The American Revolution had its origin in part in economic causes, and it produced economic results of tremendous reach and weight.  The Civil War also arose in large part from economic conditions, and it has had the largest economic consequences.  But in each case there was a higher and more compelling reason.  So with the third great crisis of our history.  It has an economic aspect of the largest and most permanent importance, and the motive for action along that line, once it is recognized, should be more than sufficient.  But that is not all.  In this case, too, there is a higher and more compelling reason.  The question of the conservation of natural resources, or national resources, does not stop with being a question of profit.  It is a vital question of profit, but what is still more vital, it is a question of national safety and patriotism also.

We have passed the inevitable stage of pioneer pillage of natural resources.  The natural wealth we found upon this continent has made us rich.  We have used it, as we had a right to do, but we have not stopped there.  We have abused, and wasted, and exhausted it also, so that there is the gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been bought at the price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants.  We may now fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural interest in those who are to come after us.  No patriotic citizen expects this Nation to run its course and perish in a hundred or two hundred, or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the happiness and prosperity of our people.  But we have as little reason to expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been for the men who established this Nation to expect that a United States would grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices.  It was their duty to found this Nation, and they did it.  It is our duty to provide for its continuance in well-being and honor.  That duty it seems as though we might neglect—­not in wilfulness, not in any lack of patriotic devotion, when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of the moment long enough to realize that what we do now will decide the future of the Nation.  For, if we do not take action to conserve the Nation’s natural resources, and that soon, our descendants will suffer the penalty of our neglect.

Let me use a homely illustration:  We have all known fathers and mothers, devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and limited by the household routine of daily life.  Such parents were actively concerned with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed in bringing up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all unusual.  Fathers and mothers such as these often remain serenely unaware while some dangerous malady or injurious habit is