among them he has
left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic
justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.'
The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world,
and of giving the national 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. This 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
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?"

[Illustration: Page One of Letter Found in Schrank's Pocket.]