or a thousand years, the coal is limited in amount, unless through geological changes which we shall not live to see, there will never be any more of it than there is now.  But coal is in a sense the vital essence of our civilization.  If it can be preserved, if the life of the mines can be extended, if by preventing waste there can be more coal left in this country after we of this generation have made every needed use of this source of power, then we shall have deserved well of our descendants.

Conservation stands emphatically for the development and use of water-power now, without delay.  It stands for the immediate construction of navigable waterways under a broad and comprehensive plan as assistants to the railroads.  More coal and more iron are required to move a ton of freight by rail than by water, three to one.  In every case and in every direction the conservation movement has development for its first principle, and at the very beginning of its work.  The development of our natural resources and the fullest use of them for the present generation is the first duty of this generation.  So much for development.

In the second place conservation stands for the prevention of waste.  There has come gradually in this country an understanding that waste is not a good thing and that the attack on waste is an industrial necessity.  I recall very well indeed how, in the early days of forest fires, they were considered simply and solely as acts of God, against which any opposition was hopeless and any attempt to control them not merely hopeless but childish.  It was assumed that they came in the natural order of things, as inevitably as the seasons or the rising and setting of the sun.  To-day we understand that forest fires are wholly within the control of men.  So we are coming in like manner to understand that the prevention of waste in all other directions is a simple matter of good business.  The first duty of the human race is to control the earth it lives upon.

We are in a position more and more completely to say how far the waste and destruction of natural resources are to be allowed to go on and where they are to stop.  It is curious that the effort to stop waste, like the effort to stop forest fires, has often been considered as a matter controlled wholly by economic law.  I think there could be no greater mistake.  Forest fires were allowed to burn long after the people had means to stop them.  The idea that men were helpless in the face of them held long after the time had passed when the means of control were fully within our reach.  It was the old story that “as a man thinketh, so is he”; we came to see that we could stop forest fires, and we found that the means had long been at hand.  When at length we came to see that the control of logging in certain directions was profitable, we found it had long been possible.  In all these matters of waste of natural resources, the education of the people to understand that they can stop the leakage comes before the actual stopping and after the means of stopping it have long been ready at our hands.