CONSERVATION

The practical application of economy to the resources of the country calls for conservation.  This does not mean that every resource should not be developed to its full degree, but it means that none of them should be wasted.  We have a conservation board working on our oil problem.  This is of the utmost importance to the future well-being of our people in this age of oil-burning engines and the general application of gasoline to transportation.  The Secretary of the Interior should not be compelled to lease oil lands of the Osage Indians when the market is depressed and the future supply is in jeopardy.

While the area of lands remaining in public ownership is small, compared with the vast area in private ownership, the natural resources of those in public ownership are of immense present and future value.  This is particularly trite as to minerals and water power.  The proper bureaus have been classifying these resources to the end that they may be conserved.  Appropriate estimates are being submitted, in the Budget, for the further prosecution of this important work.

IMMIGRATION

The policy of restrictive immigration should be maintained.  Authority should be granted the Secretary of Labor to give immediate preference to learned professions and experts essential to new industries.  The reuniting of families should be expedited.  Our immigration and naturalization laws might well be codified.

WAGE EARNER

In its economic life our country has rejected the long accepted law of a limitation of the wage fund, which led to pessimism and despair because it was the doctrine of perpetual poverty, and has substituted for it the American conception that the only limit to profits and wages is production, which is the doctrine of optimism and hope because it leads to prosperity.  Here and there the councils of labor are still darkened by the theory that only by limiting individual production can there be any assurance of permanent employment for increasing numbers, but in general, management and wage earner alike have become emancipated from this doom and have entered a new era in industrial thought which has unleashed the productive capacity of the individual worker with an increasing scale of wages and profits, the end of which is not yet.  The application of this theory accounts for our widening distribution of wealth.  No discovery ever did more to increase the happiness and prosperity of the people.

Since 1922 increasing production has increased wages in general 12.9 per cent, while in certain selected trades they have run as high as 34.9 per cent and 38 per cent.  Even in the boot and shoe shops the increase is over 5 per cent and in woolen mills 8.4 per cent, although these industries have not prospered like others.  As the rise in living costs in this period is negligible, these figures represent real wage increases.