The Fight for Conservation Part 3

Conservation is the most democratic movement this country has known for a generation. It holds that the people have not only the right, but the duty to control the use of the natural resources, which are the great sources of prosperity. And it regards the absorption of these resources by the special interests, unless their operations are under effective public control, as a moral wrong. Conservation is the application of common-sense to the common problems for the common good, and I believe it stands nearer to the desires, aspirations, and purposes of the average man than any other policy now before the American people.

The danger to the Conservation policies is that the privileges of the few may continue to obstruct the rights of the many, especially in the matter of water power and coal. Congress must decide immediately whether the great coal fields still in public ownership shall remain so, in order that their use may be controlled with due regard to the interest of the consumer, or whether they shall pa.s.s into private ownership and be controlled in the monopolistic interest of a few.

Congress must decide also whether immensely valuable rights to the use of water power shall be given away to special interests in perpetuity and without compensation instead of being held and controlled by the public. In most cases actual development of water power can best be done by private interests acting under public control, but it is neither good sense nor good morals to let these valuable privileges pa.s.s from the public ownership for nothing and forever. Other conservation matters doubtless require action, but these two, the conservation of water power and of coal, the chief sources of power of the present and the future, are clearly the most pressing.

It is of the first importance to prevent our water powers from pa.s.sing into private ownership as they have been doing, because the greatest source of power we know is falling water. Furthermore, it is the only great unfailing source of power. Our coal, the experts say, is likely to be exhausted during the next century, our natural gas and oil in this.

Our rivers, if the forests on the watersheds are properly handled, will never cease to deliver power. Under our form of civilization, if a few men ever succeed in controlling the sources of power, they will eventually control all industry as well. If they succeed in controlling all industry, they will necessarily control the country. This country has achieved political freedom; what our people are fighting for now is industrial freedom. And unless we win our industrial liberty, we can not keep our political liberty. I see no reason why we should deliberately keep on helping to fasten the handcuffs of corporate control upon ourselves for all time merely because the few men who would profit by it most have heretofore had the power to compel it.

The essential things that must be done to protect the water powers for the people are few and simple. First, the granting of water powers forever, either on non-navigable or navigable streams, must absolutely stop. It is perfectly clear that one hundred, fifty, or even twenty-five years ago our present industrial conditions and industrial needs were completely beyond the imagination of the wisest of our predecessors. It is just as true that we can not imagine or foresee the industrial conditions and needs of the future. But we do know that our descendants should be left free to meet their own necessities as they arise. It can not be right, therefore, for us to grant perpetual rights to the one great permanent source of power. It is just as wrong as it is foolish, and just as needless as it is wrong, to mortgage the welfare of our children in such a way as this. Water powers must and should be developed mainly by private capital and they must be developed under conditions which make investment in them profitable and safe. But neither profit nor safety requires perpetual rights, as many of the best water-power men now freely acknowledge.

Second, the men to whom the people grant the right to use water-power should pay for what they get. The water-power sites now in the public hands are enormously valuable. There is no reason whatever why special interests should be allowed to use them for profit without making some direct payment to the people for the valuable rights derived from the people. This is important not only for the revenue the Nation will get.

It is at least equally important as a recognition that the public controls its own property and has a right to share in the benefits arising from its development. There are other ways in which public control of water power must be exercised, but these two are the most important.

Water power on non-navigable streams usually results from dropping a little water a long way. In the mountains water is dropped many hundreds of feet upon the turbines which move the dynamos that produce the electric current. Water power on navigable streams is usually produced by dropping immense volumes of water a short distance, as twenty feet, fifteen feet, or even less. Every stream is a unit from its source to its mouth, and the people have the same stake in the control of water power in one part of it as in another. Under the Const.i.tution, the United States exercises direct control over navigable streams. It exercises control over non-navigable and source streams only through its ownership of the lands through which they pa.s.s, as the public domain and National Forests. It is just as essential for the public welfare that the people should retain and exercise control of water-power monopoly on navigable as on non-navigable streams. If the difficulties are greater, then the danger that the water powers may pa.s.s out of the people's hands on the lower navigable parts of the streams is greater than on the upper non-navigable parts, and it may be harder, but in no way less necessary, to prevent it.

It must be clear to any man who has followed the development of the Conservation idea that no other policy now before the American people is so thoroughly democratic in its essence and in its tendencies as the Conservation policy. It a.s.serts that the people have the right and the duty, and that it is their duty no less than their right, to protect themselves against the uncontrolled monopoly of the natural resources which yield the necessaries of life. We are beginning to realize that the Conservation question is a question of right and wrong, as any question must be which may involve the differences between prosperity and poverty, health and sickness, ignorance and education, well-being and misery, to hundreds of thousands of families. Seen from the point of view of human welfare and human progress, questions which begin as purely economic often end as moral issues. Conservation is a moral issue because it involves the rights and the duties of our people--their rights to prosperity and happiness, and their duties to themselves, to their descendants, and to the whole future progress and welfare of this Nation.

CHAPTER VIII

PUBLIC SPIRIT

Violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own remedies. They grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs.

But the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of importance. The quiet turning point, reached and pa.s.sed often with slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was actually accomplished.

The United States has been in the midst of such a period of decision since the Spanish War called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and we are still face to face with questions of the most vital bearing upon our future. The changes now in progress are accompanied by no convulsions, yet the whole character of our civilization is being rapidly crystallized anew as our country takes its inevitable place in the world.

So quietly are the great forces at work that some of our most vital problems have remained almost unrecognized by the public until the last two years. Yet the fact that these decisions are being made is almost appalling in its magnitude, and their indescribable consequence not only to the United States, but to all the nations of the earth, needs to be vividly realized by every one of us, for it is one of the great compelling reasons why the public spirit of young men is needed so urgently and at once. And more specific reasons press upon us from every side.

Recently the attention of our people, thanks largely to President Roosevelt, was focussed upon the presence or absence of the common virtues and the common decencies in public life. The revelation of corruption in politics, in business, and here and there in the public service, is a testimony not of unwonted wickedness in high places, but of unwonted sensitiveness in public opinion, and so far as it goes it is a most hopeful sign; but it does not yet go far enough.

The opportunity to set a new standard in political morality is here now.

Public sensitiveness on every subject ebbs and flows and must be taken at the flood if the use of it is to be really effective. Decision made now as to the character of our public life will be valid for many years, for it is but seldom that the question comes so clearly before us. The war for righteousness is endless, but this is one of the great battles, and its results will endure.

We are now in the throes of decision on the whole question of business in politics, of politics for business purposes, and we must take our share in determining whether the object of our political system is to be unclean money or free men. The present strong movement to prevent the political control of public men, law-courts, and legislatures by great commercial enterprises will either flash in the pan or it will succeed; it will leave either the man or the dollar in control. The decision will be made by the young men, and it is not far ahead.

The question of efficiency in public office has been brought to the front as never before in the history of the Nation. As a whole, our public service is honest, but we should be able to take honesty for granted. What we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes great enterprises succeed. The national house-keeping, the Government's vast machinery, should he the cleanest, the most effective, and the best in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the Nation at every point is constant and vital.

There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of land. Under the influence of this compelling desire, a.s.sisted by obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political va.s.salage, or free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance of the decision.

We have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by protecting the timberlands we shall a.s.sure the prosperity of all of the users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply.

Nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the country is in the balance. No other conservation question compares with this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national life.

Other great questions only less vital I cannot even refer to, but one of the central ones remains--our whole future is at stake in the education of our young men in politics and public spirit. The greatest work that Theodore Roosevelt did for the United States, the great fact which will give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the att.i.tude of the American people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward public questions and public life. The time was, not long ago, when it was not respectable to be interested in politics. The time is coming, and I do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable not to be interested in public affairs. Few changes can mean so much.

Among the first duties of every man is to help in bringing the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth. The greatest human power for good, the most efficient earthly tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is without question the United States; and the presence or absence of a vital public spirit in the young men of the United States will determine the quality of that great tool and the work that it can do. This is the final object of the best citizenship. Public spirit is the means by which every man can help toward this great end. Public spirit is patriotism in action; it is the application of Christianity to the commonwealth; it is effective loyalty to our country, to the brotherhood of man, and to the future. It is the use of a man by himself for the general good.

Public spirit is the one great antidote for all the ills of the Nation, and greatly the Nation needs it now. In a day when the vast increase in wealth tends to reduce all things, moral, intellectual and material, to the measure of the dollar; in a day when we have with us always the man who is working for his own pocket all the time; when the monopolist of land, of opportunity, of power or privilege in any form, is ever in the public eye--it is good to remember that the real leaders are the men who value the right to give themselves more highly than any gain whatsoever.

It is given to few men to serve their country as greatly as President Roosevelt has done, yet vastly smaller services are still tremendously worth while. I question whether there has ever been a time and place (except in violent crises) when the demand for public spirit was greater than now and the results of it more a.s.sured. Public spirit is never needed more than in times of prosperity, and it is never more effective.

It is the boat which is floating easily and rapidly with the stream that is most in danger of striking the rocks.

The reasons why public opinion may be so effective in the United States are not far to seek. The extreme sensitiveness of our form of government to political control is one of the commonplaces that has real meaning.

We seldom realize that ours is actually what it pretends to be--a representative government--and our legislatures are extraordinarily sensitive to what the people, the politically effective people, really want. The Senators and Representatives in Congress do actually and accurately represent the men who send them there, and they respond like lightning to a clear order from the controlling element at home. It is in the power of public spirit to say whether men or money shall control.

If public spirit is in the saddle, the fundamental purpose of all the people, which is good, will govern. If not, the bosses and the great private interests will have their way. Without the backing of the public spirit of good men, even the President himself loses by far the greater portion of his power. For the power to do what we hope to see accomplished, we must look most of all to the public spirit of the young men.

But some one will say that great service is beyond his individual power.

I do not believe that great service is beyond the power of any young man. This is not a matter in which obstacles decide. The man for whom all the barriers to success have been broken down is not, as a rule, the man who succeeds. On the contrary, conflict is the condition of success. The quality of the man himself decides. The more I study men, which is the daily occupation of every man in affairs, the more firmly I am a.s.sured that the great fundamental difference between men, the reason why some fail and some succeed, is not a difference in ability or opportunity, but a difference in vision and in relentless loyalty to ideals--vision to see the great object, and relentless, unwavering, uninterrupted loyalty in its service. What young men determine to do at whatever cost of effort, self-denial, and endurance, provided that their objects are good and within the possibility of attainment, they will surely accomplish in so large a proportion of cases that the failures are negligible. If all that a man has or is, if his death and his daily life, are wholly and relentlessly at the service of his ideal, without hesitancy or reservation, then he will achieve his object. Either by himself or his successors he will achieve it, for he disposes of the greatest power to which humanity can attain. Under such conditions there is no man among us who cannot render high service to our beloved country.

CHAPTER IX

THE CHILDREN

The success of the conservation movement in the United States depends in the end on the understanding the women have of it. No forward step in this whole campaign has been more deeply appreciated or more welcomed than that which the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and other organizations of women have taken in appointing conservation committees.

Patriotism is the key to the success of any nation, and patriotism first strikes its roots in the mind of the child. Patriotism which does not begin in early years may, though it does not always, fail under the severest trials. I say "not always," for many men and women have proved their patriotic devotion to this country although they were born elsewhere. Yet, as a rule, it must begin with the children. And almost without exception it is the mother who plants patriotism in the mind of the child. It is her duty. The growth of patriotism is first of all in the hands of the women of any nation. In the last a.n.a.lysis it is the mothers of a nation who direct that nation's destiny.

The fundamental task of patriotism is to see to it that the Nation exists and endures in honor, security, and well-being. Fortunately there is no question as to our existing in honor, and little if any as to our continuing to exist in security.

The great fundamental problem which confronts us all now is this: Shall we continue, as a Nation, to exist in well-being? That is the conservation problem.

If we are to have prosperity in this country, it will be because we have an abundance of natural resources available for the citizen. In other words, as the minds of the children are guided toward the idea of foresight, just to that extent, and probably but little more, will the generations that are coming hereafter be able to carry through the great task of making this Nation what its manifest destiny demands that it shall be.

Women should recognize, if this task is to be carried out, one great truth above all others. That this Nation exists for its people, we all admit; but that the natural resources of the Nation exist not for any small group, not for any individual, but for all the people--in other words, that the natural resources of the Nation belong to all the people--that is a truth the whole meaning of which is just beginning to dawn on us. There is no form of monopoly which exists or ever has existed on any large scale which was not based more or less directly upon the control of natural resources. There is no form of monopoly that has ever existed or can exist which can do harm if the people understand that the natural resources belong to the people of the Nation, and exercise that understanding, as they have the power to do.

It seems to me that of all the movements which have been inaugurated to give power to the conservation idea, the foresight idea, there is none more helpful than that the women of the United States are taking hold of the problem. We must make all the people see that now and in the future the resources are to be developed and employed, yet at the same time guarded and protected against waste--not for small groups of men who will control them for their own purposes, but for all the people through all time.

The question of the conservation of our natural resources is not a simple question, but it requires, and will increasingly require, thinking out along lines directed to the fundamental economic basis upon which this Nation exists. I think it can not be disputed that the natural resources exist for and belong to the people; and I believe that the part of the work which falls to the women (and it is no small part) is to see to it that the children, who will be the men and women of the future, have their share of these resources uncontrolled by monopoly and unspoiled by waste.

What specific things can the women of the Nation do for conservation?

The Daughters of the American Revolution have begun admirably in the appointment of a Conservation Committee, and other organizations of women are following their example. Few people realize what women have already done for conservation, and what they may do. Some of the earliest effective forest work that was done in the United States, work which laid the lines that have been followed since, was that of the Pennsylvania Forestry a.s.sociation, begun and carried through first of all by ladies in Philadelphia. One of the bravest, most intelligent and most effective fights for forestry that I have known of was that of the women of Minnesota for the Minnesota National Forest. It was a superb success, and we have that forest to-day. I have known of no case of persistent agitation under discouragement finer in a good many ways than the fight that the women of California have made to save the great grove of Calaveras big trees. As a result the Government has taken possession of that forest and will preserve it for all future generations.

Time and again, then, the women have made it perfectly clear what they can do in this work. Obviously the first point of attack is the stopping of waste. Women alone can bring to the school children the idea of the wickedness of national waste and the value of public saving. The issue is a moral one; and women are the first teachers of right and wrong. It is a question of seeing what loyalty to the public welfare demands of us, and then of caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal advantage first. It is a question of inspiring our future citizens while they are boys and girls with the spirit of true patriotism as against the spirit of rank selfishness, the anti-social spirit of the man who declines to take into account any other interest than his own; whose one aim and ideal is personal success. Women both in public and at home, by letting the men know what they think, and by putting it before the children, can make familiar the idea of conservation, and support it with a convincingness that n.o.body else can approach.

However important it may be for the lumberman, the miner, the wagon-maker, the railroad man, the house-builder,--for every industry,--that conservation should obtain, when all is said and done, conservation goes back in its directest application to one body in this country, and that is to the children. There is in this country no other movement except possibly the education movement--and that after all is in a sense only another aspect of the conservation question, the seeking to make the most of what we have--so directly aimed to help the children, so conditioned upon the needs of the children, so belonging to the children, as the conservation movement; and it is for that reason more than any other that it has the support of the women of the Nation.

CHAPTER X