The Government should have a more complete knowledge of the coal and of
other foundation industries than can be found elsewhere, and we should
not fear national stock taking as a continuing process. It is indeed the
beginning of wisdom. The war revealed to us how delinquent in this
regard we had been in the past. One day when the full story is told of
the struggle of the Army engineer to meet war emergency demands, and
this is supplemented by the tale of the effort made by the Council of
National Defense and the War Industries Board, it will be realized more
seriously than now how little of stock taking we have done in this
generous, optimistic land.
When any such undertaking is proposed, however, it at once appears to
arouse the fear that it is somehow the beginning of a malevolent policy
called "conservation," and conservation has had a mean meaning to many
ears. It connoted stinginess and a provincial thrift, spies in the guise
of Government inspectors, hateful interferences with individual
enterprise and initiative, governmental haltings and cowardices, and all
the constrictions of an arrogant, narrow, and academic-minded
bureaucracy which can not think largely and feels no responsibility for
national progress. Needless to say this fear should not, need not be.
The word should mean helpfulness, not hindrance--helpfulness to all who
wish to use a resource and think in larger terms than that of the
greatest immediate profit; hindrance only to those who are spendthrift.
A conservation which results in a stalemate as between the forces of
progress and governmental inertia is criminal, while a conservation that
is based on the fuller, the more essential use of a resource is
statesmanship.
To know what we have and what we can do with it--and what we should not
do with it, also!--is a policy of wisdom, a policy of lasting progress.
And in furtherance of such a policy the first step is to know our
resources--our national wealth in things and in their possibilities; the
second step is to know their availability for immediate use; the third
step is to guard them against waste either through ignorance or
wantonness; and the fourth step is to prolong their life by invention
and discovery.