IncreasesWealth1870 to 1890116.0%1890 to 190465.0%Foreign Trade1870 to 189099.0%1890 to 190885.4%Value Manufactured Product1870 to 1890121.0%1890 to 190558.0%Net Ordinary Exp. U. S. Govt1870 to 18901.4%1890 to 1908121.4%Expenditures of 30 States1890 to 1909201.6%
This debauch of capital and credit has sent a poison circulating through the veins of the Nation. Everywhere the individual imitates the profligacy of his Government. Industry and saving are at a discount. Any luxury, any extravagance is warranted if funds for it can be raised by wasting capital or creating debt. There is just so much less money for productive employment: for payrolls and the extension of commerce and industries, and the creation of those new facilities for want of which the commerce of the country is and always must be limited (applause). Hence come also high prices, curtailment of business, distrust, and eventual distress. Hence come waste and idleness, and the increased cost of production that makes both business and employment slow and insecure. Any Conservation movement worthy of the name must place high upon its program the saving of capital and credit from the rapacious hands of socialist as well as monopolist (applause). Extravagance is undermining the industry of this country as surely as the barbarians broke down and looted thatmighty empire with whose civilization and progress Ferrero repeatedly insists that ours has so much in common.
We must stand for Conservation everywhere; in the tedious as well as in the interesting application; where it cuts into our pleasure and habits, and jostles our comfortable, easy-going ways of thought, just as firmly as where it is hand in glove with self-interest. This is, above all things, an economic question. It is neither personal nor political. In such petty and partial interests it has found its worst obstructions and encountered its most serious reverses.
The tariff in some respects is a great enemy of Conservation (applause). Whatever we may think of it as a general industrial policy, everyone can see that, by excluding the raw products of other countries, it throws the entire burden of their consumption upon our own resources, and thus exhausts them unnecessarily (applause). This appears clearly when we consider such commodities as we might obtain from Canada, a country that gained nearly 400,000 immigrants from the United States in the nine years up to April, 1909, and has probably taken another hundred thousand since; a country where it is absurd to talk about any actual advantage in the wage scale as compared with our own. The tariff on forest products cuts down our own forests, a tariff on coal depletes our mines, a tariff on any raw material forbids the conservation of similar natural resources here. (Applause).
This Congress announced from the first its purpose to deal with the subject of Conservation in a practical spirit. The present condition of the movement, now in the third stage of its development, demands it. We have to apply the Conservation principle, as we have eventually to apply every other, to our domestic economics; to work it out in the experience and practice of everyday life. How this may be done can be stated in the form of a few conclusions that raise the word Conservation from the name of a more or less vague, diffuse, and disputable theory to that of a practical guide to legislation and administration. (Applause)
Conservation is wholly an economic, not in any sense a political principle (applause). The Nation has suffered and still suffers so much from transferring other economic questions to politics that the mistake should not be repeated (applause). Whoever attempts to make Conservation the bone of a personal controversy or the beast of burden to carry any faction into power or popularity is its worst enemy. (Great applause)
"Conservative" is the adjective corresponding to the noun "Conservation." Any other attitude toward this movement, either radical or reactionary, is treason to its name and to its spirit. It should mean no more and no less than dealing with our resources in a spirit of intelligence, honesty, care for both the present and the future, and ordinary business common sense. (Applause)
Conservation does not mean forbidding access to resources that could be made available for present use. It means the freest and largest development of them consistent with the public interest and without waste. A bag of gold buried in the earth is useless for any purpose. So is an acre untilled, a mine unopened, a forest that bars the way to homes and human happiness.
The determination in each case as to what extent a given resource should be utilized and how far reserved for the future is an intensely practical, individual, and above all a local question. It should be carefully considered in all its aspects by both Nation and State, and should finally rest within lines determined by proper legislation, as far as may be under the control of local authority. (Applause) Experience proves that resources are not only best administered but best protected from marauders by the home people who are most deeply interested and who are just as honest, just as patriotic and infinitely better informed on local conditions than the National Government can possibly be. (Applause) It is clear that every one of the many problems all over the country can be better understood where they are questions of the lives and happiness of those directly interested.
Behind this, as behind every great economic issue, stand moral issues. Shall we, on the one side, deny to ourselves and our children access to the same store of natural wealth by which we have won our own prosperity, or, on the other, leave it unprotected as in the past against the spoiler and the thief? Shall we abandon everything to centralized authority, going the way of every lost and ruined government in the history of the world, or meet our personal duty by personal labor through the organs of local self-government, not yet wholly atrophied by disuse? Shall we permit our single dependence for the future, the land, to be defertilized below the point of profitable cultivation and gradually abandoned, or devote our whole energy to the creation of an agriculture which will furnish wealth renewed even more rapidly than it can be exhausted? Shall we permit the continued increase of public expenditure and public debt until capital and credit have suffered in the same conflict that overthrew prosperous and happy nations in the past, or insist upon a return to honest and practicable economy? This is the battle of the ages, the old, familiar issue. Is there in the country that intelligence, that self-denial, that moral courage, and that patriotic devotion which alone can bring us safely through? (Applause)
I ask these questions not because there is any doubt of the answer in the minds of the American people, but that it may be made plain what a complex fabric the fates are weaving from the apparently commonplace happenings of our peaceful years, and how each generation and each epoch must render an account for the work of its own days. The unprecedented dignity of this assemblage, its nationally representative character, the presence here of those upon whom greatoccasions wait, the interest felt by millions who look to it for information and guidance, prove how deep beneath the surface lie the sources of its existence and its influence. Out of the Conservation movement in its practical application to our common life may come wealth greater than could be won by the overthrow of kingdoms and the annexation of provinces; National prestige and individual well-being; the gift of broader mental horizons; and, best and most necessary of all, the quality of a National citizenship which has learned to rule its own spirit and to rise by the control of its own desires. (Great applause)
ChairmanClapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: One among the recognized agencies for the spread of information in relation to our agricultural development is a paper published in Iowa by Mr Henry Wallace, who is known to us all. A discussion will now be led by Mr Wallace, and I take great pleasure in presenting him to this assemblage. (Applause)
MrWallace—Mr Chairman, and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congress: I have been asked to discuss the subject opened up by my old friend—and your friend—Mr James J. Hill.
With very much that he has said, I most heartily agree. He speaks on these and other subjects "as one having authority, and not as the scribes." While listening to him I have been trying to get in my own mind a clear conception of certain fundamental questions that have been discussed at this Congress, and around which the discussion turns. I have been trying to put them in form, pointing out where he and I can agree and where we differ.
I have come to the conclusion that a man has what he had, if he hasn't sold or contracted to sell it, or allowed somebody to steal it; that the United States has the resources that are now in the name of the United States and not under contract to be delivered, and not sold—or stolen—either in compliance with the letter of the law or in violation of both letter and spirit. In other words, there are certain assets or resources that we have and hold; and we all agree that the owner is entitled to the management and use of his assets (applause), and therefore that the people of the United States, as a people, are entitled to the use of whatever resources we may have remaining (applause). They are not for the benefit of any one man or any combination of men (applause), neither of any State (applause) or combination of States (applause), but for the whole people; therefore we can sell our coal lands or keep them. We will be wise if we keep them (applause). We can sell our forests, or say how they shall lie used, or we can let somebody steal them. We can hold on to our phosphate (and there is very little of these United States that won't be buying phosphates in fifty years) or we can let somebody control and ship it to Europe, to enable the Belgians and the Germans to grow 32 bushelsof wheat to the acre while we grow 13 (applause)—and by means ofourphosphates. Using the language of the President the other day to outline the management of these resources (and he has done it better than any other man I ever knew), we can lease the lands, we can control them, we can prescribe how they shall be used. This much we all agree upon. And we will further agree that the Congress of the United States, our Representatives, must decide how it shall be done.
We can do one of three things: We can deed these lands and these resources to the States, to be used as they think best. We can abdicate our sovereignty—perhaps modifying that to some extent, we can outline what the States shall do and what they shall not do, but that will involve abdicating our sovereignty and will lead to perpetual quarrels between the States (applause), such as now existing, for example, between Colorado and Kansas as to the use of water. Or, as Canada does, as Germany does, as Australia does, as Tasmania does, we can hold to those resources and lease them for money for the benefit of the whole people. (Applause)
Now, my good friend Mr Hill seems to have grave doubts as to the capacity of the United States to handle its business with anything like the same skill with which he handles his (laughter and applause). He tells us that this Reclamation Service is costly—thirty, forty, or fifty dollars an acre, to be paid in ten years without interest—for what? To be able to make it rain just when we want to, and stop it when we want to; that is what irrigation is (applause). And Mr Hill would give five dollars an acre for twenty years if for all time and eternity he, his descendants and his assigns, could make it rain when he wanted to and make it stop when he wanted to (applause). Next to the owner of a quarter-section of land in Iowa I think that the man who owns fifty acres of irrigated land at fifty dollars an acre is a prince of the blood royal (applause and cry of "Good!"). It is the cheapest land in the United States, in the center of the highest civilization, the best education and the best schools. Mr Hill tells us also that the United States (I guess it was Solomon he had in his mind: he was the brother of a great waster) has received $400,000,000 or so for its Indian lands—he didn't know how much it cost to acquire them (millions, however)—and that he doesn't know what has become of the money. Well, I found since yesterday where some of it went—to this dam over here between Minneapolis and Saint Paul (great laughter and applause). He tells us that States are more economical than Nations. Now, isn't it a matter of fact that both State and Nation have been playing the part of the prodigal son, wasting our substance in riotous living—and that now we smell the husks?
Gentlemen, the agricultural colleges have wasted a good deal of money. The State of Iowa had a great grant of land for improvement, and I give you my word you could run the whole thing througha barrel if you had enough headway. We have been absolutely throwing away our resources—just like some of our wealthy gentlemen down in New York throw their daughters in the face of titled Nobodies asking them to take them "with the compliments of the author" (laughter). If this country continues to be governed, as it has been governed for the last twenty years, by great combinations of capital that get together in Congress or out of Congress to determine how much tariff they will levy and what else they may do in the way of getting hold of the public domain, it doesn't make a speck of difference whether our resources are governed by the Government or by the States; they will all be stolen anyhow (laughter and cheers, and cries of "Hit him again!")—just as they have been in the past. (Renewed applause)
A Voice: Conservation ought to have been started a hundred years ago.
MrWallace: You're right. But if the people of the United States have made up their minds that they are going to be in the future a Government "of the people by the people and for the people"; if we mean this in blood earnest (applause) and are willing to sacrifice our party affiliations (cries of "Good, good, good!"); if we are willing to pay money to attend conventions, without going on passes (cries of "You bet!" and cheers); if we are willing to make the sacrifices which always belong to a free government (applause)—then predatory wealth will no longer sit in the seats of Congress, and we shall have a democracy, a Government of the People instead of a Government of Plutocracy. (Applause and cheers)
Gentlemen, it is just a question whether we have the stuff in us to really be a great self-governing people, a Nation that stands four-square to every wind that blows, that regards a law of the Almighty as supreme law and right and the only manhood worth having as that which comes in obedience to those great laws that govern men in all nations of the world (applause and cheers); it is a question whether we will pay the price for the liberties that our fathers gave us. (Applause)
Now, with about everything that my good friend Mr Hill has said on the conservation of soil fertility I most heartily agree. I get an idea about once a year (laughter), and am able to put it in a way that seems fairly good to me: and for some time past I have been brooding over the thought that the great problem before the American people—a problem involving all other problems that vex us, tariffs, Conservation, trusts, everything—that the great problem we have before us ishow to keep enough skilled labor on the land to enable the farmer to sell his products to the city at a price the people can afford to pay. Now, just let that soak into you (applause). The problem is to keep enough skilled labor on the farm to enable the farmer to grow the food for this and other nations at a price that the peoplein the cities can afford to pay. It is the biggest problem before us. It involves all other problems, when you come to trace it down to its roots. The farmer is handicapped by the fact that he no longer tills virgin soil, as his father and his grandfather did, and by the fact that he no longer has timber at his door. We have wasted our magnificent forests of oak and walnut, and given away an empire (for example, in Wisconsin) of the best pine lands that some fellows would put a road through, to get the lumber out under pretense of resisting a Canadian invasion (laughter and applause). Today we are buying fertilizers for all New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, southern Indiana, all the South, and even for Missouri; it is only a question of time when we shall have to buy them for all our land. Notwithstanding all of the millions of acres that have been put into cultivation every year, our crop production lags behind our population. In the last ten or fifteen years, our production of wheat per acre gradually but slowly decreased until within the last three or four years, when with my friend Secretary Wilson's help we began to do a little better.
The farmer is handicapped by the fact that he is tilling a partially infertile soil; he is handicapped worse in this way: he cannot possibly get, for love or money, the really skilled labor required to maintain the fertility of the soil while he is growing crops (applause). Why, you know how difficult it is in the country to get a hired hand, and you know that a hired girl in the home is a thing out of the question. There isn't a man here ugly enough, if he is a widower, but what could get two second wives where he could get one hired girl (laughter and applause). Now, we cannot use the labor of the city. Let a man go to town and become a lawyer or a doctor for ten or fifteen years, and then return to the country, and what is he good for? He has to serve an apprenticeship for four or five years before he is worth his board. We cannot use the labor of southern Europe except in the wheat fields or in the orchards; farm labor now isskilledlabor; and we haven't got it. One reason we haven't got it is because my friend Mr Hill has been giving excursion rates up to Canada (laughter and applause)—for the benefit of his railroad, he says—and for the benefit of speculators who can paint a desert to look like the Garden of Eden, and make farmers believe that it is like the land of Egypt "as thou goest unto Zoar." If we could keep on the farm the boys and girls that grow up there we could give the people of the cities food at a price they could afford to pay; but there is the great problem. I will not solve it now, because I would have to discuss the tariff (laughter) and every other blooming thing that allures men to town—including high wages and easy times.
Today the townsman is in trouble. The fact is that he cannot get the farmer's products at anything like the price the farmer ought to have (Voice: "Now you're talking"). The farmer never gets morethan two-thirds (Voice: "If he gets that"); frequently he gets one-third. Out in Fresno, California, we found they made a first-class rate at four cents on what I was paying sixteen cents for; the railroad got four cents, the wholesaler four, the retailer four, and the farmer four—and I pay sixteen. And there is another trouble (I am one of the unfortunates so I look at both sides of the question): the farmer in town pays 16 percent, so the merchants tell me, for the privilege of ordering goods by telephone instead of going to the market and getting them; and that is another reason he has to pay so much. But there is still another matter with the city man; it is not so much the high cost of living as the cost of high living and prosperous times (I borrowed that from Mr Hill); for the man in town now isn't satisfied to live as his father did, or his grandfather, or as he himself did ten or twenty years ago (applause). Why, he wants strawberries from Texas in February, and he wants green peas from Florida, and he wants fresh eggs at the time when hens don't lay, and he wants spring chicken in the coldest weather—and he gets it, but it comes out of cold storage (laughter). That is one reason why the townsman cannot get farmer's products at the price he can afford to pay.
Let us look a little further—but I must not detain you (Cries of "Go on, go on, go on"). This problem has been growing on us for years; ever since the iron rail and steam and electricity enabled us to build cities far remote from the lake or the river or the ocean, ever since we learned to get gold out of quarries instead of out of river sand, ever since human power was multiplied by machinery, ever since railroads netted the country with their systems: there has been a tendency to the development of great cities and a constant decrease in the number of men that work on the farm. We don'tthinknow as we used to, because improved machinery (in most cases invented by farmers) has enabled the farm boy of fifteen years of age to do the work of eight or ten men—and at the same time has enabled him to rob the land more effectively than ever before. And this problem would have been met long ago if it had not been right here in this Mississippi valley there is the finest slice of land that the Lord ever made, to be given away by our benevolent Uncle Sam partly to the farmers and partly to the railroads—a country that needed neither spade nor axe to fit it for the plow; for the last twenty years we have been breaking it, mining it, robbing it, and selling its fertility to enable men in the great cities to live cheaply in the Old World and in this country (applause). The people of Kansas invited my good friend Secretary Wilson and me down there to talk about agriculture, and in going from our hotel to the place of meeting we actually fell over bags of bran that were put out there to send to Denmark to make butter and cheese to come back and be eaten in Kansas (laughter). This is the way we have actually been selling, piecemeal, our fertility. Why, you men remember when corn was sold at 15 and even 10 centsa bushel, and oats at 101/2—I myself have sold wheat at 38—lower than the cost of production. The people in cities all over the world have an idea that it was foreordained from all eternity that they should have cheap foods, but they are now waking up to the fact that we have been postponing the day of judgment by selling foodstuffs for about what the fertilizers would cost, if we had to buy them, to provide bread and meat for the hungry nations. We have sold the buffalo grass on the prairies to the people of Europe, in the shape of beef, dirt cheap; we have built up great cities and States; and the people have all the while thought that cheapness was normal, whereas we are now just getting to the normal basis. For twenty years I could buy bread made from American wheat, in the country on the farm, for three cents a pound, and now I pay five cents in town—and don't get as good bread at that.
The real problem is,how we are going to furnish bread to the people at a price that they can afford to pay? I have no hand-me-down solution for that; it is the biggest problem that I know of, and I can venture only some suggestions. First, we can add a little to our production through irrigation. That is a slow process, and limited at best. We can add some more by drainage. We can add a good deal to the yield per acre by better methods of farming. But we are limited, as I have said, largely by the lack of skilled labor. The merchant, the city man, if he is to live on his income, must improve his system of distribution; he must in some way or other, get rid of the go-betweens. Some things will have to be done by railroads and some by Congress, and a number of things will have to be done that they will all saycan'tbe done—I'm tired of that story, that youcan'tdo anything. Our railroad friends have told us that we can't pass interstate commerce laws, it's unconstitutional; that wecan'tstop the giving of passes and rebates, that it's unconstitutional. Now, we have done all those things.The people of the United States can do anything that is right!(applause), though they can't permanently succeed in doing wrong (applause); and these things we have been told wecan'tdo wehave done, and everybody says it is right. Sometimes I take great comfort in watching some of our great "captains of industry," railroad magnates like Mr Hill. To see them you would imagine they had been reading the Psalms of David and saying, "It was good for me that I was afflicted; before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I love"—the Interstate Commerce Law (laughter). The trouble with them is that they turn round and oppose our railroad laws, and the measures brought up by the voice of the people, and insist that theycan'tbe enforced.
If the farmers are to sell their products in sufficient quantities to cities at a price that they can afford to pay, the calm and considerate judgment and the earnest cooperation of every class of our people are needed. We have problems before us that cannot be settled todayor tomorrow; they involve questions of deep statesmanship; and they never can be settled until they are settled right, on a basis that is just. And I have this faith in the American people, that notwithstanding all their mistakes and all their follies and all their extravagances and all their partisan differences, down at the bottom they are an honest people, they are an intelligent people, and they are a people that seem to have an instinct of danger and an instinctive perception of what is fundamentally and inherently right. (Prolonged applause)
MrHill—I want to apologize to Brother Wallace because I did not make myself entirely understood when I indicated that $50 or $42 or $45 an acre for Government-irrigated land is too high. He says that I would give $100—and I would, if I had to; but if that land were left with private enterprises, or if thepeople of the Statealongside of this $42 and $45 and $50 land were putting water on their land for $15, I wouldn't charge the settler $50 or $42. (Laughter and applause)
ChairmanClapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: There is a tradition in Washington that the present very efficient Secretary of Agriculture established the Department of Agriculture, because of his long service in that position. I have to dispel that illusion. Nevertheless his service has made that Department what it is today; and I take great pleasure in presenting to you Secretary Wilson. (Great applause)
SecretaryWilson—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I have enjoyed the two last speeches more than anything else I have heard since I have been here, although I have never attended a meeting anywhere that I can remember where there were so many big men who do things in the world. The greatest regret I have is that there must be more than a hundred men here well worth hearing who will not have opportunity to speak on account of lack of time.
Mr Hill and Mr Wallace have talked about things that I have not done. Fourteen years ago I went down to Washington with President McKinley to do something with the Department of Agriculture. I could see right well from tendencies that had originated some time previous a growing and a development that now at this present time have come to a head. I saw the necessity for Conservation of the natural utilities of this country, the necessity for Conservation of soils and forests and water-powers and all those things; and I went to work. I have never gone to Congress to get help or money without getting it at once. If I have failed to do something for agriculture, the fault is mine and not that of Congress, because they have never criticized me, except that I have not asked for enough money.
I have found it necessary to educate men, or to have them educated, along new lines. Search history as far back as you see fit to go, and you will find that there has been no education whatever for thefarmer. The classical education, so beautifully spoken about by our friend from Tulane University (President Craighead), is a beautiful education; but there is no agriculture in it. It is a difficult thing to change the education of a people; even our religion is interwoven, like our literature, with the old-fashioned classical education. The country was regarded as valuable and the professions went to the country to get new men because the old wore out in the town, and so the farm has always reinforced the professions; and the practice has gone on until today the American Navy is being reinforced even from the farms of Minnesota and Iowa. The average boy who lives in town knows too much about things he shouldn't know, and the boy on the farm or in the country knows little about the things that wouldn't do him any good if he did know them (laughter). My first problem was to organize a Department of Agriculture by training men to go safely where there were but few blazings through the woods.
Mr Hill and Mr Wallace have both spoken wisely of the soil. That is the source of our wealth. When our good people travel abroad, the farmer pays the bill; when you beautiful ladies purchase diamonds—and sometimes bring them back in your hats—the farmer pays the bill (laughter). Of course, since the Civil War the farmer has been keeping the balance of trade in our favor—has paid all our foreign debts, has paid the cost of our wars, has paid all the expenses of shipments to foreign ports; but a new day has come. While the farm has been producing considerably more and its area has been increasing, certain things have occurred that have a momentous influence on the present and on the future. We have not been producing so fast as we have been increasing in population; it costs too much to get breakfast and dinner and supper, and we eat three times a day. The serious problem which presents itself to us now is thatit costs too much to live. I never want to see the day come when the American workingman shall be reduced to the condition of the European who makes his dinner on bread alone and still lives. (Applause)
What are the prospects of getting cheaper food to eat? Do we want to bring men from Central America? They are diseased. Do we want to bring them from Mexico? They are not adapted to our climate. We do not care to bring them in much from Canada, because they have no corn up there, and don't eat that kind of food. I see some rays of hope in our leaden sky. The South has in the past suffered from a pest known as the cattle-tick which prevents the development of domestic animals, and they have not given us as much meat as we have shipped to them; but Congress gave my Department money to try to get rid of this tick, and we have been at work for three years and have cleared the pest from the equivalent of an area of three great States, 140,000 square miles (applause), and it will not be many years until all the South is cleared of the cattle-tick. Then the southern States will begin to contribute materially to our food production,because they have a mild winter, they have intelligent people, they have transportation systems; all they need is a little better system of agriculture. We have also been dealing with an invasion from Guatemala for some time, the boll weevil. The question was whether the poor people in that section could sustain life under the burden of this pest, and they came to my Department to go down and do something; and in checking the pest we are meeting the need for improved agriculture and increased production of foodstuffs.
There are two prominent ways of increasing the producing capacity of a people: First, there is Conservation demonstration (we shall be using this word "Conservation" in our prayers if we don't look out). (Laughter) Last year we had 12,500 boys in four southern States, all under sixteen years of age, each of whom grew an acre of corn—the South never grew as much corn in its history as it did last year—and some of those boys grew over 150 bushels to the acre (applause). They sold it at different prices. They were promised, as an encouragement, free tickets to Washington to see the President and the Capitol, and that the Secretary would give them diplomas. Well, I thought little about this until in marched the boys—looking very serious—each exactly like a man who is getting an LL.D. from a university. The first view of those boys was amusing, but the next one to me was very pathetic. A diploma, you know, is given to a man or a woman who does good work in a college course. Didn't the boy who grew 150 bushels of corn to the acredosomething? He did; he did the best there was in him; he put his will into the work. I signed the diplomas, and those boys went out as proud as any boys ever went away from a university. This year we have 50,000 boys in the southern States, each under sixteen years of age, each growing an acre of something, each getting lessons and hints in all directions from everybody that can give them, with regard to how to grow crops; we have 400 agents in the South.
Now let me tell you something. You will find in every northern and eastern and western State a minority of good farmers and, I am compelled to confess, a majority of poor farmers. They don't know how to farm; they have yet to learn. Where did bad farming begin, do you think? Why, back in the eastern States where they do everything well—except farming. Now where is there worse farming than there? I believe that the President of Tulane University used to live there; perhaps he can tell us. When I was a boy I went to church on Sunday and to prayer meeting in the middle of the week—I had to (laughter)—but they didn't educate the boys toward the farms; they educated them toward the professions, toward the mechanic arts, toward the factories. And when they were big enough and had an education they left the farm, they left the father and mother there, and by and by when the father and mother couldn't farm any more they rented out the farm—and today the same thing is beginningin Iowa. I can't tell you what is happening in Minnesota; you people who live here must be the judges whether the same robbery of the soil is beginning in Minnesota. A soil robber is a man who grows grain and hay to sell from the farm and puts nothing back; that is what he is, and that is where he originated—back East.
And we began manufacturing in our country at the time we began robbing our soil. The last half-century we have built up our manufactories at an astonishing rate. Why have we built them up so fast; why have they risen to such tremendous figures? Because our people were fed cheaper and better than the people who worked in factories in any other country. But what is the condition now? Are our people still better fed and more cheaply that work in the factories, that work for the railroads, that work in the mines? No! There is where the trouble comes; that is what has arrested the attention of our people. Every year, maybe oftener (Mr Hill could tell better than I can), the men that work for railroads notify the president that they want more wages because they can't live; and of course he has to raise their wages. While we were feeding Europe, there was no difficulty in getting cheap food here in the United States for our workingmen; but, as Mr Hill told you, and gave you statistics for it—it is pretty hard to follow a man like him, who has all the statistics, and Dr Wallace, who has all the philosophy and wit, but I will do the best I can (laughter)—we are sending less and less food to foreign countries and paying more and more for what our workingmen eat at home. We are not paying off debts any more, though our people are still buying diamonds and pearls—you see the rows we are having in New York when our traveling Americans come back, and want to get their jewels through the custom-house for nothing and hide them and all that; I have no sympathy with it—but we are not discussing the tariff here at all; I never talk politics and won't allow it; I have 12,000 men in my Department and every man knows I'll discharge him in a minute if he talks politics (laughter and applause); we are considering the natural resources of the country and trying to conserve them. (Applause and cries of "Good!")
As the Department grew we organized a bureau for animals, another for plants, one for forests, one for chemistry, and one for soils; and all along the line we have those great bureaus at work. We are the practical fellows who conserve; we are doing it every day. I have just been out among the forests myself four or five weeks, helping to save the Government's property out there. But the great question comes down to the soil. There is no classical college or university that teaches anything about the soil, not one single thing. From the time that Samuel had the school of the prophets at Bethel down to the present day, there never has been anything taught to the people with regard to the soil on which they walk and from which they get their living. I have organized a bureau for it. We are studyingthe soil all over the country. You might think, to go out on these beautiful prairies, that the soil is all alike. Well, it isn't; any prairie has probably a hundred different soils, some of them best adapted to grow one plant and some another, some needing one kind of treatment and some another; and the great fundamental question that we must study now is the American soil and its power to produce. (Applause)
With regard to the literature of the farm: There was none when I was a young fellow; there was no college for farmers. I had to get what I did get from observation and from a store of recollection of older men. But now we have an agricultural college in each State. We have an experiment station in each State. We have 3,000 men making research in the Department of Agriculture at Washington, all specialists, the foremost in their lines in the world. When one of those men makes inquiry into something and reports, we put his name to it and print it and send it out to the people without expense. We sent out 20,000,000 pieces last year (applause). And any of you who want anything we have, no matter whether you are farmers or not, you are welcome to it. Some of the best encouragement that we have comes from those who are not farmers at all.
I have told you of the genesis of the soil-robber; is he here in the Mississippi valley? The old-time farmer educated his children, but he educated them to do anything under the sun but farm. When the boy graduated, when he got through with his education, he went anywhere but to the farm. That was until within a few years the custom. The other day I wrote to the dean of the Iowa Agricultural College that several people had applied to me for men to superintend farms, and that a newspaper man wanted a farm expert to go into his office at a good salary, and asked—"How many young men do you graduate this year in a four-year agricultural course?" He replied, and I think he said "We graduated some seventy in a four-year course, but none of them left the State; they are all going back to the farm" (great applause and cry of "Good!"). Those men know something. Now, are you doing that in Minnesota? You have always had a fine agricultural school here connected with your State University, and you have an open door into the four-year academic course in the University; you are doing much for agriculture and education. Yet we are where we are today with regard to scarce food and dear meat because we didn't begin educating the young farmer sooner. But he is going to catch on. There would be a universal introduction of agricultural education into the common and secondary schools of the country if teachers could be found. That is the great difficulty. Fifty years ago, when Congress endowed agricultural colleges, that was the trouble. They could start the college, they could erect a building, but there was no library, there was no professor who knew anything about agriculture, and the great trouble is a man can only teach what heknows himself. But now, after half a century of effort on the part of the farmers, on the part of friends of the farms, on the part of far-seeing men like James J. Hill (applause), we are getting a creditable agricultural education in this country.
Do not be uneasy about the forests; at the last session, Congress gave me $400,000 more than they had ever given me before to take care of the forests. Do not be uneasy about the coal, the gas, the oil, and the phosphates; President Taft has withdrawn all those until Congress indicates what shall be done with them. But the soil, Gentlemen, the soil; the big price for meat, the big price for bread; these are things to study. Wecanimprove our soil. One of our speakers this afternoon told us that you cannot grow soil. I believe that, once you wash it away. But you can reduce it, beyond the point of profitable production of crops; that you can do, and that is being done. The soil-robber works in Iowa, and I fear he is at work in Minnesota. The old folks have gone to town; and the Lord knows nobody wants them there, because when you want to improve the town with gas and sewer and water and things of that kind, the farmer won't vote for them; he is regarded as a nuisance; everybody wishes he would stay on the farm, and I wish he would. And when the old farmer and his wife go to town, they sell off everything; they rent the farm to a man who has no means to stock it with cattle and sheep, hogs and poultry; he grows grain to sell, he grows hay to sell, and those farms grow worse and worse every year. That is the situation we are in. (Applause)
We are making some progress, some headway. The Government gave to the emigrant from abroad, to everybody who wanted it as long as they lasted, a claim in the rainy belt; but there are no lands left for giving away in the rainy belt. Something can be done in regard to our dry-land farming; something can be done in regard to irrigation. As Mr Hill intimated (in fact, he delivered a great deal of my speech), there is not much being done in the line of irrigation. Take a trip out West and watch the rivers as you cross them, and you will see that we are wasting far more water than we are using—though in certain neighborhoods in Colorado highly intelligent people are every year building more dams away up in the mountains and saving their winter and spring-flood waters. That is going on and on, and it should go on until all the waters in the mountains are saved for application to the land. Do you remember the history of irrigation in the valley of the Po, in Italy? There are more people to the square mile there than are found in almost any other part of the world. They began at the headwaters of the tributaries and built great dams to hold up the water to an amount suitable for the growing of crops, something like twenty inches or more; and they built on down to the mouth of the Po. Now when there comes a drought like we had this year, they let water out on the fields, and thus get a maximum crop. Without that extra water, at a time of drought their crop would wither and fail. Iunderstand Minnesota has more lakes, more natural reservoirs for holding water than any other State in the Union. Look to it, you Minnesota people; you can, by using that water in a dry year, grow maximum crops.
How do the people of the Old World raise big crops? If you followed Mr Hill's statistics you learned they didn't know as much there once as they do now, for they have raised their crop production from 20 to 30 bushels an acre. He also alluded to the Danes, who by good farming are enabled to sell enormous amounts of farm products. How do they keep that land up? I will tell you what a great many of them are doing. They buy mill-feeds from the United States; they buy bran and shorts, they buy the cottonseed of the South and the flaxseed of Minnesota, and feed their dairy cows. That is a highly intellectual job, isn't it, for an American citizen, to grow food for a Danish cow? But the Dane has his eyes open; heknows. He sells $40,000,000 worth of butter and cheese to England every year, but puts back all the fertility on the farm; and that is what has brought up his little fifteen-acre farm, or his forty-acre farm. He has brought it up by keeping and feeding his cows on our mill-feeds, mind you; and he is prosperous—and we are not so prosperous only because we rob ourselves.
A Voice—Bran doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in America.
SecretaryWilson—It is American bran, though. And let me tell you something else. The meats you grow up here cost hardly any more in Europe than they cost here, because the retailer over there hasn't got all the frills that the retail dealer has here, and is satisfied with a smaller profit. (Applause)
Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am merely outlining some of the remarks that I prepared and gave to the newspaper people; and I have no doubt you have listened to me as long as you care to (cries of "Go on, go on"). I have enjoyed my visit here. I am on record as saying that these northwestern States, beginning here and extending on west, are the healthiest we have; their waters are good; their climate is fine; they are going to grow vigorous men and handsome women. If we are going to have all their benefits you should conserve your soil, so that your great-grandchildren will have better soil than you have today. Down in Iowa, where I have lived for 46 years, the soil grows bigger crops today than it did fifty years ago; and it is still improving.
You have extended to me the greatest compliment a hospitable people can bestow on a stranger, and that is to give me your attention. I thank you. (Great applause.)
ChairmanClapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: We will now listen to a discussion by Honorable F. C. Stevens, Member of Congress from this district. (Applause)
RepresentativeStevens—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: You are fortunate this afternoon, so far as my discussion is concerned. I was assigned to discuss an address by Senator Dolliver, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, on the subject of "Cattle, Food, and Leather." We greatly regret the enforced absence of Senator Dolliver, because he is informed on that subject and could have given us a discussion of great benefit. I congratulate myself that I am not obliged to follow him, because I know too little about his subject. So I shall briefly discuss something I do know about.
In the very able address of Mr Hill, and in the very bright discussion of Mr Wallace which followed, there was a general criticism of Congress for undue expenditures of public money. I want to tell this audience that Congress, instead of being extravagant, is often unduly economical of the people's money. The money we spend is what the people want us to spend, and we do not spend nearly as much as they want us to. The estimates that were sent in by the heads of the departments (of which Secretary Wilson is one) aggregated nearly two hundred millions of dollars more than the expenditures which Congress authorized, and the estimates which came from the field officers to the heads of these great departments, for example, like that of Secretary Wilson; from the post-offices scattered throughout the country; from the officers of the War and Navy Departments, scattered all over the world; and from the officers of the State and other departments, were, I will venture to say, nearly two hundred million dollars more still: so that Congress actually did not spend more than two-thirds as much as the people of the United States in their respective localities wanted spent. There is not a single large convention in the United States similar to this—which is one of the most magnificent in the history of this section of the country—that does not call upon Congress for the expenditure of large sums of money, and I will venture to predict that the resolutions, which will be adopted by this Congress will call for a large appropriation from the National treasury. We have in Washington every year a Rivers and Harbors Congress, composed of 4,000 of the brightest, broadest, most patriotic business men of the United States, who go there as delegates, spend their own money to go, and then ask large expenditures from the people's treasury. Scattered all over this country, meeting probably in every State in the Union, are various voluntary assemblages of our People demanding various improvements by the Federal Government, and every one asking for expenditures of the people's money. You never yet have heard of a convention which has met anywhere at anybody's expense asking for a cutting down of expenditures. If there is any one man who is popular in the United States it is the man who calls for the expenditure of the people's money; the men who are the most unpopular, and are condemned and criticised in public life, are those who try to cut down the expenses and be economical with thepeople's money (applause). I think there ought to be some reform (and I have had some experience); weareextravagant; we do spend more money than we ought to, but it is spent honestly, it is spent with the best of intention, it is spent because the people want us to spend it, and we do not go nearly as far as they ask us to.
Just one suggestion more: It is easy to criticise and ridicule something that a man knows but little about, and I have noticed that in this discussion of Conservation each man is almighty anxious to conserve that which interestshim; and one of the latest examples of that was afforded by the statement of Mr Wallace in condemnation of the dam between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Now, in advance I want to state that I am not responsible for that dam; it was there before I entered public life. But there is one thing we are trying to do; we are trying to enforce the principle of practical Conservation, and I wish to call attention to that as a sample of ridicule sometimes seen in the discussion of a subject that really interests the people. The United States thirty years ago started, at the headwaters of the Mississippi, six of the largest storage reservoirs for water in the world, with a capacity of many thousands of millions of gallons of water, designed to improve the navigation of the river and raise it in times of drought eighteen inches here at the levee of Saint Paul. That enormous storage of water in the river should be utilized for the practical benefit of the people of the United States. That is the practical basis for all theories of Conservation. A board of engineers was ordered by Congress to make an investigation of the use of the dam at the Twin Cities, and they have reported that a dam can be built and it has been ordered by Congress and is under construction (it is the one ridiculed). It will be thirty feet high and will yield 15,000 horsepower of electrical energy, worth here $25 per horsepower-year, making a total value of $375,000 per annum, at an expenditure in all not to exceed $2,000,000. It will pay the United States the money that it invests in that dam. It is expected that the United States will sell, for a reasonable price, that electrical energy to the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota; these cities can be the best lighted in the world and save a hundred thousand dollars each annually (applause); and, more than that, we will have there the most beautiful lake in the world, extending from the historical falls of Minnehaha below to the great and beautiful University of Minnesota above. That is a practical example of Conservation (applause). Before any of these gentlemen come forward flippantly to ridicule the public works going on in any part of the country, they should realize that theremay besome things they don't know about. (Applause)
Only one suggestion more (because we all want to hear from Professor Bailey): It is easy to criticise Congress as a whole; it is fashionable to do it; Congress hasn't any friends anywhere; but just remember this: it is a necessary evil; it is the concrete voice ofninety millions of free American citizens; it is the only agency whereby these ninety millions of American people can accomplish their will and desire. We can only run a free Government by the rule of the majority; a majority of one is potent to control this whole great country; 51 percent are in favor of what that majority does, and, 49 percent claim the right to criticise and kick at what that majority does. As this is a free Government they have that right. Now, my friends, we must remember that what displeases us probably pleases 51 percent, and if we had the right to pass the very laws we wanted to on any subject, the chances are that our next-door neighbors, on both sides, would criticise and complain of us, just as we are now doing of other people. The only thing I wish to emphasize is that Congress tries to represent the whole American people, tries to make concrete the voice of the whole American people. It is human, the same as the people are; it makes the same kind of mistakes that the people make; and, after all, the people are responsible for Congress. I thank you. (Applause)
ChairmanClapp—Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now have an address on "Conservation in Country Life," by Dr Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dean of State Agricultural College, Cornell University, and Chairman of the Country Life Commission. It affords me great pleasure to introduce Professor Bailey. (Applause)
ProfessorBailey—Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Because of the lateness of the hour, and because of the very great treat which you have had this afternoon in the presentation of the fundamental questions of country life, I shall only call your attention to three or four topics which, perhaps, have not been touched by others who have spoken from this platform.
Two great economic and social movements are now before the country—Conservation, and Country Life. The Conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. The Country Life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. Both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. They rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore, are phases of a process in social evolution.
Not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also onsecuring greater quantity and variety of new products. These are finally the most fundamental movements that government has yet attempted to attack; for when the resources of the earth shall largely disappear or the arm of the husbandman lose its skill, there is an end of the office of government.
At the bottom, therefore, the Conservation and Country Life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation, and in the problems that are before them, they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. These complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, although articulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attached to each movement. The Conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore finds itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. The Country Life movement lacks these personal and political aspects.
These Subjects Have a History
Neither "Conservation" nor "Country Life" is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. The end of our original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. The need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has been depicted from the days of the classical writings until now. On this side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists and others among us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility, the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. So long and persistently have those of us in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coordinate importance of rural affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty. But there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep, back into human experience. It is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now met to discuss.
All really fundamental movements are the results of long-continued discussion and investigation, but it requires a great generalizer and organizer, and one possessed of prevision, to concrete scattered facts into powerful national movements. The one who recognized the existence of these questions, who saw the significance of the problems, who aided to assemble them, and who projected them into definite linesof public action was Theodore Roosevelt; and he himself has expressed our obligation in this Conservation movement to Gifford Pinchot. (Great applause)
The Conservation movement is now approaching its full; the Country Life movement is a slower and quieter tide, but it will rise with great power. These are the twin economic and social questions that the Roosevelt administration raised for our consideration. (Applause)
They are not party-politics subjects
I have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. I wish to enlarge this view. They are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. We must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. The subject must be approached by scientific methods. It would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. Every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than be made the arbitrary program, either one way or another, of a political organization. The Conservation principle is a plain economic and social problem rather than a political issue. (Applause)
The Country Life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. It will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution by non-political methods. The first recommendation of the Commission on Country Life is that the Government begin taking stock of rural life in order that we may have definite facts on which to begin a reconstructive program.
The soil is the greatest of all resources
The resources that sustain the race are of two kinds—those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. The former are the water, the air, the sunshine, and the mines of minerals, metals, and coal; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock. Intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. Even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. Beyond all the mines of coal and all theprecious ores, the soil resource is the heritage that must be most carefully saved; and this, in particular, is the country-life phase of the Conservation movement.
To my mind, the Conservation movement has not sufficiently emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion, and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice; but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening power of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. The course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands.
Thinner than the skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that man tills. Beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of the soft soil layer of the earth. We do not know that any vital forces pulsate from the great interior bulk of the earth. Only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. And yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life-principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves.
The general evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he abandons it and throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. We are accustomed to marvel at the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature—he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam and the energy of the electric currents, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. Man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth.
We can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. It is the one great earth resource over which we have dominion. The soil may be made better as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the Conservation of natural resources.
No man has a right to plunder the soil
The man who owns and tills the soil owes an obligation to his fellowmen for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellowmen owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that hewill not be obliged to rob the earth in order to maintain his life. The natural resources of the earth are the heritage and the property of every one and all of us. A man has no moral right to skin the earth, unless he is forced to do it in sheer self-defense and to enable him to live in some epoch of an unequally developed society; and if there are or have been such epochs, then is society itself directly responsible for the waste of the common heritage.
The man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own and he withholds food from the mouths of generations yet to be born. No man really owns his acres; society allows him the use of them for his life-time, but the fee comes back to society in the end. What, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? The pillaging or reckless land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders.
(I know that the soil-depletion idea is now challenged; but I am sure that the Conservation ideal must be applied to soil maintenance even as it is applied to other maintenance. If it transpires that plants hold a different relation to the soil-content than we have supposed, we still know that poor farming makes the land unproductive and that the saving of wastes is a desirable human quality; and we shall probably need to change only our phraseology to make the old statement broadly correct.)
I have no socialistic program to propose. The man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever (applause). When he knows, and when his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. When society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. We shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless he is able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it. (Applause)
It is a pernicious notion that a man may do what he will with his own. The whole tendency of social development is away from this idea. A person may not even have the full control of his own children: society compels him to place them in school, and it protects them from over-work and hardship. A man may not breed diseased cattle. No more should he be allowed wantonly to waste forests or to make lands impotent, even though he "owns" them. (Applause)
Ownership vs. Conservation
This discussion leads me to make an application to the Conservation movement in general. We are so accustomed to think of privilegedinterests and of corporation control of resources that we are likely to confuse Conservation with company ownership. The essence of Conservation is to utilize our resources with the least waste consistent with good progress, and with an honest care for the children of all generations.
While we not infrequently state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and then assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved, yet, in fact, the Conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. A corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. The individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists (applause), even though his operations compass a very small scale. The very fact that he is independent, with the further fact that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers—private property rights—insures his monopoly.
In the interest of pure Conservation, it is necessary to control the single man as well as the organized men. In the end Conservation must deal with the individual man—that is, with a person. It matters not whether this person is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm—if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender. We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? (Applause)
In the last analysis, as measured by the results to society, there is no essential difference between corporate ownership and individual ownership.
The philosophy of saving
The Conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best advancement in our own day. We have not developed much consciousness of saving when dealing with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the American has found himself so much in the midst of plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. As a question of public action, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. A high senseof saving ought to come out of the Conservation movement. This will make directly for character-efficiency, since it will develop both responsibility and regard for others.
Civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. Materials are brought from forest and sea and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is discarded or destroyed; more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable quantities and dumped wholesale, through endless sewerage and drainage systems, into the sea. It would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. We are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the ocean. (Applause)
The factories that fabricate agricultural products are likely to be midway stations in the progress of the fertility on its way to the sea. The refuse is dumped into streams; or if it is made into fertilizing materials, it seldom returns to the particular areas whence it came. A manufactory will expend any effort in improving its machinery and practice to enable it to get more material out of its products, but may do little or nothing to increase the production back on the farms. A sugar-beet or other factory may drain its country until the country can no longer raise the product; whereas, by developing a rational system of husbandry and returning the wastes, as in some European countries, it might maintain the land-balance. Any good milk-products factory should develop sound milk-making on the farms of the region, as any good canning factory should raise the standard of production in the fruits and vegetables that it uses; and this should always be done with the object of preserving and even increasing the land-power. A factory owes an obligation to the open country that supports it.
For these and for other reasons, the city always tends to destroy its province. The city takes everything to itself—materials, money, men—and gives back only what it cannot use or what it discards as useless: it does not constructively build up its contributory country.
City dwelling and country dwelling are the two opposite developments of human affairs. The future state of society depends directly on the finding of some real economic and social balance between the two, some species of cooperation that will build and serve them both. This is the fundamental problem of the social structure. Although city people and country people are rapidly affiliating in acquaintanceship, these poles of society are not yet effectively coming together cooperatively on economic lines. (Applause)
The Conservation of food
The fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. It has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thusfar, because the earth yet has a small population, and because there have always been new lands to be brought into requisition. We shall eliminate the plague and the devastations of war, and the population of the earth will tremendously increase. When the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem that we scarcely apprehend today.