CHAPTER V
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:
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:
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
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 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
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 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.