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10(9

IA'1 \l \ HI

LAND AND

ON

THE NATURAL WEALTH OF THE
LAND AND ITS CONSERVATION

MR. JAMES J. Hill

WU. H«~.

AT THE CONFERENCE ON THE CONSERVATION Ot NATIONAL

RCSOt

MAY 13.15. 1906

In Miiuc reflects tlic'H-casi,,!) that rails t. Aether this

assemblage is unprecedented. The dignity and public

influence of thost. present as guests ami advisers mark

It is in cfTcct a dn meeting of

^rcat j>olitical and economic corporation known as

the Tinted States of America. The stockholders are

^7,000,000 people Country ; the directors are

:id federal • •: whose position brings

them in touch with the oj>eration of the whole country.

We should not fail t<» recognize the hi^h note that has

been struck and the immensity of the int involved

upon the lives of milli be.

The two-fold this meeting is found

in the comparative novelty of its subject matter and of

the metb.Kl by which it has been approached. The sub-

he 000 n of our national wealth, and a

ly of our national economic resources.

Iress delivered before the
meeting of the Minnesota State Agricultural Society,

at St. Paul, I reviewed the practical consequences and
the statistical proof of that national wastefulness which
competent scientific authority had already set down as
distinguishing the American people. From data of the
highest certainty, no one of which has ever since been
called in question, I then forecast some of the condi-
tions certain to arise within the next half century, when
the population of this country will have grown to more
than 200,000,000. The facts were pointed out, not in
the spirit of the alarmist, but in order that attention
might be directed to the way by which the nation may
escape future disaster. So rapidly do events move in
our time, so swiftly do ideas spread and grasp the pub-
lic mind, that some policy directed to the ends then set
forth has already become a national care. It is this
policy — the conservation of national resources, the best
means of putting an end to the waste of the sources of
wealth — which largely forms the subject-matter of this
conference. For the first time there is a formal na-
tional protest, under seal of the highest authority,
against economic waste.

The method by which this end is to be reached is
scarcely less interesting or significant. This body has
no legal status and its conclusions will not be of binding
effect upon the nation, the state or the individual. Yet
they will carry a weight greater than legislatures can
impart, a force that even courts could not strengthen,
because they will not be subject to repeal. They will
represent a truly national opinion expressed with
fidelity to our national constitutional form. The

people of the United States are represented
through the several states. May we not hope that from
this gathering there may be born not only a wiser sys-
tem of using the still remaining resources of this coun-
Init a co-operation between nation and state that
shall be as helpful in our political as these deliberations
ought to be in our economic future?

"Of all the sinful wasters of man's inheritance on
ii. said the late Professor Shaler, Mand all arc in
regard sinners, the very worst are the people of
America." This is not a popular phrase, but a scien-
tific judgment. It is borne out by facts. In the move-
ment of modern times, which has made the world com-
mercially a small place and has produced a solidarity
of the race such as never before existed, we have come
tn the point where we must to a certain extent regard
the natural resources of this planet as a common asset*
compare them with demands now made and likely to be
made upon them, and study their judicious use. Com-
merce, wherever untrammeled. is wiping out boundaries
and substituting the world relation of demand and sop-
ply for smaller systems of local economy. The changes
of a single generation have brought the nations of the
earth closer together than he states of this Union

at the close of the Civil War. If we fail to

u hat we possess of wealth available for the uses of
:ul to what extent we are wasting a national
patrimony that can never be restored, we might be
likened to the directors of a company who never
amine a balance sheet.

3

The sum of resources is simple and fixed. From
the sea, the mine, the forest and the soil must be gat li
ered everything that can sustain the life of man. Upon
the wealth thai these supply must be conditioned for-
ever, as far as we can see, not only his progress, Inn his
continued existence on earth. How stands the inven-
tory of property for our own people? The resources
of the sea furnish less than five per cent, of the food
supply, and that is all. The forests of this country, the
product of centuries of growth, are fast disappearing.
The best estimates reckon our standing merchantable
timber at less than 2,000,000,000,000 feet. Our an-
nual cut is about 40,000,000,000 feet. The lumber cut
rose from 18,000,000,000 feet in 1880 to 34,000,000,000
feet in 1905 ; that is, it nearly doubled in 25 years. We
are now using annually 500 feet board measure of tim-
ber per capita, as against an average of 60 feet for all
Europe. The New England supply is gone. The
\Orthwest furnishes small growths that would have
been rejected by the lumberman 30 years ago. The
South has reached its maximum production and bc-in-
to decline. On the Pacific Coast only is there now any
considerable body of merchantable standing timber.
We are consuming yearly three or four times as much
timber as forest growth restores. Our supply of some
varieties will be practically exhausted in 10 or 12
years; in the case of others, without reforesting, the
present century will see the end. When will we take
up in a practical and intelligent way the restoration of
our forests ?

Turning now to one of the only two
sources of wealth, the mine, we find it differing from
the others in an important essential. It is inftptMt
of restoration or recuperation. The mineral wealth
stored in the earth can be used only once. When iron
and coal are taken from the mine, they cannot be re-
stored ; and upon iron and coal our industrial civiliza-
tion is built. When fuel and iron become scarce and
ln-h i triced, civilization, as far as we can now foresee,
will suffer as man would suffer by the gradual with-
drawal of the air he breathes.

The exhaustion of our coal supply is not in the in-
definite future. The startling feature of our coal pro-
duction is not so much the magnitude of the annual out-
put as its rate of growth. For the decade ending in
1905 the total product was 2,832402,746 tons, which
is almost exactly one-half the total product previously
mined in this country. For the year 1906 the output
was 414,000,000 tons, an increase of 46% on the aver-
age annual yield of the 10 years preceding. In 1907
our production reached 470,000,000 tons. Fifty years
ago the annual per capita production was a little more
than one-quarter of a ton. It is now about five tons.
It is but eight years since we took the place of Great
Britain as the leading coal-producing nation of the
world, and aleady our product exceeds hers by over
43%, and is 37% of the known production of the world.
Estimates of coal deposits still remaining must neces-

y be somewhat vague, but they are approximately
near the mark. The best authorities do not rate them

at much over 2,000,000,000,000 tons. If coal produc-
tion continues to increase as it has in the last 90 years,
the available supply will be greatly reduced by the close
of the century. Before that time arrives, however,
resort to lower grades and sinking of mines to greater
depths will become necessary; making the product in-
ferior in quality and higher in price. Already Great
Britain's industries have felt the check from a similar
cause, as shown in her higher cost of production. Our
turn will begin probably within a generation or two
from this time. Yet we still think nothing of consum-
ing this priceless resource with the greatest possible
speed. Our methods of mining are often wasteful;
and we not only prohibit our industries from having re-
course to the coal supplies of other countries, but actu-
ally pride ourselves upon becoming exporters of a
prime necessity of life and an essential of civilization.
The iron industry tells a similar story. The total
of iron ore mined in the United States doubles about
once in seven years. It was less than 12,000,000 tons
in 1893, over 24,000,000 tons in 1899, 47,750,000 tons
in 1906 and over 52,000,000 tons in 1907. The rising
place of iron in the world's life is the most impressive
phenomenon of the last century. In 1850 the pig iron
production of the United States amounted to 563,758
tons, or about 50 pounds per capita. Our production
now is over 600 pounds per capita. We do not work a
mine, build a house, weave a fabric, prepare a meal or
cultivate an acre of ground under modern methods
without the aid of iron. We turn out over 25,000,000

tons of pig iron every year, ami the production for the
first half of 1907 was at the rate of 27,000,000 tons.
This is two and one-half times the product of Great
Britain. It is nearly half the product of the whole
world. And the supply of this most precious of all the
metals is so far from inexhaustible that it teems as if
iron and coal might be united in their disappearance
from common life.

The large deposits of iron ore in this country are
now located. For cheap iron we depend upon the Lake
Superior district, because of its high grade, the ease of
extr the ore from the mines and its nearness to

cheap transportation. At the rate of over 50.000,000
tons per year, our present consumption, it would re-
quire over 2,000,000,000 tons to supply the demand for
the next 40 years, supposing it to remain stationary.
This would approach the end of all the higher grade ore
in larije deposits now in sight. The product of other
workings would be of inferior quality and higher cost
and remote from market. But production is certain to
increase even more rapidly than in the past A few
years ago a Swedish geologist prepared for his govern-
ment a report which stated that the entire supply of
the iron ore in the United States would be exhausted
within the present century. The United States Geo-
logical Survey declared this an overstatement ; but here

ie conclusion of its own report, after a careful ex-
amination of the question in the light of the best
authorities. I quote the official published document:
"Assuming that the demand for iron ore during the

7

present century may range from 50,000,000 to 100,-
000,000 tons per year, the Lake Superior district would
last for from 25 to 50 years more, if it supplied flu-
ent ire United States. But counting on the known re-
serves elsewhere in the United States, the ore will last
for a much longer period, though, of course, it must
necessarily show a gradual but steady increase in value
and in cost of mining, along with an equally steady de-
crease in grade/' The most favorable view of the
situation forces the conclusion that iron and coal \\ ill
not be available for common use on anything like pres-
ent terms before the end of this century ; and our indus-
trial, social and political life must be readjusted to meet
the strains imposed by new conditions. Yet we forbid
to our consumers access to the stores of other coun-
tries, while we boast of our increased exports, of that
material for want of which one day the nation must be
reduced to the last extremity.

We now turn to the only remaining resource of man
upon this earth, which is the soil itself. How are we
caring for that, and what possibilities does it hold out
to the people of future support? We are only begin-
ning to feel the pressure upon the land. The whole
interior of this continent, aggregating more than
500,000,000 acres, has been occupied by settlers within
the last 50 years. What is there left for the next 50
years? Excluding arid and irrigable areas, the latter
limited by nature, and barely enough of which could
be made habitable in each year to furnish a farm for
each immigrant family, the case stands as follows:

8

In 1906 the total unappropriated public lands in the
United States consisted of 792,000,000 acres. Of tins
area the divisions of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colo-

>, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Wyo-
ming contained 1^5, 700,000 acres of surveyed and
509,000,000 acres m" imMirveyed land. Little of Alaska
is fitted for general agriculture, while practically all of
the rest is semi-arid land, available only for grazing or
irrigation. We have, subtracting these totals,
50,000,000 acres of surveyed and 36,500,000 acres of

irveyed land as our actual remaining stock. And
21,000,000 acres were disposed of in 1907. How loo;
will the remainder last? No longer can we say that
"Uncle Sam has land enough to give us all a farm."

Equally threatening is the change in quality. There
are two ways in which the productive power of the

h is lessened; first, by erosion and the sweeping
away of the fertile surface into streams and thence to
the sea, and, second, by exhaustion through wrong

:iods of cultivation. The former process has gone
far. Thousands of acres in the East and South have
been made unfit for tillage. North Carolina was, a
century ago, one of the great agricultural states of the

try and one of the wealthiest. To-day as you ride
through the South you see everywhere land gullied by
torrential rains, red and yellow clay banks exposed

re once were fertile fields; and agriculture reduced
because it< main support has been washed away. Mil-
lions of acres, in places to the extent of one-tenth of
the entire arable area, have been so injured that no
industry and no care can restore them.

9

Far more ruinous, because universal and continu-
ing in its effects, is the process of soil exhaustion. It
is creeping over the land from East to West. The
abandoned farms that are now the playthings of the
city's rich or the game preserves of patrons of sport
bear witness to the melancholy change. New Hamp-
shire, Vermont, Northern New York, show long lists
of them. In Western Massachusetts^ which once sup-
ported a flourishing agriculture, farm properties are
now for sale for half the cost of the improvements.
Professor Carver, of Harvard, has declared, after a
personal examination of the country, that "agriculture
as an independent industry, able in itself to support a
community, does not exist in the hilly parts of New
England."

The same process of deterioration is affecting the
farm lands of Western New York, Ohio and Indiana.
Where prices of farms should rise by increase of popu-
lation, in many places they are falling. Between 1880
and 1900 the land values of Ohio shrank $60,000,000.
Official investigation of two counties in Central New
York disclosed a condition of agricultural decay. In
one land was for sale for about the cost of improve-
ments and 150 vacant houses were counted in a lim-
ited area. In the other the population in 1905 was
nearly 4,000 less than in 1855.

Practically identical soil conditions exist in Mary-
land and Virginia, where lands sell at from $10 to $30
an acre. In a hearing before an Industrial Commis-
sion the chief of the Bureau of Soils of the Department

10

of Agriculture said: "One of the most important
causes of deterioration, and I think I should put this
first of all, is the method and system of apiculture that
prevails throughout these states. Unquestionably the
soil has been abused" The richest region of the West
is no more exempt than New England or the South.
The soil of the West is being reduced in agricultural
potency by exactly the same processes which have
driven the farmer of the East, with all his advantage
of nearness to markets, from the field.

Within the last 40 years a great part of the richest
land in the country has been brought under cultivation.
We should, therefore, in the same time, have raised
proportionately the yield of our principal crops per
acre, because the yield of old lands, if properly treated,
tends to increase rather than diminish. The year 1906
was one of large crops and can scarcely be taken as a
standard. We produced, for example, more corn that
year than had ever been grown in the United States in
a single year before. But the average yield per acre
was less than it was in 1872. We are barely keeping
the acre product stationary. The average wheat crop
of the country now ranges from \2l 2. in ordinary years,
to 15 bushels per acre in the best seasons. And so it
is on down the line.

But the fact of soil waste becomes startUngiy evi-
dent when we examine the record of some states where
single cropping and other agricultural abuses have
been prevalent. Take the case of wheat, the main-
stay of single crop abuse. Many of us can remember

1 1

when New York was the great wheat-producing state
of the Union. The average yield of wheat per acre in
New York for the last 10 years was about 18 bushels.
For the first five years of that lo-year period it was
18.4 bushels, and for the last five 17.4 bushels. In the
farther West, Kansas takes high rank as a wheat pro-
ducer. Its average yield per acre for the last 10 years
was 14.16 bushels. For the first five of those years it
was 15.14 and for the last five 13.18. Up in the North-
west, Minnesota wheat has made a name all over the
world. Her average yield per acre for the same 10
years was 12.96 bushels. For the first five years it was
13.12 and for the last five 12.8. We perceive here the
working of a uniform law, independent of location, soil
or climate. It is the law of a diminishing return due
to soil destruction. Apply this to the country at large,
and it reduces agriculture to the condition of a bank
whose depositors are steadily drawing out more money
than they put in.

What is true in this instance is true of our agricul-
ture as a whole. In no other important country in the
world, with the exception of Russia, is the industry
that must be the foundation of every state, at so low an
ebb as in our own. According to the last census the
average annual product per acre of the farms of the
whole United States was worth $11.38. It is little
more than a respectable rental in communities where
the soil is properly cared for and made to give a reason-
able return for cultivation. There were but two states
in the Union whose total value of farm products was

12

over $30 per acre of improved land. The great itale
of Illinois gave but $12.48, and Minnesota showed only
$8.74. No discrimination attaches to these figures,
where all are so much at fault. Nature has given to us
the most valuable possession ever committed to man.
1 1 can never be duplicated, because there is none like it
upon the face of the earth. And we arc racking and
impoverishing it exactly as we are felling the forests
and rifling the mines. Our soil, once the envy of every
other country, the attraction which draws millions of
immigrants across the seas, gave an average yield for
the whole United States during the 10 years

\\ith 1896 of 13.5 bushels of wheat per acre. Austria
and Hungary each produced over 17 bushels per acre,
France 19.8, Germany 27.6 and the United Kingdom
32.2 bushels per acre. For the same decade our average
yield of oats was less than 30 bushels, while Germany
produced 46 and Great Britain 42. For barley the fig-
ures are 25 against 33 and 34.6; for rye 15.4 against
24 for Germany and 26 for Ireland In the United
Kingdom. Belgium, The Netherlands and Denmark a
yield of more than 30 bushels of wheat per acre has
been the average for the past five years.

When the most fertile land in the world produces
so much less than that of poorer quality elsewhere, and
tliis low yield shows a tendency to steady decline, the
situation becomes dear. We are robbing the soil, in
an effort to get the largest cash returns from each acre
of ground in the shortest possible time and with the
least possible labor. This soil is not mere dead matter,

subject to any sort of treatment with impunity. Chem-
ically, it contains elements which must be present in
certain proportions for the support of vegetation.
Physically, it is made up of matter which supplies the
principal plant food. This food, with its chemical con-
stituents in proper admixture, is furnished by the de-
composition of organic matter and the disintegration of
mineral matter that proceed together. Whatever dis-
turbs either factor of the process, whatever takes out of
the soil an excessive amount of one or more of the
chemical elements upon which plant growth depends,
ends in sterility. Any agricultural methods that move
in this direction mean soil impoverishment; present re-
turns at the cost of future loss ; the exhaustion of the
land exactly as the animal system is enfeebled by lack
of proper nourishment.

Our agricultural lands have been abused in two
principal ways ; first, by single cropping, and, second, by
neglecting fertilization. It is fortunate for us that
nature is slow to anger, and that we may arrest the
consequence of this ruinous policy before it is too late.
In all parts of the United States, with only isolated ex-
ceptions, the system of tillage has been to select the crop
which would bring in most money at the current market
rate, to plant that year after year, and to move on to
virgin fields as soon as the old farm rebelled by lower-
ing the quality and quantity of its return. It is still
the practice, although diversification of industry and
the rotation of crops have been urged for nearly a cen-
tury and are to-day taught in every agricultural college

14

in this country. The demonstration of the evils of
single cropping is mathematical in its completeness.
At the experiment station of the Agricultural College
of the University of Minnesota they have maintained
44 experimental plots of ground, adjoining one another,
and as nearly identical in soil, cultivation and care as
scientific handling can make them. On these have been
tried and compared different methods of crop rotation
and fertili/ation. together with systems of single crop-
The results of ten years' experiment arc now
available. On a tract of good ground sown continu-
ousiy for 10 years to wheat, the average yield per acre
for the first five years was 20.22 bushels and for the
next five 16.92 bushels. Where corn was grown con-
tinuously on one plot, while on the plot beside it corn
was planted but once in five years in a system of rota-
tion, the average yield of the latter for the two years it
was under corn was 48.2 bushels per acre. The plot
where corn only was grown gave 20.8 bushels per acre

lu first five and i i.i bushels for the second five of
tlu -e fenrs, an average of 16 bushels. The difference

\ erage of these two plots was 32.2 bushel ». or twice
the total yield of the ground exhausted by the single-
crop system. The corn grown at the end of the 10 years
was hardly hip liujh. the ears small and the grains
li-ht. But the cost of cultivation remained the same.
And the same is true of every other grain or growth
when raised continuously on land unfertilized. We
frequently hear it said that the reduction in yield is
due to the wearing out of the soil, as if it was a

to be destroyed by the wearing. The fact is that soils
cither increase or maintain their productivity indefi-
nitely under proper cultivation. If the earth, the great
mother of human and animal life, is to "wear out,"
what is to become of the race ?

The two remedies are as well ascertained as is the
evil. Rotation of crops and the use of fertilizers act as
tonics upon the soil. We might expand our resources
and add billions of dollars to our national wealth by
conserving soil resources, instead of exhausting them,
as we have the forests and the contents of the mines,
for there is good authority for the assertion that the
farmer could take from the same area of ground in four
years' grain crops out of a total of seven years as much
as the whole seven now give him, leaving the products
of the other three years when the land rested from
grain as a clear profit due to better methods.

He can do far more than that by joining stock rais-
ing with grain raising. Nature has provided the cattle
to go with the land. There is as much money in live
stock as there is in grain. Looked at in any way, there
is money in live stock ; money for dairy products, money
for beef, money for the annual increase, and most
money of all for the next year's crop when every par-
ticle of manure is saved and applied to the land.

We need not consider at present really intensive
farming, such as is done by market gardeners with high
profit, or such culture as in France, in Holland, in Bel-
gium and in the island of Jersey produces financial re-
turns per acre that seem almost beyond belief. What

16

our people have to do is to cover less ground, cultivate
smaller farms so as to make the most of them, instead
of getting a scant and uncertain yield from several
hundred acres, and raise productivity by intelligent
treatment to twice or three times its present level

There is more money in this system. The net
profit from an acre of wheat on run-down soils is very
small; consequently decreasing the acreage of wheat
under certain conditions will not materially decrease
profits. Here are some reliable estimates. The price
of wheat is given from the United States Department
of Agriculture Yearbook, average for ten years:

lM C««« of
YM4. Prk,.

20 $0.638 $12.76 sr.s, +$4.87

l6 $10. J I +$-'

12 " $7.66 — $0.23

10 $6.38 -$1.51

8 " $5.10 -$2.79

From the above table it will be seen that as large a
net profit is realized from one crop of 20 bushels per
acre as from two crops of 16 bushels; and that a 12-
bushel crop or less yields a net loss. It is a safe con-
dition that 75 acres of land, growing a crop of clover
every fourth year, will yield a larger net profit than
will 100 acres sown to grain continually. A small 6eM
of eight acres of clover in the Red River Valley last
year yielded 42 bushels, worth over $60 per acre from
the sale of seed.

I have dwelt upon the conservation of farm re-

17

sources because of the commanding importance of this
industry and because of its relation to our future.
Nearly 36% of our people are engaged directly in agri-
culture. But all the rest depend upon it. In the last
analysis, commerce, manufactures, our home market,
every form of activity runs back to the bounty of the
earth by which every worker, skilled and unskilled,
must be fed and by which his wages are ultimately
paid. The farm products of the United States in 1906
were valued at $6,794,000,000 and in 1907 at $7,412,-
000,000. All of our vast domestic commerce, equal in
value to the foreign trade of all the nations combined,
is supported and paid for by the land. Of our farm
areas only one-half is improved. It does not produce
one-half of what it could be made to yield ; not by some
complex system of intensive culture, but merely by or-
dinary care and industry intelligently applied. It is
the capital upon which alone we can draw through all
the future, but the amount of the draft that will be
honored depends upon the care and intelligence given
to its cultivation. Were any statesman to show us how
to add $7,000,000,000 annually to our foreign trade, it
would be the sensation of the hour. The way to do this
in agriculture is open. Our share in the increase would
not be the percentage of profit allowed by successful
trading, but the entire capital sum. On the other side
stands the fact that the unappropriated area suited to
farm purposes is almost gone, and that we have been
for the last century reducing the producing power of
the country. Nowhere in the range of national pur-

18

poses is the reward for conservation of a national re-
source so ample. Nowhere is the penalty of neglect so
threatening.

By the fixed rate of increase in the past, we most
count upon a population of over 200^000,000 in the
United States in the year 1950. The annual increase

i natural growth is about one and one-half per cent
each year. Adding for immigration only 750,000 a
year, which is less than three-quarters of the figures
reached in recent years, we shall have about 130,000,-
ooo people in 1925 and at least 200,000,000 by the
middle of the century. Where arc they to gof how arc
they to be employed, how fed, how enabled to earn a
living wage? The pressure of all the nations upon the
waste places of the earth grows more intense as the
last of them are occupied. We are approaching the
point where all our wheat product will be needed for
our own uses, and we shall cease to be an exporter of
grain. There is still some room in Canada, but it will
soon be filled. The relict will be but temporary. Our
own people, whose mineral resources will by that time
have greatly diminished, must find themselves thrown
back upon the soil for a living. If continued abuse of
the land should mark the next 50 years as it has the last,
what must be our outlook?

Even the unintelligent are now coming to under-
stand that we cannot look to our foreign trade for re-
lief from future embarrassment. Our total exports,
about one-fourth in value of the products of our farms,
consist to the extent of more than 70% of articles

•9

grown on the soil or directly sustained by it, such as
live stock, or made from soil products, such as flour.
Of all the materials used in manufacture in this coun-
try, 42% are furnished by the soil. We shall have less
and less of this agricultural wealth to part with as popu-
lation increases. And as to enlarging greatly our sale
of manufactured products in the world's markets, it is
mostly a dream. We cannot finally compete there, ex-
cept in a few selected lines, without a material lowering
of the wage scale at home and a change in the national
standard of living which our people are not ready to
accept without a struggle. When capital cannot find
a profit there will be no money for the payrolls of an
unprofitable business. Doubtless as we grow we shall
buy more and sell more ; but our main dependence half
a century ahead must be upon ourselves. The nation
can no more escape the operation of that law than can
the man. It is time to set our house in order.

Not only the economic, but the political future is
involved. No people ever felt the want of work or the
pinch of poverty for a long time without reaching out
violent hands against their political institutions, believ-
ing that they might find in a change some relief from
their distress. Although there have been moments of
such restlessness in our country, the trial has never
been so severe or so prolonged as to put us to the test.
It is interesting that one of the ablest men in England
during the last century, a historian of high merit, a
statesman who saw active service and a profound stu-
dent of men and things, put on record his prophecy of

20

a iiiturc ordeal. Writing to an American corre-

• li-nt 50 years ago, Lord Macaulay used these

words: "As long as you have a boundless extent of

ud unoccupied land your l.iU.rm^ population
will IK* found more at case than the laboring population
of the ( )M World; but the time will come when wages
will IK- as low and will fluctuate as much with you as
they do with us. Then your institutions will be brought
to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer
unit in. .us and discontented and inclines him to listen
\\ nh eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a
monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million
and another cannot get a full meal. * • • The
day will come when the multitudes of people, none of

:n has had more than half a breakfast or expects to
have more than half a dinner, will choose a legislature.
1> it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be
chosen? * * * There will be, I fear, spoliation.
The spoliation will increase the di^ :he distress

win produce fresh spoliation. * * * Hither civili-
zation or liberty will perish. Hither some Caesar or
Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a

ng hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plun-
dered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth
century as the Roman Hmpire in the fifth." We need

accept this gloomy picture too literally, but we

have been already sufficiently warned to prevent us

from dismi-sjn^ the subject as unworthy of attention.

Every nation finds its hour of peril when there is no

free access to the land, or when the land will no

longer support the people. Disturbances within are
more to be feared than attacks from without. Our
government is built upon the assumption of a fairly
contented, prosperous and happy people, capable of
ruling their passions, with power to change their insti-
tutions when such change is generally desired. It
would not be strange if they should in their desire for
change attempt to pull down the pillars of their na-
tional temple. Far may this day be from us. But
since the unnecessary destruction of our land will bring
new conditions of danger, its conservation, its improve-
ment to the highest point of productivity promised by
scientific intelligence and practical experiment, appears
to be a first command of any political economy worthy
of the name.

I have endeavored to outline some of the principal
issues at stake in the better conservation of our na-
tional resources, and especially that one about which
all the others revolve and by whose fortunes we shall
eventually stand or fall — the land itself. They are for
us quite literally the issues of national existence. The
era of unlimited expansion on every side, of having but
to reach out and seize any desired good, ready pro-
vided for us by the Hand that laid the foundations of
the earth, is drawing to a close. The first task, it seems
to me, must be to force home the facts of the situation
into the public consciousness; to make men realize their
duty toward coming generations exactly as the father
feels it a duty to see that his children do not suffer
want. In a democracy this is a first essential. In

22

< .t her forms of government one or two great men may

power to correct mistakes and to put in motion

s that centuries do not unsettle. A part of

tiu price of self-government is the acceptance of that

hi^h office and imi>erati\ e duty as a whole by the people

ves. They must know, they must weigh, they

mu-i act Only as they form and give effect to wise

-ions can the nation go forward. And we should
not be here to-day were it not that the principle of a
conservation of national resources as the foremost and
controlling policy of the United States henceforth is
coming to be seen by many, and must be heartily ac-
cepted by all, as the first condition, not only of con-
tinued material prosperity, but also of the perpetuation
of free institutions and a government by the people. The
work now lx?ing done by the Department of Agriculture
and the agricultural colleges of the various states fur
iii-hcs a broad and intelligent foundation upon which
to build up a new era of national progress and pros-
perity. It calls for a wise, generous and continuing
policy on the part of both federal and state govern-
ments.

If this patriotic gospel is to make headway, it must
be by just such organized missionary work as is to-day
begun. It cannot go on and conquer if imposed from
without. It must come to represent the fixed idea of
tin people's mind, their determination and their hope.
It cannot be incorporated in our practical life by the
dictum of any individual or any officer of nation or
state in his official capacity. It needs the cooperation

•3

<»i all the influences, the help of every voice, tin com
niendation of nation and state that has been the
strength and inspiration of every worthy work on
American soil for 120 years. We return, for our gath
cring in council and for our plan of action for the
future, to the model given us by the fathers. State
and nation are represented here, without jealousy or
any ambition of superiority on either side, to apply to
tin- consideration of our future such co-operation as
that out of which this nation was born and by which it
has won to worthy manhood. Reviving the spirit of
the days that created our Constitution, the days that
carried us through civil conflict, the spirit by which all
our enduring work in the world has been wrought, tak-
ing thought as Washington and Lincoln took thought,
only for the highest good of all the people, we may, as
a result of the deliberations held and the conclusion
reached here to-day, give new meaning to our future ;
new lustre to the ideal of a republic of living federated
states; shape anew the fortunes of this country, and
enlarge the borders of hope for all mankind.

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