“But for all that, this contemner of ‘reformers’ made reform respectable in the United States, and this rebuker of ‘muck-rakers’ has been the chief agent in making the history of ‘muck-raking’ in the United States a National one, conceded to be useful.  He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase ‘the square deal.’  The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the Nation a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it is likely to think.

“And, then, there is the great and statesmanlike movement for the conservation of our National resources, into which Roosevelt so energetically threw himself at a time when the Nation as a whole knew not that we are ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can.  This is probably the greatest thing Roosevelt did, undoubtedly.  This globe is the capital stock of the race.  It is just so much coal and oil and gas.  This may be economized or wasted.  The same thing is true of phosphates and other mineral resources.  Our water resources are immense, and we are only just beginning to use them.  Our forests have been destroyed; they must be restored.  Our soils are being depleted; they must be built up and conserved.

“These questions are not of this day only or of this generation.  They belong all to the future.  Their consideration requires that high moral tone which regards the earth as the home of a posterity to whom we owe a sacred duty.

“This immense idea Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the ears of the Nation until the Nation heeded.  He held it so high that it attracted the attention of the neighboring nations of the continent, and will so spread and intensify that we will soon see the world’s conferences devoted to it.

“Nothing can be greater or finer than this.  It is so great and so fine that when the historian of the future shall speak of Theodore Roosevelt he is likely to say that he did many notable things, among them that of inaugurating the movement which finally resulted in the square deal, but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement for staying terrestrial waste and saving for the human race the things upon which, and upon which alone, a great and peaceful and progressive and happy race life can be founded.

“What statesman in all history has done anything calling for so wide a view and for a purpose more lofty?”

CHAPTER XI

THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF THE NATION

When Governor of New York, as I have already described, I had been in consultation with Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, and had shaped my recommendations about forestry largely in accordance with their suggestions.  Like other men who had thought about the national future at all, I had been growing more and more concerned over the destruction of the forests.