Inexhaustible,
+  RIVERS AND FORESTS,
+    Unit from Source to Mouth,
+  ROOSEVELT, President, Home-making Policy,
+    Message,
+    The Common People,
+    and Conservation,
+    Thanks due to,
+    and Young Men,
+    Policies, The,
+    and Public Spirit,
+
+
+  SOIL EROSION,
+  SPECIAL PRIVILEGES, Danger of,
+    Victims of Grab System,
+    Must be Driven out of Politics,
+  SQUARE DEAL, Doctrine of,
+  SUCCESS, Conditions of,
+
+
+  TARIFF, a Tool to Increase Cost of Living,
+  TENANTRY _vs._ FREEHOLD, Menace to Public Lands,
+
+
+  UNITED STATES, Destiny of,
+    Crisis and History of,
+
+
+  VOTING POWER, Property and,
+
+
+  WASTE, Prevention of,
+    in Mining Coal,
+    Period of Destruction,
+  WATER-POWER TRUST,
+    Monopoly,
+    and Private Capital,
+    Grants in Perpetuity,
+    and Private Interests,
+    Control of,
+    Sites,
+  WATER RESOURCES,
+  WATERWAYS, Development of,
+    Conservation of,
+  WOMAN'S WORK FOR CONSERVATION,
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Fight For Conservation, by Gifford Pinchot
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11238 ***