ase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform
respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the Nation a slogan
in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it is likely to
think.

"And, then, there is the great and statesmanlike movement for the
conservation of our National resources, into which Roosevelt so
energetically threw himself at a time when the Nation as a whole knew
not that we are ruining and bankrupting ourselves as fast as we can.
This is probably the greatest thing Roosevelt did, undoubtedly. This
globe is the capital stock of the race. It is just so much coal and oil
and gas. This may be economized or wasted. The same thing is true of
phosphates and other mineral resources. Our water resources are immense,
and we are only just beginning to use them. Our forests have been
destroyed; they must be restored. Our soils are being depleted; they
must be built up and conserved.

"These questions are not of this day only or of this generation. They
belong all to the future. Their consideration requires that high moral
tone which regards the earth as the home of a posterity to whom we owe a
sacred duty.

"This immense idea Roosevelt, with high statesmanship, dinned into the
ears of the Nation until the Nation heeded. He held it so high that it
attracted the attention of the neighboring nations of the continent,
and will so spread and intensify that we will soon see the world's
conferences devoted to it.

"Nothing can be greater or finer than this. It is so great and so fine
that when the historian of the future shall speak of Theodore Roosevelt
he is likely to say that he did many notable things, among them that of
inaugurating the movement which finally resulted in the square deal,
but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world
movement for staying terrestrial waste and saving for the human race
the things upon which, and upon which alone, a great and peaceful and
progressive and happy race life can be founded.

"What statesman in all history has done anything calling for so wide a
view and for a purpose more lofty?"

CHAPTER XI

THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF THE NATION

When Governor of New York, as I have already described, I had been in
consultation with Gifford Pinchot and F. H. Newell, and had shaped
my recommendations about forestry largely in accordance with their
suggestions. Like other men who had thought about the national future at
all, I had been gro