topped
there. We have abused, and wasted, and exhausted it also, so that there
is the gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been bought
at the price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants. We may now
fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural
interest in those who are to come after us. No patriotic citizen expects
this Nation to run its course and perish in a hundred or two hundred,
or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in
influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the
happiness and prosperity of our people. But we have as little reason to
expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been for
the men who established this Nation to expect that a United States would
grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. It was their duty
to found this Nation, and they did it. It is our duty to provide for its
continuance in well-being and honor. That duty it seems as though we
might neglect--not in wilfulness, not in any lack of patriotic devotion,
when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere thoughtlessness and
inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of the moment long
enough to realize that what we do now will decide the future of the
Nation. For, if we do not take action to conserve the Nation's natural
resources, and that soon, our descendants will suffer the penalty of
our neglect.

Let me use a homely illustration: We have all known fathers and mothers,
devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and limited by the
household routine of daily life. Such parents were actively concerned
with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed in bringing
up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all unusual. Fathers
and mothers such as these often remain serenely unaware while some
dangerous malady or injurious habit is fastening itself upon a favorite
child. Once the evil is discovered, there is no sacrifice too great to
repair the damage which their unwitting neglect may have allowed to
become irreparable. So it is, I think, with the people of the United
States. Capable of every devotion in a recognized crisis, we have yet
carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and waste of resources to
find lodgment. It is our great good fortune that the harm is not yet
altogether beyond repair.

The profoundest duty that lies upon any father is to leave his son with
a reason