We have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to impoverish and, over thousands of square miles, to destroy our farms.  The Mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than 400,000,000 tons of the richest soil within its drainage basin.  If this soil is worth a dollar a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from soil-wash to the farmers and forest-owners of the United States is not far from a billion dollars a year.  Our streams, in spite of the millions of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty years ago, and the soil lost by erosion from the farms and the deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason.  The great cattle and sheep ranges of the West, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and should still.  Their condition affects the price of meat in practically every city of the United States.

These are but a few of the more striking examples.  The diversion of great areas of our public lands from the home-maker to the landlord and the speculator; the national neglect of great water powers, which might well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of the rail instead—­these are other items in the huge bill of particulars of national waste.

We have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, and it has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaustible.  Even now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing itself upon us in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are still asserting, if not always in words, yet in the far stronger language of action, that nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are inexhaustible.

It is this national attitude of exclusive attention to the present, this absence of foresight from among the springs of national action, which is directly responsible for the present condition of our natural resources.  It was precisely the same attitude which brought Palestine, once rich and populous, to its present desert condition, and which destroyed the fertility and habitability of vast areas in northern Africa and elsewhere in so many of the older regions of the world.

The conservation of our natural resources is a question of primary importance on the economic side.  It pays better to conserve our natural resources than to destroy them, and this is especially true when the national interest is considered.  But the business reason, weighty and worthy though it be, is not the fundamental reason.  In such matters, business is a poor master but a good servant.  The law of self-preservation is higher than the law of business, and the duty of preserving the Nation is still higher than either.