BUSINESS
The business of the people of the United States, performed by the
Government of the United States, is a vast and a most important one; it
is the house-keeping of the American Nation. As a business proposition
it does not attract anything like the attention that it ought.
Unfortunately we have come into the habit of considering the Government
of the United States as a political organization rather than as a
business organization.
Now this question, which the Governors of the States and the
representatives of great interests were called to Washington to consider
in 1908, is fundamentally a business question, and it is along business
lines that it must be considered and solved, if the problem is to be
solved at all. Manufacturers are dealing with the necessity for
producing a definite output as a result of definite expenditure and
definite effort. The Government of the United States is doing exactly
the same thing. The manufacturer's product can be measured in dollars
and cents. The product of the Government of the United States can be
measured partly in dollars and cents, but far more importantly in the
welfare and contentment and happiness of the people over which it is
called upon to preside.
The keynote of that Conservation Conference in Washington was
forethought and foresight. The keynote of success in any line of life,
or one of the great keynotes, must be forethought and foresight. If we,
as a Nation, are to continue the wonderful growth we have had, it is
forethought and foresight which must give us the capacity to go on as we
have been going. I dwell on this because it seems to me to be one of
the most curious of all things in the history of the United States
to-day that we should have grasped this principle so tremendously and so
vigorously in our daily lives, in the conduct of our own business, and
yet have failed so completely to make the obvious application in the
things which concern the Nation.
It is curiously true that great aggregations of individuals and
organized bodies are apt to be less far-sighted, less moral, less
intelligent along certain lines than the individual citizen; or at least
that their standards are lower; a principle which is illustrated by the
fact that we have got over settling disputes between individuals by the
strong hand, but not yet between nations.
So we have allowed ourselves as a Nation, in the flush of the tremendous
progress that we have made, to fail to look at the end from the
beginning and to put ourselves in a position where the normal operation
of natural laws threatens to bring us to a halt in a way which will
make every man, woman, and child in the Nation feel the pinch when it
comes.
No man may rightly fail to take a great pride in what has been
accomplished by means of the destruction of our natural resources so far
as it has gone. It is a paradoxical statement, perhaps, but nevertheless
true, because out of this attack on what nature has given we have won a
kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are
new in the world. For example, nothing like the rapidity of the
destruction of American forests has ever been known in forest history,
and nothing like the efficiency and vigor and inventiveness of the
American lumberman has ever been developed by any attack on any forests
elsewhere. Probably the most effective tool that the human mind and hand
have ever made is the American axe. So the American business man has
grasped his opportunities and used them and developed them and invented
about them, thought them into lines of success, and thus has developed
into a new business man, with a vigor and effectiveness and a
cutting-edge that has never been equalled anywhere else. We have gained
out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor
and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud.
Now that is done. We have accomplished these big things. What is the
next step? Shall we go on in the same lines to the certain destruction
of the prosperity which we have created, or shall we take the obvious
lesson of all human history, turn our backs on the uncivilized point of
view, and adopt toward our natural resources the average prudence and
average foresight and average care that we long ago adopted as a rule of
our daily life?
The conservation movement is calling the attention of the American
people to the fact that they are trustees. The fact seems to me so
plain as to require only a statement of it, to carry conviction. Can we
reasonably fail to recognize the obligation which rests upon us in this
matter? And, if we do fail to recognize it, can we reasonably expect
even a fairly good reputation at the hands of our descendants?
Business prudence and business common-sense indicate as strongly as
anything can the absolute necessity of a change in point of view on the
part of the people of the United States regarding their natural
resources. The way we have been handling them is not good business.
Purely on the side of dollars and cents, it is not good business to kill
the goose that lays the golden egg, to burn up half our forests, to
waste our coal, and to remove from under the feet of those who are
coming after us the opportunity for equal happiness with ourselves. The
thing we ought to leave to them is not merely an opportunity for equal
happiness and equal prosperity, but for a vastly increased fund of
both.
Conservation is not merely a question of business, but a question of a
vastly higher duty. In dealing with our natural resources we have come
to a place at last where every consideration of patriotism, every
consideration of love of country, of gratitude for things that the land
and the institutions of this Nation have given us, call upon us for a
return. If we owe anything to the United States, if this country has
been good to us, if it has given us our prosperity, our education, and
our chance of happiness, then there is a duty resting upon us. That duty
is to see, so far as in us lies, that those who are coming after us
shall have the same opportunity for happiness we have had ourselves.
Apart from any business consideration, apart from the question of the
immediate dollar, this problem of the future wealth and happiness and
prosperity of the people of the United States has a right to our
attention. It rises far above all matters of temporary individual
business advantage, and becomes a great question of national
preservation. We all have the unquestionable right to a reasonable use
of natural resources during our lifetime, we all may use, and should
use, the good things that were put here for our use, for in the last
analysis this question of conservation is the question of national
preservation and national efficiency.