Chapter XII: Part 12

Mr. BAKER—Pursuant to an announcement made from the stage at the opening of the afternoon session of the Congress this day, the members of the nominating committee met in room 775, Baltimore Hotel, at 3:00 p. m., and unanimously nominated the following officers for election for the ensuing year:

President, J. B. White.
Secretary, Thomas R. Shipp.
Treasurer, D. Austin Latchaw.
Recording Secretary, James C. Gipe.

The report is signed by the following nominating committee: Mr. B. N. Baker, Baltimore, Md.; Major E. G. Griggs, Tacoma, Wash.; Mr. A. B. Farquhar, York, Pa.; Mr. H. C. Wallace, Des Moines, Ia.; Mr. Henry S. Graves, Washington, D. C.; Mr. G. E. Condra, Lincoln, Nebr.

President WALLACE—You have heard the nominations. Is there a motion made to accept and approve the report of the committee?

Delegate BAKER—I move that the report be accepted.

Motion was duly seconded and, on being put to vote, was carried.

President WALLACE—I want to thank members of the Congress for their kindness to me. And I am going to make a confession now. I have been running a bluff on you, for I never in my life presided over any convention or association of more than thirty persons, and it is only by the marvelous patience that this Congress has shown and its endurance that I have been enabled to carry it through. I thank you, and I want to say that I do not believe the mantle could have fallen on a better man than Mr. J. B. White. (Applause)

President WHITE—I hope the election has been fair, if there has been an election. Has there?

Mr. WALLACE—Yes, sir, there has been an election and you are president.

President WHITE—Has the committee reported?

Mr. WALLACE—It has, and reported in favor of you, Mr. Shipp, Mr. Latchaw and Mr. Gipe.

President WHITE—This is a great honor, and I appreciate it very much, more than I can tell. I have been in politics before tonight, but not in this way. I will have to tell a short story. It will take less time to tell it than it did for the events to transpire. I have got to tell it straight because I see Governor Stone of Pennsylvania watching me. I was a candidate one time when I thought it was necessary for someone to represent some good principles. I published a newspaper. I owned a farm and a small saw mill, and I was nominated because I was a granger and because I had the reputation of being a laborer. I got the nomination of the Democratic party of my state, and the nomination of the National Greenback and Labor party of my county. Then the Prohibitionists met. They were not quite sure about me as a Prohibitionist, but they said that they would support me, and they would not put any ticket in the field against me. So that I had the endorsement of the Prohibitionists, the Greenbackers, the Labor party, and the Democratic party, but I did not have the Republican party because there was another man running in that party, and I had to have one opponent. The fight waxed warm. I drove all over the county, to every school house; I met the people, kissed all the babies in the county, and I was elected by a very large majority. It was not quite unanimous, but it was very large. This appears to be unanimous. And the next day after the election a gentleman came down from the township, I think, of Limestone, up above Warren on the Allegheny river. He came to see me, and said “I see you are elected.” “Yes,” I said, “I understand I am. It is very gratifying as it has been a very hard campaign.” “I came down to see Davis, the treasurer of this campaign fund,” he said. “Davis is in Warren,” I told him. “Well, I stopped off at Warren on the way down to see him and Davis was not to home. I spent $30.00 in this campaign and Davis said to come right down after election and get my money. I thought maybe you could pay it. You are elected, and I come down to see you.” “Let us see, what did you spend that money for? How did you spend it?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I told Davis I could carry Limestone Township. The way I done it was that I went and bought a ten-gallon keg of whisky, and I got down by the ferry. The lumberman and tie markers from up in that township had to go across the ferry. On the other side I put the keg of whisky in the ferry house. Every man that came along I says, ‘Come on, boys,’ and they came in to get their ferry tickets. And I says, ‘Here, have a drink,’ and I gave them a drink, and I gave them your ticket. I says, ‘Here is a ticket for White; go right over on the other side and vote, and then when you come back come in and get another drink.’ They went right, every one of them, and voted, and they were so anxious to come back and get another drink that they never stopped to talk with anybody. And that is the way we carried Limestone Township solid for you.”

I said, “Well, that is very gratifying, but you know, of course, I am somewhat of a candidate on the Prohibition ticket. I think you had better see Davis about this.” “Well, yes,” he says, “that is all right, I know; I knew you was a candidate also on the Democratic ticket, and I thought you might pay this out of Democratic money.” (Applause) So I think probably Davis fixed it without my knowledge. I will ask the retiring president to introduce to this audience Prof. Hopkins.

Mr. WALLACE—Permit me to say that Prof. Hopkins has done a wonderful work in the State of Illinois, and I have asked him to present the results of that work, or to tell us about worn-out soils. If your soils out in Kansas are not worn out, they will be unless you mend your ways. Now you want to listen to Professor Cyril G. Hopkins of the University of Illinois. (Applause)

Professor HOPKINS—As agriculture is the basis of all industry, so the fertility of the soil is the basic support of every form of agriculture. Without productive land there could be no American agriculture and no American prosperity. The most important material problem of the United States is to restore, to increase, and to permanently maintain the fertility and productive power of our farm lands. In comparison with this problem others fade almost to insignificance; and we do well to pause in the rush and hurry of our business life, to measure the agricultural record of the past and to consider the possibilities of the future.

I come before this National Congress of patriotic, progressive and influential men and women, not to present theories or opinions, but facts and data, which deserve and should command your immediate serious consideration and your subsequent persistent and effective action.

Intelligent optimism is right and admirable, but blind bigotry paraded as optimism is dangerous and condemnable. “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again; the eternal years of God are hers”; and this Congress has before it the duty and the right to uncover the facts, to face the truth, and to plan intelligently for the solution of this mighty problem.

That vast areas of land once cultivated with profit in the original thirteen states now lie agriculturally abandoned is common knowledge; and that the farm lands of the great corn belt and wheat belt of the North Central states are even now undergoing the most rapid soil depletion ever witnessed is known to all who possess the facts.

WHAT CROP STATISTICS SHOW.

The crop statistics of the United States now cover two twenty-year periods, and half a decade on the next. A comparison of these two periods shows the average acre yield in the United States to have increased only one bushel for wheat and one-half bushel for rye; while corn decreased one and one-half bushels and potatoes decreased seven bushels per acre. These crops constitute the basis of our human foods, even our supply of meat being largely dependent upon the corn crop. Thus, in spite of the vast areas of new land put under cultivation during the last twenty years, and in spite of the improvements in dredge ditching and tile drainage, in seed, and in implements and methods of cultivation, the average acre yield shows little or no increase. In striking contrast the census returns show an increase in the population of contiguous continental United States from thirty-eight million to ninety-two million people during the last forty years; and in spite of the fact that to feed our rapidly increasing population we have extended our area of cultivated crops beyond the humid and far into the semi-arid regions, and in spite of reducing our corn exports from 213 million to thirty-eight million bushels and our wheat exports from thirty-four to twelve million bushels during the last decade, nevertheless the most common topic discussed in recent years is the high cost of plain living in these United States.

These are American facts; and, while there need be no sensation, there is need for sense in their consideration. A few people can live on blind optimism or hot air, but something more substantial will be required to feed the progeny of ninety-two millions, and added millions of immigrants. It is said that the high civilization of the ancient Mediterranean countries went down into the Dark Ages with laughter—Dark Ages which covered the face of the earth for a thousand years and which still exist for most of our own Aryan race in Russia and in India, where more people are hungry day by day, and year by year, than the total population of the United States.

The problem which now confronts America is nothing less than the maintenance of prosperity for ourselves and of civilization for our children; for civilization depends upon education, and only a prosperous nation can afford the general education of its people. Poverty is at once helpless, and soon ignorant and indolent. An impoverished people cannot have adequate schools or schooling.

No greater problem ever confronted any nation than now confronts the United States, but the solution is plain: In a word, we must increase production and limit reproduction, especially the reproduction of the unfit. To solve half of the problem is not sufficient; and, in passing, I must emphasize the fact that, with the most practical scientific systems of farming applied to all the farm lands of the United States, there is still somewhere a limit to the highest possible production of food and clothing materials in this country; but there is no limit to the reproduction and increase of population except the starvation limit, already reached in Russia, India and China; unless the public sentiment of this Nation, in these times of education and general intelligence, will support the inauguration and enforcement of legal laws based upon the established natural laws of heredity.

Just and adequate legislation should be enacted by the Nation for the better control of immigration, and by the states for preventing the reproduction of every form of degeneracy, whether revealed by insanity, criminality, idiocy, deformity, or beggary. Half of all the state revenue is already required in many cases for the support of the non-productive degenerate classes, upon whose reproduction there is still no check in most states.

CROP YIELDS CAN BE DOUBLED.

That we can double the crop yields of the United States is not a prediction, but a fact. To say that millions of acres of abandoned farm lands in the older states can be restored and increased in productivity far above the present average for the $200.00 corn belt lands is merely to speak the truth. To accomplish these objects requires, first of all, that agricultural ignorance shall be replaced with agricultural intelligence in the minds of the people of influence in this nation.

Why should not every influential man and woman in America have a definite and quantitative knowledge of the basic principles that to increase and permanently maintain the productive power of our normal soils, in practical systems of farming, requires the addition to the soil and permanent maintenance of adequate supplies of only three important constituents, limestone, phosphorus, and nitrogenous organic matter?

The limestone is contained in measureless deposits in almost every state. All it requires is that it be quarried and pulverized and transported at a reasonable cost.

The phosphorus is contained in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana, in the greatest deposits known to the world. All that is required to utilize these great stores of phosphorus for soil improvement in good systems of general farming is to mine and finely pulverize the natural rock and transport it to the farmer’s railroad station at reasonable cost.

With abundant supplies of limestone and phosphorus thus provided, the nitrogenous organic matter can then be produced upon the farm by the growing of clover and other legume crops which have power to secure nitrogen from the inexhaustible supply in the air; and by plowing under this organic matter, either directly or in animal manures, the remaining essential mineral plant foods, such as potassium, can then be liberated and made available from the practically inexhaustible supply in the soil.

The man who is willing to study this subject will find that these facts are as true as the fact that the earth is round.

Normal land contains thirty thousand pounds of potassium in the plowed soil of an acre, and the air above contains seventy million pounds of nitrogen; and yet the most common commercial fertilizer sold to the general farmers in the older states contains both nitrogen and potassium, with a small amount of phosphorus. The average farmer who buys fertilizer at all merely accepts the teaching that reaches him, and as a rule this teaching comes through the fertilizer agents, who are now selling to the farmers of Indiana 900 different brands of fertilizers, and to the farmers of Georgia more than 2,000 different brands.

The result is that the ton of fertilizer for which the farmer pays $25.00 contains less than a hundred pounds of phosphorus, whereas he ought to receive and apply to his land a thousand pounds of phosphorus for the same money.

Phosphorus is the one element we shall always need to buy—phosphorus, the master key to permanent agriculture, permanent industry, and permanent prosperity in America; phosphorus, in which we are exporting, practically giving away, as a nation, a value which amounts to as much every year as the total value of all the timber on all the Federal lands.

In 1848, Sir John Lawes and Sir Henry Gilbert began at Rothamsted, England, an investigation to ascertain the effect of applying phosphorus to normal soil where a good crop rotation and a practical system of farming were followed. The Norfolk rotation, already well known at that time as one of the best rotation systems, was turnips, barley, clover and wheat. In these practical field experiments the turnips were fed on the land and the animal fertilizer thus produced returned to the soil, which was well supplied with limestone.

THE USE OF PHOSPHORUS.

During the next thirty-six years $29.52 worth of phosphorus was applied to one part of the field; and in comparison with another part of the field cropped and managed, the same, except that no phosphorus was applied, the $29.52 worth of phosphorus produced $98.02 increase in the value of turnips, $37.45 in barley, $48.93 in clover (and other legumes), and $45.99 increase in the value of the wheat. The total value of the crops grown on land not receiving phosphorus during the thirty-six years was $432.43 per acre, while on the phosphated land the crop values amounted to $662.82, an increase of $230.39 from an investment of $29.52 in phosphorus. These statements summarize the results of thirty-six years of careful investigation in practical farming on normal soil; but not one American in a hundred knows, utilizes, or imparts this information. Meanwhile the ten-year average yield of wheat in the United States is fourteen bushels per acre, while Germany’s average is twenty-eight bushels and England’s thirty-two bushels per acre; meanwhile the United States continues to export annually, for the paltry sum of five million dollars, a million tons of our best phosphate rock, carrying away an amount of phosphorus which, if applied to our own depleted and depleting soils, would be worth not five million, but a thousand million dollars, for the production of food for us for the oncoming generations of Americans.

As an average of twenty-four years of carefully conducted field investigations with a four-year rotation of corn, oats, wheat and clover on normal soil at the Pennsylvania State College, the addition of $5.04 worth of phosphorus increased the value of the four crops from $32.55 to $44.72; and a comparison of the two twelve-year periods reveals the fact that the average crop value per acre per annum decreased on unfertilized land under this rotation from $11.05 to $8.18, a decrease of 26 per cent in the productive power of the land. Meanwhile the average farmer, and even the average business man who owns a farm, allows the land to be depleted and decreased in acre yield because of the erroneous and widespread opinion that crop rotation will maintain the fertility of the soil; whereas the truth, as revealed by every long continued and trustworthy investigation, shows that the rotation of crops will no more maintain the fertility of the soil than the rotation of the checkbook among the members of the family would maintain the bank account.

The rotation of crops should, of course, be practiced, for it helps to avoid injurious insects and fungous diseases, and stimulates the soil to produce larger crops for a time, with the result, however, that the depletion of the essential plant food elements is even more rapid than if wheat were grown every year on the land.

In 1897 the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station began a field investigation on normal soil with a three-year rotation of corn, wheat and clover—and as an average of the next thirteen years, the application of eight tons per acre of farm manure increased the value of the three crops from $26.21 to $42.79, and the further addition of $1.20 worth of fine-ground raw rock phosphate increased the crop values from $42.79 to $53.28.

WRONG FERTILIZERS.

Meanwhile the farmers and landowners of Ohio continue, in the main, to use high-priced so-called “complete” fertilizers in the same systems of land ruin that led to the agricultural abandonment of much farm land in the older states.

As an average of nineteen years, the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment Station applied $14.45 worth of plant food, chiefly in organic manures and acid phosphate, which produced an average increase of $62.25 in the value of the crops in a three-year rotation of cotton, corn and cowpeas, oats and cowpeas, grown on the typical much exhausted upland soil of the South.

The average yield of cotton exceeded a bale to the acre for the nineteen years. Meanwhile the average yield for the Southern states is one-third of a bale per acre.

I have given you some of the cream of the world’s work in soil fertility investigations on normal soils, which need for their improvement phosphorus and organic manures, and sometimes limestone. Abnormal, or markedly different soils, require markedly different treatment.

Thus four plots of normal corn belt prairie soil in McLean County, Ill., produced, in round numbers, only twenty-two, twenty-six, twenty-two, and twenty-seven bushels of wheat per acre in 1911, although some of them had received nitrogen and potassium; while four other similar adjoining or intervening plots, which differed from these only by having been treated with $2.50 worth of phosphorus, in 200 pounds of steamed bone meal per acre per annum, during the past ten years, produced fifty-eight, sixty, fifty-four, and sixty bushels, respectively, of wheat per acre.

But on the peaty swamp soil of Kankakee County, with the same amount of phosphorus applied to several plots, the acre-yields of corn in 1903 were seven, four, five, and four bushels, respectively, on four separate plots, while on four other plots, which differed from these only by the addition of potassium, the yields were seventy-two, seventy-one, seventy-three, and sixty-seven bushels of corn per acre the same season.

Again, on the sand land in Tazewell County, Ill., four plots, including some treated with phosphorus and potassium, both singly and combined, produced eighteen, ten, eight, and eighteen bushels of corn per acre in 1906, while four other plots whose treatment differed from these only by the addition of nitrogen, produced the same season sixty-three, seventy-one, seventy-five, and sixty-six bushels per acre.

It is truly gratifying to acknowledge that the State of Illinois is now devoting $100,000 per annum to soil and crop investigations and the dissemination of the information secured, even though this is less than one per cent of the revenue of the state, all of which come directly or indirectly from the soil. It is also gratifying to acknowledge that, according to the crop statistics reported by the Federal Government and confirmed by the independent crop statistics of the Illinois State Board of Agriculture, the last ten-year average yield of corn for the State of Illinois is six bushels higher than during the twenty-five years before the agricultural experiment station began to exert an influence upon our agricultural practice, and also that a similar comparison shows three bushels increase per acre in the Illinois wheat crop—increases whose aggregate value for the state now exceeds twenty million dollars a year; and yet I must confess to you that as an average the farm lands of Illinois are yielding only half a crop; that by soil enrichment alone the average crop yields of Illinois could be doubled even with the same seed as we now plant, with the same amount and methods of cultivation and with our normal climatic conditions.

On one of our old experiment fields on the University of Illinois farm the latest three-year average yield of corn grown every year upon the same land is twenty-seven bushels, while in a crop rotation of corn, oats and clover the average corn yield for the same three years has been forty-nine bushels, and where proper soil enrichment is practiced in the same rotation the average yield of corn has been eighty-seven bushels per acre—all grown from the same seed, on the same kind of land, plowed and cultivated the same, warmed by the same sunshine and watered by the same rains.

All these are examples not of theory, but of fact—examples of fact which should be known and emphasized by all influential men and organizations. We talk of conservation, but 90 per cent of all the talk during the last five years about the conservation of natural resources has been directed toward 10 per cent of the resources. On the other hand, to improve and to save the soils of America will require more than talk. Thought and action are required, and the time for thought and action is already upon us. Not conservation of soil fertility; but amelioration of good soils, restoration of worn-out soils, and then permanent preservation of all soils.

WHAT REAL RECLAMATION MEANS.

Our reclamation of land must be more than the continued exploitation of so-called dry farming and irrigation on virgin soils and the drainage of virgin swamp lands; we must reclaim, in the truest sense of the word, the millions of acres of depleted and agriculturally abandoned lands lying at the door of our greatest markets and already favored with an abundant supply of unused water in the normal rainfall of our older states.

If 145 million dollars of federal funds can be wisely and profitably expended (and I believe they can) in providing irrigation for three million acres in the arid regions of the Far West, and if 300 million dollars can be expended annually to support our army and navy, as we are doing even in time of peace, then what should we do in comparison for the restoration or improvement of the 900 million acres of farm lands in this country? I would affirm and emphasize the fact that 145 million dollars, if wisely and economically used, would make a soil survey of every farm in the United States and furnish every farmer with definite and much needed information concerning the composition or invoice of fertility of every type of soil on his farm and proof of practical profitable methods for its improvement, and still leave an endowment whose income would support a permanent experiment field or demonstration farm in every county in every state.

Private enterprise has already put twelve million acres under irrigation in the United States, and the Federal Government has added one million and has projects concerning two million more. This is doubtless all good work and ought to go on, but the fact still remains that as a nation we are penny-wise and pound-foolish, with millions of acres of agriculturally abandoned lands in states surrounding the national capital.

The rapid investigation of the soils of every state should be inaugurated, and this should be accompanied by the wide dissemination of information by demonstration farms showing by actual field trial the most practical methods of soil improvement and preservation. This is local work and is best done by the state institutions directly responsible to their home people, while the Federal Government must direct and control the reclamation work on the federal lands. Because the revenue of the Federal Government is ten times the total or combined revenue of all the states, the federal appropriations to the state agricultural institutions should be largely increased for the specific purpose of increasing and extending the knowledge of practical methods for restoring and improving the fertility of the soil, and these increased appropriations might well be made in direct proportion to the acreage of farm lands in the respective states.

All public schools should offer practical scientific instruction in the principles of soil fertility, and every man and woman of mental power should acquire information and exert influence toward saving the soil, which is second in importance only to saving the soul. But the fact is that not one American in a hundred knows what the soils contain or what the crops require. They know of the rivers of Asia and of all the kings of England, and perhaps of the wars of Caesar and the orations of Cicero; but they do not know what is required to produce a grain of wheat or a kernel of corn. And yet there is as much of culture and more of use and value and of satisfaction in a study of clover roots and plant-food compounds than in Greek roots and Latin compounds; and I insist that the study of soil fertility is so simple and easy and so interesting that any man or woman of ordinary education can become master of the essential principles by studying the subject an hour a day for a single month.

President WHITE—Mr. Wallace will introduce Mr. F. D. Coburn, secretary of the Kansas Board of Agriculture, who will preside this afternoon.

Mr. WALLACE—You people in Kansas have all heard of Coburn (applause), the man who adorns, advises, and advertises the State of Kansas and the state of the West. Mr. Coburn will preside with you this afternoon. (Applause)

Mr. COBURN—President Wallace, I thank you for your kindly introduction. Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, and delegates: Your temporary chairman will base his claims to your charitable consideration this afternoon on the fact that he has no speech to make, and further will go on the assumption that the program which is provided him and for you will be carried out. I thank you. (Applause)

President WHITE—Ladies and gentlemen: The Missouri delegation is requested to meet immediately after adjournment. We will now listen to Dr. W J McGee, the well-known authority on soils, of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. (Applause)

DR. MCGEE—The relation of man to the earth on which he lives forms a worthy theme for those who think and base action on thought. As it is now, so it has been in every age; every early people had a creation epic: the noblest of all recounts that out of the dust of the earth God made man in His own image. The ancients gave chief thought to beginnings seen vaguely at the best; moderns to current processes which may be seen clearly and verified by repeated observation. In this way natural science arose; and under the guidance of Darwin naturalists learned that living organisms are controlled and perpetuated chiefly by the two factors of heredity and environment. Into this scheme of nature man entered, and through mental power gradually assumed control over lower nature; for man differs from other organisms in that he adjusts himself to his surroundings largely by reconstructing them. While still retaining heredity as a vital factor like lower living things, man is essentially an environment-shaping organism, and lives by doing. The factors of his existence are heredity and exercise, and it is his role in nature to reconstruct the face of the earth, to modify all other living things for the welfare of his kind, and finally, by growing knowledge, to progressively improve his own kind and ennoble humanity.

The conservation movement marks a step in human advancement; for it is a conscious and purposeful entering into control over nature, through the natural resources, for the direct benefit of mankind. In truth it means a revolution (arising, like all other beneficent revolutions, in clear thinking) against an old order of things, preparatory to the framing of principles on which a new order may arise; and in essence it reaches those fundamental relations between man and earth which have stirred deep thought and inspired high motives during all the generations of men. Conservation is no passing caprice, no fantastic whim of a day; the idea expressed by the term runs back to the mainsprings of human existence and of righteousness, and it is in no way surprising that it has already spread from sea to sea and found lodgment in millions of minds—albeit still as seed rather than in the full bloom and rich fruitage destined to follow as question grows into conviction and conviction into action.

THE PRESTIGE OF THE TREE.

As a vital factor in our national life, conservation began with forests used and destroyed several times faster than they grew. Now a tree is a noble object, a sacred thing; “the groves were God’s first temples”; the apple is the theme of earliest legend, and the vine and fig tree are emblems of domestic peace; the oak is the symbol of strength and the pine of perpetuity; the memories and affections of the happily born cluster about the old homestead trees under which their happiest hours were spent. And so the material argument for conserving forests was supported by deep-lying sentiment—and what obstacle can long resist the united assaults of profit and sentiment? Then as growing knowledge showed that the woods conserve the waters the force favorable to forests was further increased. At the critical time the prophet of the forest arose in Gifford Pinchot, and the gospel of conserving nature’s good for the Nation’s strength took form.

Even before the public conscience was awakened to the woodland waste the farm lands available for homesteads were nearly gone out of public possession, and a plan to eke out the supply by irrigating arid districts was framed by John Wesley Powell, soldier and scientist, whose grasp of the relations between man and earth was stronger than any other of his generation. His plan was extended and carried out by Frederick Haynes Newell, engineer and builder, one of the live leaders of the conservation movement. Thus Powell planted and Newell watered, and the wilderness blossomed; and the aspiration for an independent home-owning citizenry which shaped the Nation in its infancy, and then fell into neglect, was revived. The Reclamation Service virtually extended the habitable and productive area of the country; but its best gift was a re-awakened desire for homes on the land, a re-kindling of that home sense which is the mate of patriotism and handmaid of conservation.

Through genius fostered by stress of pioneering, this became a country of invention; and through plentitude of coal and wood and iron, manufacturing grew as never before, until the riches of one after another of the forests and coal fields and ore beds were exhausted. Meantime the contact of free citizens with nature—the common touch of man and earth—made this a country of science, and scientific surveys measured the mineral resources used and remaining for use. More than any other, Joseph Austin Holmes came up as the apostle of better things in economical exploitation and in the saving of human life in mine and factory, and the last of these stirred deeper sympathy and evoked wider appreciation than could the merely material considerations untouched by humane sentiment.

THE ROOSEVELT POLICY.

Though moved directly by desire for better use of the rivers, it was on these three pillars—forests, lands, minerals—that the original structure of conservation was founded by Theodore Roosevelt, humanitarian and statesman, no less than president. Yet—“lest we forget”—it cannot be too strongly emphasized that while the argument for conservation was and is statable in terms of board feet and acres and tons and dollars, the strength of the movement lies in the human feeling behind the material units: in love of trees, in love of home, in love of country, in love of family and fellow men. In truth, the material argument merely justifies and gives formal warrant for the sentimental outgrowth born of increasing intelligence coupled with increasing interdependence between man and earth—for even like Anteus of old, modern men gain new life by contact with earth.

Largely after the conservation movement was under way came the realization that the water of the country is the primary resource, since on it depends that productivity without which the lands would be uninhabitable, the forests non-existent, and the minerals merely so much inert and worthless matter. Now, the material basis for appreciation of water has been largely worked out; the quantity has been computed more carefully than before; the amount required for the maintenance of life has been reckoned, and it has been shown that the capacity of the country for population is only half what it would be if the land were more freely watered. It has been emphasized that there is no assimilation, or germination, or tissue growth, or reproduction in the absence of water—indeed it has been shown that these vital processes are apparently but manifestations of properties inhering in water; but, except here and there in arid regions and now and then in its esthetic aspects, water has not yet fully found that place in sentiment which it deserves as the final measure of life on the land, the direct medium between man and earth.

As the movement proceeded it was realized, even before the National Conservation Commission reported, that all the natural resources (as commonly defined) are balanced against that human life in which alone they find use and value; for without men to enjoy them the earth and the fullness thereof were as dead cosmic matter. So human efficiency was recognized as a sort of equation expressing the relations between man and earth, measured by the powers of accomplishment, the prospects of perpetuity, and the general welfare of mankind; and the survey was extended, first by Irving Fisher to the public health, considered with special reference to industrial capacity and viability, and later (through another agency headed by Liberty Hyde Bailey) to that rural living which may and should contribute so largely to national strength and spirit. Thereby the material field and much of the moral purport of conservation were rounded out, and the lesson of science that man is master over lower nature became practical and entered into the daily thought of millions.

THE SCOPE OF CONSERVATION.

Such, in broad outline, has been the course of conservation to date, that earlier course predetermining the present and future trend of the movement. Yet forecast or even current view would be futile without the fullest understanding that, despite the impressive material facts with which conservationists point argument and convince contemporaries, the conservation movement is primarily and fundamentally moral, and is material only in secondary and empirical aspects; the material resources form property, but the moral forces make men who create property at will. It is the quality of human knowledge to advance, not uniformly but per saltum. In the individual a great idea (perhaps the offspring of subconscious cerebration) springs full-armed—like the daughter of Jove—under momentary inspiration, and is gradually adjusted to the general fabric of thought. In the people, a great idea (conceived in some individual) sweeps from one to another swiftly, according to its fitness as a new faith, or doctrine, or cult, or means of life, until enough are inspired to reconstruct the old ideas and customs.

Somehow, men need these inspirations; they are essential to advancement, are indeed the very means of mental growth; and the whole course of human progress is marked by great inspirations. In the unwritten past of our ancestry (though in the observed life of other races) the recognition of paternity came as a luminous idea, and the mother-right of savagery was shifted to the paternal kinship of barbarism, while the deific powers were transformed from fearsome to gracious. Within the time of written record, consanguineal tribes gathered into civic groups, yet civilization became effective only under monotheistic faith and the great inspiration going out from Palestine with the injunction, “Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you.” Later, Luther and Loyola fired mankind religiously, and Cromwell politically, through inspirations influencing all Christendom. And then came, through resistance to attempted tyranny over a strong people and unparalleled weighing of human rights, the quickened conviction that all men are equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which inspired enlightenment and gave a new form of government already spread afar over the lands of the earth. With each inspiration, the moral impulse quickly rose above material structures and yielded better institutions on the higher plane.

Now the conservation idea has spread and is still spreading as an inspiration for which the national mind was ripe; it crystallizes intuitive feeling as to eternal fitness—the feeling that the riches of the land belong not to the few but in due share to all, both living and yet unborn. So in its essence, conservation is a cult based on deep-lying moral sense; and, just as in the earlier stages of human progress, all material structures must be adjusted, albeit gradually, to the moral foundation. Happily, the new cult is peculiarly adapted to our country, not only by our plentitude of resources and our constructive genius but by historical association. Ever the highest human aspirations have been for liberty, equality, fraternity. Our Revolution was fought for liberty, and our Constitution was framed for equality; and the end of conservation is fraternity—a stricter honesty, richer patriotism, broader charity, and warmer philanthropy ripening in the brotherhood of man.

MAN AND THE FOREST.

Since 1776 and 1787, knowledge of the relations between man and earth has multiplied. Then forests were but haunts for game and obstacles to settlement—the waters unreckoned, coal unknown, and iron little used. Then but two elements of national strength were conceived: (1) land as both means and symbol of homes, and (2) the home-making people; and on this balance between lower nature and the higher nature residing in mankind the Nation was founded. In 1908 the several natural resources, waters, forests, lands, minerals, were in large use and were balanced against human efficiency, measured chiefly by public health and viability; yet in the last three years, under the inspiration of conservation, the spirit of citizenship has spread more than in the preceding century, until today it is widely recognized that the earth and all its riches are for all mankind, and the natural resources as a whole may now be balanced against human welfare in the individual, the family, the community, and the state, including commonwealth and Nation.

In this broad view, conservation deals not merely with the sources of welfare found in lower nature, but in still larger degree with the higher powers involved in the relations among men—in human rights and institutions and laws, social, industrial, civil and political. For it is not enough for the free citizens of this new era to conserve the mere materials for national power and perpetuity; the Nation itself, with all that strength of national character which has given us the lead among the nations, must be conserved for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children! This is the chief duty of the day.

While individual and family and community and state are interdependent, human efficiency begins in the individual. Only in the individual mind, howsoever warmed by association, are ideas conceived; only by individual aptitude, howsoever instructed, are tasks accomplished; only by individual conscience, howsoever quickened, is conduct guided. Individual standards of righteousness are higher than those of crowds of communities or states. In war it is the man behind the gun, and in peace the man with hand on tool or throttle that achieves victory. No state can be powerful unless its constituent individuals are efficient. Now, individual efficiency involves suitable food and clothing and dwelling, with health and sanitary surroundings assuring normal expectation of life. And in even higher degree it involves those inspirations of humanity; especially love of kind and love of country, in which incentive buds and ambition blossoms. These things are among the rights of the individual on which the strength of the state must ever rest—the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, of late expressed in the single term, “Opportunity.”

THE RIGHT AND NEED OF WORK.

The clearest right and most needful opportunity is for work, that exercise wherein men rise above lower nature, especially productive labor in which visible results incite the mind and invigorate the hand. Despite current clap-trap, there is no “inalienable right not to work”; none have the right to idleness, and the country owes no man a living unearned, for it is no less true now than of old that “they who work not, neither shall they eat”; and neither community nor state can conserve its strength without opening wide the door of opportunity to its constituent individuals.

Within any generation, efficiency is attained by individual work—that exercise which combines with heredity to shape human progress. Yet it is only through the run of generations that heredity acts and that individuals, like communities and states, are perpetuated. Indeed, the essential human unit is neither the individual nor the social assemblage, but the procreative family. So the ultimate strength of any nation, and the progress of mankind in controlling lower nature, hinge on maintenance of the family triad with its vital angles of mother and child.

Herein moderns may learn something from the ancients and lower races. When mankind commenced conquest over lower nature, mother-right prevailed; the mothers were priestesses and law-givers for their clans, and they and their daughters were esteemed as the bearers of the line of life. Under the patriarchial condition, the child-bearers were seen to measure tribal strength, and were set apart and supported, and often multiplied, through warfare and polygyny, though sometimes degraded into slaves and chattels. Under the militant motives of early civilization, when the strength of cities and principalities was measured by the fighting men, as shown by Fustel de Coulanges in “The Ancient City,” and Sir Henry Maine in “Ancient Law,” wives and mothers were debarred from councils and virtually disfranchised. Although “When Knighthood Was in Flower” and romance in its heyday, the prolific sex was often both cause and guerdon of strife; and it is only under enlightenment, with its broad view of general welfare, that the pendulum is swinging toward that equitable division of rights and duties and responsibilities between the sexes and ages of mankind inhering in the family.

In the light of accumulated experience, it is to the interest of community and state to vouchsafe mother and child exceptional rights; the prospective mother has a right to family protection and to freedom of choice in mating, and the bearing mother to both material sustenance and the spiritual support of affection during her fruitful period. The child has a right to be conceived in the inspiration of love (the most potent force in humanity) and born to a welcome—and then to both material sustenance and moral sympathy during infancy and early adolescence. These rights may burden individuals and communities, yet the burden is essential to the richness of heredity and the fullness of humanity. Now the rights of the generation arise in the family. Conservation came up with the new concept of continuity, added to that of present power. It was first felt that each future generation is entitled equally with the present one to a due share of the natural resources. Yet already the moral light has shown that each generation in its turn is no less entitled to the benefits of happy birth and good breeding, to normally increasing numerical strength, and to the fittest laws and institutions within reach of the parents, for each child and each generation naturally inherit not merely parental traits but their share in the community and state. Already conservation and eugenics and righteous decrial of race-suicide are awakening a new sense of generational responsibility; and it grows clearer every day that our present power and prestige were of little worth unless assured of perpetuity by due regard for generations coming up and yet to come.

THE GREGARIOUS INSTINCT.

Under gregarious instinct and desire for strength in union, mankind is grouped in multifarious communities overlapping and combining in such wise as measurably to control the action of each individual and family, and shape the character and career of the state. It is the essence of the community that each surrenders some share of individuality for the common good; and the benefits usually vary with the nearness of the constituents in person and in interest. While endlessly protean, communities may be classed by purpose as (1) for public benefit, (2) for class benefit, and (3) for private benefit—of which the first and some of the second merge in the state. Now, the community may be likened to a miller’s bolt, in that it grades individuals according to characteristics, and in the overlapping communities of the country each individual falls more or less fairly into fit place according to the judgment of contemporaries. Yet the customary flexibility of the community allows the less designing and more generous constituents to lose position and permits the designing and selfish to gain undue power—and partly for this reason the communities for private and class benefit tend to multiply, while communities for public benefit tend to become subverted to the ends of shrewd and self-seeking leaders.

Despite primary dependence on individuals and families, the power and continuity of the state are measured largely by the strength and sagacity of its communities, especially those designed for public benefit. Yet grave dangers lurk in that multiplication and subversion of communities tending to subordinate public good to private greed. Two current tendencies may be signalized as especially ominous: (1) through an insidious legal fiction certain communities for private benefit (_e. g._, corporations for profit) have come to be viewed as possessing the property rights of individuals, whereby their constituents (partners, stockholders, _et al_) enjoy dual privileges as actual persons and in the pseudo-personalities of their corporations. So that privileged classes are arising among us, despite a republican constitution under which all are equal. (2) Through a development not sanctioned by the constitution, and most solemnly denounced by that steady balance-wheel of the constitutional convention, afterward First President, the form of community known as “political party” grew up, and, though first designed for public benefit, became subverted through self-seeking leadership into the machine organization, diverting attention of citizens from the public welfare and promoting graft and bribery and worse evils, especially in cities—where the party “machine” is commonly a cover for corruption. These two unrepublican forces have not unnaturally drawn together, and often combine, interests in private behalf and against the public welfare; and in them lies the chief menace to the Republic. Clearly, maintenance of the integrity and power of the state demands due regulation of these and other community forces. Largely through the conservation movement, the public conscience and the spirit of citizenship have been awakened as never before. Citizens are entering on exercise of their rights as a sacred duty, and through such community devices as municipal commissions, direct primaries and the gradual adoption of initiative and referendum and recall, they are rapidly restoring government of the people, by the people, for the people—the only form of government assuring perpetuity to a great and progressive country.

THE GROWTH OF ORGANIZATION.

In a republic such as this, the state (including commonwealth and nation) merely sums the constituent individuals and families and communities, and—theoretically—organizes the popular will. Now, the hardest lesson of the long course of human progress is that of individual responsibility for the general welfare, a responsibility first realized by the founders of the Republic and fully realized today by few of our citizens. But those are of the salt of the earth. Fortunately, our forebears saw the way to develop a responsible citizenry united in popular government, the chief requisite being the independent family home on land producing the prime necessaries of life; and such was the real foundation of the Republic. Later, manufacturing and transportation grew until a majority of our electors became industrial dependents and only a minority were primary producers. Still later, partly through the influence of a great governmental department under the leadership of a great farmer for fifteen years, agriculture has again become respectable, and the tiller of the soil is once more the exemplar of that citizenship on which the power and prestige of the Republic must ever depend. Thus far the movement “back to the farm” is hardly shown in population figures, though clearly indicated by farm values. During the decade 1900-1910, the farm area increased only 4.2 per cent and the acreage of improved farms only 15.2 per cent, while the acre value of farm lands increased 108.7 per cent and the aggregate value no less than 117.4 per cent. This increase is connected with the high cost of living, especially in cities, though the advance in prices has thus far benefited transportation and trade rather than the primary producers. In 1900 we paid our railways $1,650,000,000 and in 1910 about $2,750,000,000, 70 per cent of which was freightage—an advance of 67 per cent. Considered as a tax on improved land (justifiably, in that the cost of transportation limits production), this was $4.00 per acre in 1900 and $5.76 in 1910, an increase of 44 per cent, or as a per capita tax it was $21.74 in 1900 and $30.00 in 1910, an increase of 38 per cent—all of which ratios of increase are far higher than that of farm prices for farm products. Howsoever the factors of our recent growth are arranged, it is clear that primary production, fallen behind during recent decades, must be brought up—which can best be done by fertilizing the acres with brains, and so controlling natural forces and materials as to increase production both per acre and per worker.

THE FARMER’S RESOURCES.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that if there be anything in the lessons of past human progress or in modern science, this is feasible. During the generations, natural productivity has been multiplied, and today the sun-power with which the farmer plays is over 1,700 horsepower per acre for each crop, so that the farmer has larger command over natural forces than any other industrian. Nor can it be too strongly emphasized, in the light of all human experience, that the needful apotheosis of agriculture will at once revive individual and family life, relieve the burden of living, and restore that independent citizenship without which the free government in which we so justly glory may hardly be conserved for the benefit of coming generations. Herein lies a sacred duty; it is the duty of the whole people forming the Republic, but especially of the farmer folk who furnish its strength.