SIXTH SESSION (continued 2)

Do not be uneasy about the forests; at the last session, Congress gave me $400,000 more than they had ever given me before to take care of the forests. Do not be uneasy about the coal, the gas, the oil, and the phosphates; President Taft has withdrawn all those until Congress indicates what shall be done with them. But the soil, Gentlemen, the soil; the big price for meat, the big price for bread; these are things to study. We can improve our soil. One of our speakers this afternoon told us that you cannot grow soil. I believe that, once you wash it away. But you can reduce it, beyond the point of profitable production of crops; that you can do, and that is being done. The soil-robber works in Iowa, and I fear he is at work in Minnesota. The old folks have gone to town; and the Lord knows nobody wants them there, because when you want to improve the town with gas and sewer and water and things of that kind, the farmer won't vote for them; he is regarded as a nuisance; everybody wishes he would stay on the farm, and I wish he would. And when the old farmer and his wife go to town, they sell off everything; they rent the farm to a man who has no means to stock it with cattle and sheep, hogs and poultry; he grows grain to sell, he grows hay to sell, and those farms grow worse and worse every year. That is the situation we are in. (Applause)

We are making some progress, some headway. The Government gave to the emigrant from abroad, to everybody who wanted it as long as they lasted, a claim in the rainy belt; but there are no lands left for giving away in the rainy belt. Something can be done in regard to our dry-land farming; something can be done in regard to irrigation. As Mr Hill intimated (in fact, he delivered a great deal of my speech), there is not much being done in the line of irrigation. Take a trip out West and watch the rivers as you cross them, and you will see that we are wasting far more water than we are using—though in certain neighborhoods in Colorado highly intelligent people are every year building more dams away up in the mountains and saving their winter and spring-flood waters. That is going on and on, and it should go on until all the waters in the mountains are saved for application to the land. Do you remember the history of irrigation in the valley of the Po, in Italy? There are more people to the square mile there than are found in almost any other part of the world. They began at the headwaters of the tributaries and built great dams to hold up the water to an amount suitable for the growing of crops, something like twenty inches or more; and they built on down to the mouth of the Po. Now when there comes a drought like we had this year, they let water out on the fields, and thus get a maximum crop. Without that extra water, at a time of drought their crop would wither and fail. I understand Minnesota has more lakes, more natural reservoirs for holding water than any other State in the Union. Look to it, you Minnesota people; you can, by using that water in a dry year, grow maximum crops.

How do the people of the Old World raise big crops? If you followed Mr Hill's statistics you learned they didn't know as much there once as they do now, for they have raised their crop production from 20 to 30 bushels an acre. He also alluded to the Danes, who by good farming are enabled to sell enormous amounts of farm products. How do they keep that land up? I will tell you what a great many of them are doing. They buy mill-feeds from the United States; they buy bran and shorts, they buy the cottonseed of the South and the flaxseed of Minnesota, and feed their dairy cows. That is a highly intellectual job, isn't it, for an American citizen, to grow food for a Danish cow? But the Dane has his eyes open; he knows. He sells $40,000,000 worth of butter and cheese to England every year, but puts back all the fertility on the farm; and that is what has brought up his little fifteen-acre farm, or his forty-acre farm. He has brought it up by keeping and feeding his cows on our mill-feeds, mind you; and he is prosperous—and we are not so prosperous only because we rob ourselves.

A Voice—Bran doesn't cost any more in Denmark than in America.

Secretary Wilson—It is American bran, though. And let me tell you something else. The meats you grow up here cost hardly any more in Europe than they cost here, because the retailer over there hasn't got all the frills that the retail dealer has here, and is satisfied with a smaller profit. (Applause)

Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am merely outlining some of the remarks that I prepared and gave to the newspaper people; and I have no doubt you have listened to me as long as you care to (cries of "Go on, go on"). I have enjoyed my visit here. I am on record as saying that these northwestern States, beginning here and extending on west, are the healthiest we have; their waters are good; their climate is fine; they are going to grow vigorous men and handsome women. If we are going to have all their benefits you should conserve your soil, so that your great-grandchildren will have better soil than you have today. Down in Iowa, where I have lived for 46 years, the soil grows bigger crops today than it did fifty years ago; and it is still improving.

You have extended to me the greatest compliment a hospitable people can bestow on a stranger, and that is to give me your attention. I thank you. (Great applause.)

Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: We will now listen to a discussion by Honorable F. C. Stevens, Member of Congress from this district. (Applause)

Representative Stevens—Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: You are fortunate this afternoon, so far as my discussion is concerned. I was assigned to discuss an address by Senator Dolliver, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, on the subject of "Cattle, Food, and Leather." We greatly regret the enforced absence of Senator Dolliver, because he is informed on that subject and could have given us a discussion of great benefit. I congratulate myself that I am not obliged to follow him, because I know too little about his subject. So I shall briefly discuss something I do know about.

In the very able address of Mr Hill, and in the very bright discussion of Mr Wallace which followed, there was a general criticism of Congress for undue expenditures of public money. I want to tell this audience that Congress, instead of being extravagant, is often unduly economical of the people's money. The money we spend is what the people want us to spend, and we do not spend nearly as much as they want us to. The estimates that were sent in by the heads of the departments (of which Secretary Wilson is one) aggregated nearly two hundred millions of dollars more than the expenditures which Congress authorized, and the estimates which came from the field officers to the heads of these great departments, for example, like that of Secretary Wilson; from the post-offices scattered throughout the country; from the officers of the War and Navy Departments, scattered all over the world; and from the officers of the State and other departments, were, I will venture to say, nearly two hundred million dollars more still: so that Congress actually did not spend more than two-thirds as much as the people of the United States in their respective localities wanted spent. There is not a single large convention in the United States similar to this—which is one of the most magnificent in the history of this section of the country—that does not call upon Congress for the expenditure of large sums of money, and I will venture to predict that the resolutions, which will be adopted by this Congress will call for a large appropriation from the National treasury. We have in Washington every year a Rivers and Harbors Congress, composed of 4,000 of the brightest, broadest, most patriotic business men of the United States, who go there as delegates, spend their own money to go, and then ask large expenditures from the people's treasury. Scattered all over this country, meeting probably in every State in the Union, are various voluntary assemblages of our People demanding various improvements by the Federal Government, and every one asking for expenditures of the people's money. You never yet have heard of a convention which has met anywhere at anybody's expense asking for a cutting down of expenditures. If there is any one man who is popular in the United States it is the man who calls for the expenditure of the people's money; the men who are the most unpopular, and are condemned and criticised in public life, are those who try to cut down the expenses and be economical with the people's money (applause). I think there ought to be some reform (and I have had some experience); we are extravagant; we do spend more money than we ought to, but it is spent honestly, it is spent with the best of intention, it is spent because the people want us to spend it, and we do not go nearly as far as they ask us to.

Just one suggestion more: It is easy to criticise and ridicule something that a man knows but little about, and I have noticed that in this discussion of Conservation each man is almighty anxious to conserve that which interests him; and one of the latest examples of that was afforded by the statement of Mr Wallace in condemnation of the dam between Saint Paul and Minneapolis. Now, in advance I want to state that I am not responsible for that dam; it was there before I entered public life. But there is one thing we are trying to do; we are trying to enforce the principle of practical Conservation, and I wish to call attention to that as a sample of ridicule sometimes seen in the discussion of a subject that really interests the people. The United States thirty years ago started, at the headwaters of the Mississippi, six of the largest storage reservoirs for water in the world, with a capacity of many thousands of millions of gallons of water, designed to improve the navigation of the river and raise it in times of drought eighteen inches here at the levee of Saint Paul. That enormous storage of water in the river should be utilized for the practical benefit of the people of the United States. That is the practical basis for all theories of Conservation. A board of engineers was ordered by Congress to make an investigation of the use of the dam at the Twin Cities, and they have reported that a dam can be built and it has been ordered by Congress and is under construction (it is the one ridiculed). It will be thirty feet high and will yield 15,000 horsepower of electrical energy, worth here $25 per horsepower-year, making a total value of $375,000 per annum, at an expenditure in all not to exceed $2,000,000. It will pay the United States the money that it invests in that dam. It is expected that the United States will sell, for a reasonable price, that electrical energy to the cities of Saint Paul and Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota; these cities can be the best lighted in the world and save a hundred thousand dollars each annually (applause); and, more than that, we will have there the most beautiful lake in the world, extending from the historical falls of Minnehaha below to the great and beautiful University of Minnesota above. That is a practical example of Conservation (applause). Before any of these gentlemen come forward flippantly to ridicule the public works going on in any part of the country, they should realize that there may be some things they don't know about. (Applause)

Only one suggestion more (because we all want to hear from Professor Bailey): It is easy to criticise Congress as a whole; it is fashionable to do it; Congress hasn't any friends anywhere; but just remember this: it is a necessary evil; it is the concrete voice of ninety millions of free American citizens; it is the only agency whereby these ninety millions of American people can accomplish their will and desire. We can only run a free Government by the rule of the majority; a majority of one is potent to control this whole great country; 51 percent are in favor of what that majority does, and, 49 percent claim the right to criticise and kick at what that majority does. As this is a free Government they have that right. Now, my friends, we must remember that what displeases us probably pleases 51 percent, and if we had the right to pass the very laws we wanted to on any subject, the chances are that our next-door neighbors, on both sides, would criticise and complain of us, just as we are now doing of other people. The only thing I wish to emphasize is that Congress tries to represent the whole American people, tries to make concrete the voice of the whole American people. It is human, the same as the people are; it makes the same kind of mistakes that the people make; and, after all, the people are responsible for Congress. I thank you. (Applause)

Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now have an address on "Conservation in Country Life," by Dr Liberty Hyde Bailey, Dean of State Agricultural College, Cornell University, and Chairman of the Country Life Commission. It affords me great pleasure to introduce Professor Bailey. (Applause)

Professor Bailey—Mr President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Because of the lateness of the hour, and because of the very great treat which you have had this afternoon in the presentation of the fundamental questions of country life, I shall only call your attention to three or four topics which, perhaps, have not been touched by others who have spoken from this platform.

Two great economic and social movements are now before the country—Conservation, and Country Life. The Conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. The Country Life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. Both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. They rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore, are phases of a process in social evolution.

Not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also on securing greater quantity and variety of new products. These are finally the most fundamental movements that government has yet attempted to attack; for when the resources of the earth shall largely disappear or the arm of the husbandman lose its skill, there is an end of the office of government.

At the bottom, therefore, the Conservation and Country Life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation, and in the problems that are before them, they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. These complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, although articulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attached to each movement. The Conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore finds itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. The Country Life movement lacks these personal and political aspects.

These Subjects Have a History

Neither "Conservation" nor "Country Life" is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. The end of our original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. The need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has been depicted from the days of the classical writings until now. On this side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists and others among us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility, the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. So long and persistently have those of us in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coordinate importance of rural affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty. But there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep, back into human experience. It is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now met to discuss.

All really fundamental movements are the results of long-continued discussion and investigation, but it requires a great generalizer and organizer, and one possessed of prevision, to concrete scattered facts into powerful national movements. The one who recognized the existence of these questions, who saw the significance of the problems, who aided to assemble them, and who projected them into definite lines of public action was Theodore Roosevelt; and he himself has expressed our obligation in this Conservation movement to Gifford Pinchot. (Great applause)

The Conservation movement is now approaching its full; the Country Life movement is a slower and quieter tide, but it will rise with great power. These are the twin economic and social questions that the Roosevelt administration raised for our consideration. (Applause)

They are not party-politics subjects

I have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. I wish to enlarge this view. They are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. We must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. The subject must be approached by scientific methods. It would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. Every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than be made the arbitrary program, either one way or another, of a political organization. The Conservation principle is a plain economic and social problem rather than a political issue. (Applause)

The Country Life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. It will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution by non-political methods. The first recommendation of the Commission on Country Life is that the Government begin taking stock of rural life in order that we may have definite facts on which to begin a reconstructive program.

The soil is the greatest of all resources

The resources that sustain the race are of two kinds—those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. The former are the water, the air, the sunshine, and the mines of minerals, metals, and coal; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock. Intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. Even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. Beyond all the mines of coal and all the precious ores, the soil resource is the heritage that must be most carefully saved; and this, in particular, is the country-life phase of the Conservation movement.

To my mind, the Conservation movement has not sufficiently emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion, and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice; but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening power of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. The course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands.

Thinner than the skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that man tills. Beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of the soft soil layer of the earth. We do not know that any vital forces pulsate from the great interior bulk of the earth. Only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. And yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life-principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves.

The general evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he abandons it and throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. We are accustomed to marvel at the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature—he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam and the energy of the electric currents, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. Man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth.

We can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. It is the one great earth resource over which we have dominion. The soil may be made better as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the Conservation of natural resources.

No man has a right to plunder the soil

The man who owns and tills the soil owes an obligation to his fellowmen for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellowmen owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that he will not be obliged to rob the earth in order to maintain his life. The natural resources of the earth are the heritage and the property of every one and all of us. A man has no moral right to skin the earth, unless he is forced to do it in sheer self-defense and to enable him to live in some epoch of an unequally developed society; and if there are or have been such epochs, then is society itself directly responsible for the waste of the common heritage.

The man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own and he withholds food from the mouths of generations yet to be born. No man really owns his acres; society allows him the use of them for his life-time, but the fee comes back to society in the end. What, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? The pillaging or reckless land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders.

(I know that the soil-depletion idea is now challenged; but I am sure that the Conservation ideal must be applied to soil maintenance even as it is applied to other maintenance. If it transpires that plants hold a different relation to the soil-content than we have supposed, we still know that poor farming makes the land unproductive and that the saving of wastes is a desirable human quality; and we shall probably need to change only our phraseology to make the old statement broadly correct.)

I have no socialistic program to propose. The man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever (applause). When he knows, and when his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. When society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. We shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless he is able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it. (Applause)

It is a pernicious notion that a man may do what he will with his own. The whole tendency of social development is away from this idea. A person may not even have the full control of his own children: society compels him to place them in school, and it protects them from over-work and hardship. A man may not breed diseased cattle. No more should he be allowed wantonly to waste forests or to make lands impotent, even though he "owns" them. (Applause)

Ownership vs. Conservation

This discussion leads me to make an application to the Conservation movement in general. We are so accustomed to think of privileged interests and of corporation control of resources that we are likely to confuse Conservation with company ownership. The essence of Conservation is to utilize our resources with the least waste consistent with good progress, and with an honest care for the children of all generations.

While we not infrequently state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and then assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved, yet, in fact, the Conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. A corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. The individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists (applause), even though his operations compass a very small scale. The very fact that he is independent, with the further fact that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers—private property rights—insures his monopoly.

In the interest of pure Conservation, it is necessary to control the single man as well as the organized men. In the end Conservation must deal with the individual man—that is, with a person. It matters not whether this person is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm—if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender. We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are regulating the corporation and making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot free? (Applause)

In the last analysis, as measured by the results to society, there is no essential difference between corporate ownership and individual ownership.

The philosophy of saving

The Conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best advancement in our own day. We have not developed much consciousness of saving when dealing with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the American has found himself so much in the midst of plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. As a question of public action, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. A high sense of saving ought to come out of the Conservation movement. This will make directly for character-efficiency, since it will develop both responsibility and regard for others.

Civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. Materials are brought from forest and sea and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is discarded or destroyed; more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable quantities and dumped wholesale, through endless sewerage and drainage systems, into the sea. It would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. We are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the ocean. (Applause)

The factories that fabricate agricultural products are likely to be midway stations in the progress of the fertility on its way to the sea. The refuse is dumped into streams; or if it is made into fertilizing materials, it seldom returns to the particular areas whence it came. A manufactory will expend any effort in improving its machinery and practice to enable it to get more material out of its products, but may do little or nothing to increase the production back on the farms. A sugar-beet or other factory may drain its country until the country can no longer raise the product; whereas, by developing a rational system of husbandry and returning the wastes, as in some European countries, it might maintain the land-balance. Any good milk-products factory should develop sound milk-making on the farms of the region, as any good canning factory should raise the standard of production in the fruits and vegetables that it uses; and this should always be done with the object of preserving and even increasing the land-power. A factory owes an obligation to the open country that supports it.

For these and for other reasons, the city always tends to destroy its province. The city takes everything to itself—materials, money, men—and gives back only what it cannot use or what it discards as useless: it does not constructively build up its contributory country.

City dwelling and country dwelling are the two opposite developments of human affairs. The future state of society depends directly on the finding of some real economic and social balance between the two, some species of cooperation that will build and serve them both. This is the fundamental problem of the social structure. Although city people and country people are rapidly affiliating in acquaintanceship, these poles of society are not yet effectively coming together cooperatively on economic lines. (Applause)

The Conservation of food

The fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. It has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thus far, because the earth yet has a small population, and because there have always been new lands to be brought into requisition. We shall eliminate the plague and the devastations of war, and the population of the earth will tremendously increase. When the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem that we scarcely apprehend today.

One would think, from current discussions, that the single way to provide the food for the population is to raise more products by moving more people on the land; but this is not at all nub of the question. More products will be raised as rapidly as it pays persons to raise them, and there are now sufficient people on the land to double its productiveness; and the necessary increase of population will come automatically with increasing profits in the business. Much is said about the necessity of intenser methods of farming, and we all recognize the need; but the chief reason why our people do not raise 300 bushels of potatoes to the acre is that it does not yet pay in most cases to produce the extra yield. The comparative statistics of yields in different countries are useful as appealing to the imagination, but they may be wholly fallacious as guides. What we need is a thorough inquiry into the course of trade from potato-patch to consumer, to see where the profit goes.

We need a greater number of competent farmers, to be sure, whether they hail from the country or the city; the city will still attract those laborers who cannot work alone and who watch the clock, and the city provides the organization or machinery to make them of use; but the real food question and cost-of-living question is the problem of maintaining the producing-power of the earth by means of better farming.

We think we have developed intensive and perfected systems of agriculture; but as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, a scientifically permanent agriculture on national lines is yet unknown in the world. In certain regions, as in Great Britain, the productivity of the land has been increased over a long series of years, but this has been accomplished to a great extent by the transportation of fertilizing materials from the ends of the earth. The fertility of England, according to authorities, has been drawn largely from the prairies and plains of America, from which it has secured its food supplies, from the guano deposits in islands of the seas, from the bones of animals and men, from the mummies of Egypt (applause). The rotation of crops is not itself a complete means of maintaining fertility.

We begin to understand how it is possible to maintain the producing-power of the surface of the earth, and there are certain regions in which our knowledge has been put effectively into operation; but we have developed no conscious plan or system in a large way for securing this result. It is the ultimate problem of the race to devise a permanent self-sustaining organized agriculture on a scientific basis. The problem is yet unsolved.

We deplore the relative decrease in the exportation of agricultural produce, and seem to think that the more we export the richer we become; but, if our knowledge is correct, under present systems of farming, the more we send abroad the sooner do we deplete our soils. We properly remove phosphate lands from exploitation and monopoly, but we may remove our phosphates more rapidly by sending our produce in unhindered quantities to Europe. Of course, I am not arguing against exportation and trade, but I wish to point out a fallacy in our common economic speech.

The best husbandry is not in the new regions

The best agriculture, considered in reference to the permanency of its results, develops in old regions, where the skinning process has passed, where the hide has been sold, and where people come back to utilize what is left. The skinning process is proceeding at this minute in the bountiful new lands of the United States; and in parts of the older States, and even also in parts of the newer ones, not only the skin but the tallow has been sold. There are "abandoned" farms from California even unto Maine.

It is persistently said that the old eastern States are worn out, and that the farming in them is wretched. There is reason enough to be ashamed of eastern agriculture, and I hope that our newer regions will not repeat the mistakes of the older States; but the eastern States have most excellent agriculture, more than we are aware. Much of it is very profitable, fully as profitable as any I have seen in the great agricultural West. The acre-efficiency, as indicated by the Twelfth Census, is greatest in the old eastern States. Considered with reference to maintaining high fertility and utilizing wastes, I have not seen better fanning in this country than in many examples east of Buffalo. In the development of our agricultural wealth, the East as well as the West must be reckoned with. We cannot expect to develop widespread self-sustaining systems of farming in the East so long as it must compete with the soil-mining of the West.

We are always seeking growing-room, and we have found it. But now, the western civilization has met the eastern, and the world is circumferenced. We shall develop the tropics and push far toward the poles; but we have now fairly discovered the island that we call the earth (within a year and a half we have reached one end of it and all but reached the other), and we must begin to make the most of it.

Another philosophy of agriculture

Practically all our agriculture has been developed on a rainfall basis. There is ancient irrigation experience, to be sure, but the great agriculture has been growing away from these regions. Agriculture is still moving on, seeking new regions; and it is rapidly invading regions of small rainfall. The greater part of the land surface of the globe must be farmed, if farmed at all, under some system of careful water-saving. Some of it is redeemable by irrigation, and the remainder, representing about one-half the earth's surface, by some system of utilization of deficient rainfall, or by what is inappropriately known as "dry farming." The complementary practices of irrigation and dry-farming will develop a wholly new system of agriculture and a new philosophy of country life.

Even in heavy rainfall countries, there is often such vast waste of water from run-off that the lands suffer severely during droughts. The hilly lands of our best farming regions are greatly reduced in their crop-producing power because people do not prepare against drought as consciously as they provide against winter. It is often said that we shall water eastern lands by irrigation, and I think that we shall; but our first obligation is to save the rainfall water by some system of farm-management or dry-farming.

The irrigation and dry-farming developments have a significance beyond their value in the raising of crops; they are making the people to be conservators of water, and to have a real care for posterity. Agriculture rests on the saving of water. (Applause)

The obligation of the farmer

The farmer is rapidly beginning to realize his obligation to society. It is usual to say that the farmer feeds the world, but the larger fact is that he saves the world. The economic system depends on him. Wall Street watches the crops.

As cities increase proportionately in population, the farmer assumes larger relative importance and becomes more and more a marked man.

Careful and scientific husbandry is rising in this new country. We have come to a realization of the fact that our resources are not unlimited. The mining of fertilizing materials for transportation to a few spots on the earth will some day cease. We must make the farm sustain itself, at the same time that it provides the supplies for mankind. We all recognize the necessity of the other great occupations to a well developed civilization; but in the nature of the case, the farmer is the final support. On him depends the existence of the race. No method of chemical synthesis can provide us with the materials of food and clothing and shelter, and with all the good luxuries that spring from the bosom of the earth.

I know of no better present conservators than our best farmers. They feel their responsibility. Quite the ideal of Conservation is illustrated by a farmer of my acquaintance who saves every product of his land and has developed a system of self-maintaining live-stock husbandry, who has harnessed his small stream to light his premises and do much of his work, who turns his drainage waters into household use, and who is now troubled that he cannot make some use of the winds that are going to waste on his farm.

The obligation of the Conservation movement

What I have meant to emphasize is the fact that the farmer is the ultimate conservator of the resources of the earth. He is near the cradle of supplies, near the sources of the streams, next the margin of the forests, and on the hills and in the valleys and on the plains just where the resources lie. He is in contact with the original and raw materials, and with the fundamental necessities. Any plan of Conservation that overlooks this fact cannot meet the situation. The Conservation movement must help the farmer to keep and save the race.

The Conservation and Country Life movements will pass through propagandic, economic, and political phases; but they will eventuate into a new alignment of human forces and a redirection of the processes of social development. These results are to be brought about by efforts proceeding along definite lines of action. The Conservation movement is rapidly becoming crystallized into definite proposals. The Country Life movement should be solidified through a definite National organization or commission, that is continuously active. This body should work through all existing rural organizations, placing before them for consideration the specific questions of the day and serving as a clearing-house of discussions that arise in the societies and with the people; and it should make real investigation into the actual economic and social conditions of the open country, with a view to pointing out the specific practical steps to be taken by National, State, local, and individual enterprise.

The Commission on Country Life made sufficient specific recommendations and suggestions to start a fundamental redirection of effort as applied to rural development. The Report of the Commission will naturally be the diverging-point of future discussions of country-life problems. (Applause)

Chairman Clapp—Ladies and Gentlemen: The hour grows late, and the Congress will stand adjourned for the day.