"THE MEN OF ALWAYS"
If one travels along the lower St. Lawrence in summer, one sees the narrow
strips of the one-time great seigniories, clinging like ribbons of varied
colors, green, gold, and brown, to the ancient river, of Cartier and
Champlain. There is on each strip, a little way back from the river, a
picturesque cottage, usually thatched, not roofed by shingles, with its
outbuildings close about, such as Longfellow writes of in Acadia-memories
of homes "which the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the
Henries." There is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle, a
section of tilled field for the wheat and corn and vegetables and a
section of woodland for the fire-wood--each strip, so divided, being a
complete miniature seigniory. Everything is neat. One feels that not a
wisp of hay is lost (for it was in haying time that I passed), that every
tree is as carefully watched as a child, that whatever is taken from the
fields they are not impoverished. The living owners, when they go to their
graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them.
There is no hurrying. The habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are
thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they have; they spend
prudently for to-day; they save for to-morrow--not for the to-morrow of
the nation, but for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly
individualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in effect national.
This is one picture. I put beside it another. Out on the farther edge of
the Mississippi Valley one finds the other extreme. Within the past
twenty-two years certain tracts of vacant land have been purchased by the
government from the Indians (and let me here say that the government has
been trying to deal fairly with these people; mistakes have been made, but
I should say that the nation had in its recent treatment of them, despite
reports I have heard in Paris, pauperized rather than robbed them). These
tracts have been opened to settlement--all the rest of the great public
domain that was immediately desirable having been occupied, as we have
seen. When, in 1889, the first of these tracts, nearly two million acres,
was to be opened, twenty thousand people were waiting just outside its
borders--some on swift horses, some in wagons or buggies, and some in
railroad trains. When the signal was given there was a race across the
border and a scramble for farm sites; and on the part of the passengers on
the trains, for town lots, when the trains had reached the predetermined
sites of cities. At the close of the first day the future capital of what
has for many years been a State had a population of several thousand
inhabitants living in tents, and within a hundred days a population of
fifteen thousand people, mostly men, an electric system in operation, a
street-railway under contract, streets, alleys, parks, boulevards, stores,
and bridges, four thousand houses under construction, five banks, fifteen
hotels, fifty grocery stores, six printing-offices, and three daily
papers--about as striking and unpleasant a contrast to that peaceful life
on the St. Lawrence as one can well imagine. Practically all of the
available land (nearly two million acres) was taken during the course of a
few days.
At the later opening of another tract one hundred thousand persons took
part in the race for the "last of the people's land." And these scenes but
illustrate the rough races to the gold-fields and the iron mountains and
the oil-wells, in eagerness to seize whatever earth had to offer and turn
it to immediate wealth--rough, restless precursors, producers, poets eager
for to-day, yet coming by and by, as we have seen, to be ready to spend
for to-morrow, building schools and universities, enlarging the field of
public provision and service, and filling the land, once neighborly,
individualistic, with institutions of philanthropy.
But the habitant of that farther valley is considerate neither of himself
nor of generous nature. He is ready to spend his all, or her all, of to-
day for to-day and for to-morrow, and to some extent unselfishly, but not
to save it. He lives "angerously" and takes all the risks. His thought of
the future is not nepotic or thrifty; it is likely to be altruistic,
publicistic. I suppose that the constitution and laws of Oklahoma, whose
land was the last to be added to the public domain and its commonwealth
among the last to the roll of States, has been more generous-minded toward
its children than any other. It set apart not only sections sixteen and
thirty-six in every township for the public schools; it reserved two more
sections in every township for kindred uses. But in all this, as I pointed
out, it is spending for the future, not saving, hoarding.
The nepotic conservationist of the St. Lawrence, fixed in his place, saves
because if he leaves but an exhausted field behind him he is robbing his
children and grandchildren of their rightful, personal heritage. The
"boomer" of Oklahoma exploits and spends lavishly because of a sublime
confidence in the illimitability of the resources of nature and in the
resourcefulness of the coming generations.
But the natural scientists--the foresters, the physiographers, the
geologists--have within a very few years been making themselves heard in
warning. They have said that "the mountains of France, of Spain, and China
have been denuded of their forests in large measure so that the supply of
wood is inadequate to meet the needs of the people," [Footnote: C. R. Van
Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States," p. 3.]
that "in Spain and Italy, though warm countries, the people suffer more
from the cold than in America because of insufficient fuel," [Footnote:
Van Hise, p. 2.] that "one-half of the people of the world go to bed
hungry," [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 3.] or at any rate insufficiently
nourished for the next day's work. But few listened to them except in the
hills and in the valleys of abandoned farms. France, Italy, Spain, China
were remote. The optimism fostered of new teeming acres and newly
discovered mines was heedless of the warning. It tore down barns and built
bigger, and it gave even more generously to the need of the hour and the
day.
But the scientists came even nearer home in their studies and statistics.
These are some of the ominous and disturbing facts that are getting to the
ears of the people out of their laboratories and experiment stations:
The coal-fields of the United States (which lie almost exclusively in and
upon the eastern and western edges of the Mississippi Valley) were, at the
rate at which coal was used a few decades ago, practically inexhaustible.
But the per-capita consumption has increased from about a ton in 1870 to
5.6 tons in 1907. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 23.] Up to 1908, 7,240,000,000
[Footnote: Van Hise, p. 25.] tons had been mined, but over ten million
tons were wasted in the mining of seven billions. You may recall the
prophecy which I quoted earlier, that if the mining and wasting go on at
the same rate of increase as in the past few decades the supposed
illimitable fields will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years--that
is by the year 2050. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 25.] This is one of the
statistics of those watchmen on the walls who, instead of standing in high
places with telescopes, sit at microscopes or over tables of figures. That
seems a long period of time, one hundred and fifty years, but it was only
a little longer ago that a French explorer saw the first signs of coal in
that valley along the Illinois, and, as the scientist has intimated, there
is no reason why we should not expect a future of thousands of years for
the coal that has been thousands or millions of years in the making.
The petroleum and natural-gas fields are also nearly all in that valley or
on its edges. (I think it was in the narrow valley of La Belle Rivière,
which Père Bonnecamp found so dark on that Celoron expedition, that this
oil of the rocks was first found.) [Footnote: Natural gas and burning
springs were early known to the French pioneers and Jesuits who penetrated
the Iroquois country, as the following extracts show:
"It was during this interval that, in order to pass away the time, I went
with M. de LaSalle, under the escort of two Indians, about four leagues
south of the village where we were staying, to see a very extraordinary
spring. Issuing from a moderately high rock, it forms a small brook. The
water is very clear but has a bad odor, like that of the mineral marshes
of Paris, when the mud on the bottom is stirred with the foot. I applied a
torch and the water immediately took fire and burned like brandy, and was
not extinguished until it rained. This flame is among the Indians a sign
of abundance or sterility according as it exhibits the contrary qualities.
There is no appearance of sulphur, saltpetre or any other combustible
material. The water has not even any taste, and I can neither offer nor
imagine any better explanation, than that it acquires this combustible
property by passing over some aluminous land."--Galinee's journal, 1669,
in "Marshall Historical Writings," p. 209.
"... The spring in the direction of Sonnontouan is no less wonderful; for
its water--being of the same nature as the surrounding soil, which has
only to be washed in order to obtain perfectly pure sulphur--ignites when
shaken violently, and yields sulphur when boiled. As one approaches nearer
to the country of the Cats, one finds heavy and thick water, which ignites
like brandy, and boils up in bubbles of flame when fire is applied to it.
It is, moreover, so oily, that all our Savages use it to anoint and grease
their heads and their bodies."--"Jesuit Relations, 1657," 43:261.
Pierre Boucher (governor of Three Rivers in 1653-8 and 1662-7) thus
mentions the mineral products of Canada, in his "Histoire veritable et
naturelle de la Nouvelle France" (Paris, 1664), chap. 1: "Springs of salt
water have been discovered, from which excellent salt can be obtained; and
there are others, which yield minerals. There is one in the Iroquois
Country, which produces a thick liquid, resembling oil, and which is used
in place of oil for many purposes."--"Jesuit Relations," 8:289.] If we
assume that the fields have all been discovered and that the present rate
of exploitation is to continue, the supply of petroleum will be exhausted
by 1935 (twenty-one years), or, if the present production goes on without
increase, in ninety years (_i.e.,_ eighty-six years), [Footnote: Van Hise,
p. 48] and that of natural gas in twenty-five years (i. e., twenty-one
years from 1914). [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 56.]
Iron, the metal which the Indians worshipped as a spirit when they first
saw it in the hands of the French, a substance so precious that their name
for it meant "all kinds of good," has, too, been taken with feverish haste
from its ancient places. Joliet and Marquette saw deposits of this ore
near the mouth of the Ohio in 1673, but it was a century and a half before
the harvesting of this crop, down among the rocks for millions of years
before, began. And now, if no new fields are found and the increased use
goes on at the rate of the last three decades, all the available high-
grade ore will have become pig iron and steel billets, bridges, battle-
ships, sky-scrapers, and locomotives, and all kinds of goods, within the
next three decades. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 68.]
The forests of the United States--the forests primeval, with the voice of
whose murmuring pines and hemlocks Longfellow begins his sad story of the
Acadians--contained approximately one billion acres, [Footnote: Van Hise,
p. 210.] a region not conterminous with, but almost as large as, the
Mississippi Valley. Of that great, tempering, benign shadow over the
continent, tempering its heat, giving shelter from its cold, restraining
the waters, there is left about 65 per cent in acreage and not more than
one-half the merchantable timber--five hundred million acres gone in a
century and a half. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 210.]
And as to the land itself--the land first symbolized in the tuft of earth
that St. Lusson lifted toward the sky that day in 1671 at Sault Ste.
Marie, when he took possession of all the land between the seas of the
north and west and south--in the first place, the loss each year from
erosion is six hundred and ten million cubic yards. [Footnote: Van Hise,
p. 307, quoted from W. J. Spillman, "Report National Conservation
Commission," 3:257-262.] This is, of course, inconsiderable in a short
period but in a long period of years means a mighty loss of nourishing
soil. With this loss is that of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus,
things of which the farmer had not even heard the names a few years ago.
The yield of farms in the United States during the last forty years does
not show a decreased average, but it must be remembered that in this
period there have been brought under cultivation new and virgin acres,
which have in their bountiful yield kept up the general average. One
authority says that, taking the country by regions and by districts and
considering what has actually happened, he is led to the conclusion that
the fertility of the soil for 50 per cent of our country has been
lessened. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 299.]
The significance of these facts lies in the desire of the people to know
the truth and seek a remedy.
In a sense the public domain has been exhausted. The pick of the land has
been pre-empted, occupied. But if it is to grow with all its crops, and to
put forth with all its products such a public spirit as this, France will
have given to America a treasure infinitely more valuable than the land
itself which her explorers gave to Europe and the world.
The beaver, which the French regarded as the first opulence of the valley,
remains only as a synonym for industry, one of the States being called the
"Beaver State," perhaps in memory of the beaver days but now in
characterization of the beaverlike activity of its people. The hide of the
buffalo which La Salle showed in Paris is now almost as great a curiosity
in the valley as it was in Paris in 1680. Wild beasts now slink only in
the mountains' margins. Domestic animals, natives of distant lands, live
about the dwellings of men.
Even the streams of water that bore the French into the valley have
dwindled, many of them, or are in despair and tears, between shallows and
torrents, longing for the forests, it is said by the scientists--longing
for the days of the French, the poet would put it. So are the rivers
crying, "In the days of Père Marquette"--the days of the "River of the
Immaculate Conception." And so are the prophets of science crying as the
prophets of inspiration cried of old: O valley of a hundred thousand
streams, O valley of a million centuries of rock and iron and earth, O
valley of a century of man! The riches of the gathering of a million years
are spent in a day. Baldness has come upon the mountains, as upon Gaza of
old. The trees have gone down to the waters. The iron has flowed like
blood from the hills. The fire of the ground is being given to the air.
The sky is filled with smoke. The soil is being carried into the sea; it's
precious dust of nitrogen and phosphor blown to the ends of the earth. The
fresh lands are no more. There are no mines to be had for the asking. The
frontier has become as the centre, the new as the old.
But it is not a hopeless prophecy--an unconstructive, pessimisstic,
lamentation. The way of reparation is made clear.
If I were to speak only of what has been done under the inspiration of
that prophecy, I should have little that is definitely measurable to
present, but in making a catalogue of the averting advice of that
prophecy, I am giving intimation of what will in all probability be done.
For the people of that valley are not wittingly going to give their once
fertile lands as stones, even to the sons of others who ask for bread, nor
their streams as serpents of pestilence to those who ask for fish.
These are some of the items of their constructive conservation programme:
_Coal._--The waste in the mining of coal must be reduced from 50 and 150
per cent of the amount taken out to 25, 15, or 10 per cent by the working
of upper beds first, the utilization of slack, etc. [Footnote: Van Hise,
pp. 26, 27.] The reckless waste of coal in the making of coke can be
prevented by the use of the right sort of oven. It is estimated that there
would be a saving of $50,000,000 per annum if such a substitution were
made. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 28. ] The tremendous loss of the power
value, [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 29, 30.] from 20 to 33 per cent, and of
illuminating value [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 32.] (99 per cent) in coal
because of its imperfect consumption can be greatly reduced by the
employment of mechanical stokers and other devices. The use of the gas-
engine in the place of the steam-engine, [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 31.] the
use of power developed from water, and the diffused carbon dioxide in the
air tempering the climate are also intimations of forces that may lengthen
the life of the coal, 99 per cent of which still remains in the keeping of
the valley. It is not too late. [Footnote: See "The Coal Resources of the
World," International Geological Congress, 1913.]
_Petroleum._--Its probable life may be lengthened beyond ninety years by
its restriction to lubricating and illuminating uses only and by the
prevention of its exportation. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 50-55.]
_Natural Gas._--Its flame is ephemeral at best, but its light may be kept
burning a little longer if the prodigious waste is prevented. During 1907
four hundred billion feet were consumed and almost as great an amount
wasted through uncontrolled wells, leaky pipes, etc. [Footnote: Van Hise,
p. 58.]
_Iron (and, in less measure, gold, silver, and other metals)_, whose life
does not, as coal and oil and gas, perish with the using, but some of
whose value is lost in the transformation from one state of use to
another, needs only to be more economically mined and used. [Footnote: Van
Hise, p. 68.] Non-metallic, inexhaustible materials, as stone, clay,
cement, should be employed in their stead when possible. [Footnote: I
watched day by day for weeks the erection of a great building in Paris,
and I noticed how little iron or steel was used as compared with that in
such structures in New York. We shall undoubtedly come to that.] Every
scrap of iron should be conserved, cry our constructive prophets, even as
the Indians treasured it. We may not need it, but succeeding generations
will. It may be recast to their use. We are but its trustees. [Footnote:
See, "Iron Ore Resources of the World," International Geological Congress,
1910.]
_Forests_[Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 223-262.]--A reduction of the waste in
cutting (this is 25 per cent of the total value of the timber cut); of the
waste in milling and manufacture, and in turpentining. This last waste is
appalling but preventable in full or large measure. The lessening the
demand for lumber by a preservative treatment of all merchantable timber.
A utilization of by-products. (Undoubtedly science will be most helpful
here.) Precautions against fires and their control. Reforestation.
Maintenance of forests on what are called essential areas, such as high
altitudes and slopes, as tending to prevent floods and erosion. (France
here gives most impressive example in planning to bring under conrol about
three thousand torrential streams in the Alps, Pyrenees, Ardennes, and
Cévennes by means, partly at least, of afforestation, $14,000,000 out of
$40,000,000 being provided for this purpose. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 247.]
Italy, because of the greatly increased destruction by the Po, has begun
the reforestation of the Apennines to the extent of a million acres.)
Battle with insect pests and finally the substitution of other materials
for wood, thus not only saving the trees but diminishing the losses by
fire.
_Land._ [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 307-352.]--The control of water to
prevent erosion, deep tillage, and contour ploughing. The restoration of
nitrogen and phosphorus by rotation of crops, phosphates, fertilizers, and
electricity. The destruction of noxious insects, mammals, and weeds. The
reclamation of wet lands. The introduction of new varieties of crops.
_Water._--A fuller use in the place of other sources of power that are
exhausted in use. It is believed that of the twenty-six million horse-
power now developed by coal fifteen million could be more economically
developed by water, thus saving not only $180,000,000 by the substitution,
but 150,000,000 tons of coal for posterity. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 124.]
The leading of this power through longer distances, as from Niagara Falls;
its impounding for a more steady supply; [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 125-
133.] the digging of channels of irrigation into arid places; [Footnote:
Van Hise, pp. 185-207.] the drainage of wet regions; the fuller
utilization of the carrying power of water to relieve the costlier use of
wheels. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 164.] Making the escaping, unsatisfying
stream of Sisyphus turn the mills of the gods.
This is, indeed, as the writing of that ancient prophet of Israel who, in
his vision of the restoration of his city and his land and the healing of
its waters, saw a man with a radiant face, a line of flax in his hand and
a measuring reed. And wherever this man of radiant face measured he caused
the waters to run in dry places and deep rivers to course where the waters
were but ankle-deep; fish to swarm again in the rivers and the seas to be
free of pollution; salt to come in the miry places and trees to grow upon
the land with unwithering leaves and abundant meat.
So have these modern prophets with optimistic faces written of their
vision, only the fulfilment comes not simply of the constructive measuring
of statistics. It takes some trees a hundred years to grow; and dams and
reservoirs for the deepening of shallow streams are not made over night as
once they were by nature, or as they grew in the vision of Ezekiel.
None the less is the prophecy a long way toward fulfilment when the vision
is seen. And that it has been seen is intimated by this sentence, too
optimistic no doubt, from a book on the subject by one of the major
prophets of conservation, recently published in America. "Conservation,"
he says, "has captured the nation."
It is not the thrifty, nepotic, static conservation of the St. Lawrence
habitant, which depends upon the self and family interest of each
landholder to keep the fields enriched and to prevent the washing away of
the soil. It is a dynamic and paternalistic conservation--a conservation
that thinks of great dams for the restraint of waters and reservoirs for
their impounding to the extent of millions or billions of cubic feet,
forestation of great stretches of mountain slope, of restrictions and
compulsions of other than personal and family interests--a paternalism
that looks beyond the next generation or even two generations and to the
feeding of other children than one's own lineal descendants--a paternalism
that is not exploiting but fiduciary.
It is interesting to observe again how the beginnings of this conservation
have been made in the fields where stood the first hospitals for the sick
among the living, the first memorials to the dead, the first schools for
the children of to-day that are to be the nation of to-morrow. Here also
begin to rise the structures of the thought for the day after to-morrow.
The first notable assembling of men in the interest of conservation,
chiefly of men already in public service--the President of the United
States, the Vice-President, members of the cabinet, justices of the
Supreme Court, members of Congress, the governors of thirty-four States,
representatives of the other States, the governors of the Territories, and
other public officials, with a number of representatives of societies and
a few guests--met in 1908, to discuss questions relative to conservation.
Probably not in the history of the nation has there sat in its borders an
assembly of men so widely representative. This gathering resulted in the
appointment of a National Conservation Commission by the President, but
Congress made no appropriation for meeting the expense of its labors; and
so private enterprise and providence have undertaken the carrying out of
the movement.
A great body of men and women scientists, public-spirited citizens from
all parts of the nation, under the presidency of Doctor Charles W. Eliot,
former president of Harvard University, began a campaign of education to
the end that ultimately and soon--before the riches have gone--this
concern for the far future may become fixed in the law and conscious
provision of the people.
I spoke in the last chapter of Hennepin's seeing a savage making sacrifice
to the spirit of the Mississippi, supposed to live under the Falls of St.
Anthony. You will recall the description of the great public university
beside it that represents the sacrifice of the democracy of to-day for the
nation of to-morrow. Instead of the beaver-skin which the poor Indian hung
in the branches of a tree near the falls as his offering, the State has
hung its gift of forty million dollars for the highest training of its
sons and daughters. But there is still, if possible, a nobler aspiration
to put against that primitive background and beside the Indian's beaver-
skin, for the gift is as yet little more than an aspiration.
A few miles back from these same falls there was held in 1910 a convention
of many thousands from all parts of the Union, the President of the United
States and his predecessor among them, assembled under the auspices of the
National Conservation Congress to consider, as they avowed, not alone
their own affairs, not even the good of their children with theirs, but
primarily the welfare of unborn millions as well. It cannot be assumed
that all were looking so far ahead, but the declaration of principles
which had called this great assemblage had in it this import--something
loftier than any declaration of personal rights. It was a declaration of
duty--of duty not to the past, not even to the present, but to the long,
long distant future.
"Recognizing the natural resources of the country as the prime basis of
property and opportunity, we hold the rights of the people in these
resources to be natural and inherent and justly inalienable and
indefeasible; and we insist that the resources should and shall be
developed, used, and conserved in ways consistent with current welfare and
with the perpetuity of our people."
When this or a like sentiment is framed out of the consciousness of a free
people into a controlling declaration of public policy, we shall have not
merely a nobler offering to put beside the beaver-skin and the university,
but a document worthy to be put above our Declaration of Independence
even, and an interpretation of the words "the people of the United States"
in our Constitution that will give them an import beyond the highest
conception of its authors.
The movement which embodies this sentiment is as yet chiefly a private
effort, as I have said, but its influence is beginning to run through the
sentiment of the individualism which has so rapidly exploited the riches
of the valley and spent with such generous hand for the immediate future.
And the boundaries of public service are already enlarged in making room
for the previsions of the "Children of Always," as the mankind now in the
thought of conservationists may well be called.
Already millions of acres of coal lands have been withdrawn from private
entry, and plans are being made for the leasing of such lands; that is,
the people are to keep them for their own.
Like provision has also been made with respect to oil, natural gas, and
phosphate fields. Forest lands to the extent of nearly two hundred million
acres have been reserved as a perpetual national domain, and, in addition
to this, several States have forest reservations amounting to nearly ten
million acres. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 216, 217.] The volume of forest
legislation in the States is unprecedented, providing for forest service,
forest study, and the prevention of forest-fires, with a prospect of laws
providing for a more rigid public control of private forests.
An increasing public control of waters is another noticeable trend in
legislation, and their increased utilization has already been noticed.
Joliet's canal has been built. Champlain's is at last completed. A
President of the United States has recommended the deepening of La Salle's
river. The valley is coming back to the French paths. These and many
others are conservation projects only indirectly, but they intimate a
thought of the future as do the heavy appropriations for the reclamation
of arid and subarid regions, the government having spent seventy million
dollars [Footnote: To June 1, 1912.] in such undertakings, making "one
hand wash the other," as our saying is; that is, making the well-watered
regions meet the expense of watering the arid.
And, finally, the States are beginning to take most serious and even
radical measures to encourage farmers so to till their fields as to be
able to bequeath them un-impoverished to those who come after. I think it
not unlikely that eventually the demos, thinking of the future, will be as
paternalistic as was Louis XIV, who told the habitant of the St. Lawrence
how many horses he should keep.
This review of the resources of the valley of France in the midst of
America, and of the forces that are now assembling to preserve for
posterity its vast capital of earth, air, and water, is but an intimation
of what might easily be expanded into a volume of itself. Indeed, much of
my statistical material I have from a book by Doctor Charles R. Van Hise,
president of the University of Wisconsin; but, meagre as this review is,
it must give you, as it has given me, a stirring sense of the mighty reach
of the paths of those few pioneers of France in those regions where the
spirit of conservation is strongest.
While it is true that every human life, as Carlyle has said, stands at the
conflux of two eternities--the one behind him, the other before--in a
sense have the material preparations, extending during a length of time
that to our measurement seems an eternity, converged upon and in those
pioneers of Europe in that valley; and from them has diverged a
civilization that now begins to look forward in the eyes of her prophets
through years that seem as another eternity. Probably, says this eminent
scientist of that valley, speaking of the past, "some of the deposits at
present being mined are the result of agents ... a hundred million years
ago"; [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 18.] and of the future: "We hope for a
future ... not to be reckoned by thousands of years but by tens of
thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. And,
therefore, so far as our responsibility is concerned, it is immaterial
whether the coal will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years or
fifteen hundred years, or fifteen thousand years. Our responsibility to
succeeding generations demands that we reduce its use to our absolute
necessities, and therefore prolong its life to the utmost." [Footnote: Van
Rise, p. 25.] Conservation has in such depth of years given a new
perspective to the picture we have been painting of the life in that
valley. The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism
of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy
thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the
conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people--to
come back again to that best of definitions--who are the invisible
multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow.
The French priest, kneeling over the dying Indian child in the forest hut
and stealthily touching its brow with water, had vision of another
immortality than that, as we know; the empire which the French explorers
and adventurers hoped to build with its capital on the Rock of Quebec, or
on the Rock St. Louis of the Illinois, or at the mouth of the Mississippi
did not grow in the fashion of their dream, as we of course realize. But
we see, on the other hand, what promise of ages has been given to the
faith and adventure which found incarnation in a frontier democracy whose
energy and spirit made possible the great, lusty republic of to-day, that
now begins to talk of a thousand centuries.
Out in that far west, in a recent autumn, the men of the standing army
were set to fighting forest-fires. This has seemed to me a happy omen of
what the new conservatism of the world may ask of its soldiery--the
conserving not of borders but of the resources of human life and of human
life itself. And so have I added another class to the inhabitants of the
valley, to the precursors, the producers, the poets, and the teachers of
to-morrow-the conservers of the day after to-morrow.
Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last
utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the
State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some
direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same
forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier--that every man by the
payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of
neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men,
and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. [Footnote:
"Memories and Studies: The Moral Equivalent of War," pp. 267-296.]
But in this demand and appeal of the new theory of our common
responsibility, of a dynamic conservationism, is the germ of a larger
patriotism than any that history has as yet defined--a patriotism that
asks the lifetime service of an individualism with an all-time horizon.