The principle of conservation is not at enmity with the spirit of change.  It is in thorough harmony with it.

Conservation becomes a timely topic in these days of hideous waste.  In fact it will not much longer remain among the optional subjects in Life’s curriculum.  Even now the Moving Finger, invisible yet to the thoughtless, is writing after it the stern word “Compulsory.”  Four hundred thousand men have been taken away from the ranks of producers here in Canada, and have gone into the ranks of destroyers, becoming a drain upon our resources for all that they eat, wear, and use.  Many thousand other men are making munitions, whose end is destruction and waste.  We spend more in a day now to kill and hurt our fellow men than we ever spent in a month to educate or help them.  Great new ways of wasting and destroying our resources are going on while the old leaks are all running wide open.  More children under five years old have died since the war than there have been men killed in battle!—­and largely from preventable “dirt-diseases” and poverty.  Rats, weeds, extravagance, general shiftlessness are still doing business at the old stand, unmolested.

But it is working in on us that something must be done.  Now is the time to set in force certain agencies to make good these losses in so far as they can be repaired.  Now is the time, when the excitement of the war is still on us, when the frenzy is still in our blood, for the time of reaction is surely to be reckoned with by and by.  Now we are sustained by the blare of the bands and the flourish of flags, but in the cold, gray dawn of the morning after, we shall count our dead with disillusioned eyes and wonder what was the use of all this bloodshed and waste.  Trade conditions are largely a matter of the condition of the spirit, and ours will be drooping and drab when the tumult and the shouting have died and the reign of reason has come back.

Personal thrift comes naturally to our minds when we begin to think of the lessons that we should take to heart.  Up to the time of the war and since, we have been a prodigal people, confusing extravagance with generosity, thrift with meanness.  The Indians in the old days killed off the buffalo for the sport of killing, and left the carcases to rot, never thinking of a time of want; and so, too, the natives in the North Country kill the caribou for the sake of their tongues, which are considered a real “company dish,” letting the remainder of the animal go to waste.

This is a startling thought, and comes to one over and over again.  You will think of it when you order your twenty-five cents’ worth of cooked ham and see what you get!  You will think of it again when you come home and find that the butcher delivered your twenty-five cents’ worth of cooked ham in your absence, and, finding the door locked, passed it through the keyhole.  And yet the prodigality of the Indian and the caribou-killer are infantile