problem. The question is not an academic one.
Various kinds of international control are present facts, and the
problem relates to the possibilities of more effective organization of
existing agencies.

CONSERVATION IN ITS INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The interests of conservation, considering both its physical and its
human energy phases (p. 362), seem to call for an international
understanding in the use of mineral resources which will result in the
minimum hindrance to their free movements along natural channels of
trade. The essential fact of the concentration of mineral supplies in
comparatively few world localities, and the fact that no nation is
supplied with enough of all varieties of minerals, mean that artificial
barriers to their distribution cannot but impose unnecessary handicaps
on certain localities, which may be anti-conservational from a world
standpoint. If the few countries possessing adequate supplies of
high-grade ferro-alloy minerals, for instance, were to restrict their
distribution by tariffs or other measures, the resulting cost to
civilization through the handicapping of the steel industry would be a
large one. Or if, for the general purpose of making the United States
entirely self-supporting in regard to mineral supplies, sufficiently
high import tariffs were imposed on these minerals to permit the use of
the low-grade deposits in the United States, earlier exhaustion of the
limited domestic supplies would follow, and in the meantime the cost to
the domestic steel industry would be serious. Cost may be taken to
represent the net result of human energy multiplied into raw material.
The movement would therefore be anti-conservational. If each state in
the United States were to start out to become entirely self-sustaining
in regard to minerals, and by various regulations were able to prohibit
the use of minerals brought in from without, or the export of its excess
of minerals, the waste in effort and materials would be obvious. Nature
has clearly marked out fields of specialization for different
localities, and the effective use of mineral supplies is just as much a
matter of specialization as the effective use of man's talents. If the
United States, because of its vast copper deposits, is in a position to
specialize in this line and to aid the world thereby, this should
involve recognition of the fact that other countries are better able to
specialize in other commodities,--thereby forming a bas