sources of any nation become exhausted, disaster and
decay in every department of national life follow as a matter of course.
Therefore the conservation of natural resources is the basis, and the
only permanent basis, of national success. There are other conditions,
but this one lies at the foundation.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the American people is their
superb practical optimism; that marvellous hopefulness which keeps the
individual efficiently at work. This hopefulness of the American is,
however, as short-sighted as it is intense. As a rule, it does not look
ahead beyond the next decade or score of years, and fails wholly to
reckon with the real future of the Nation. I do not think I have often
heard a forecast of the growth of our population that extended beyond a
total of two hundred millions, and that only as a distant and shadowy
goal. The point of view which this fact illustrates is neither true nor
far-sighted. We shall reach a population of two hundred millions in the
very near future, as time is counted in the lives of nations, and there
is nothing more certain than that this country of ours will some day
support double or triple or five times that number of prosperous people
if only we can bring ourselves so to handle our natural resources in the
present as not to lay an embargo on the prosperous growth of the future.

We, the American people, have come into the possession of nearly four
million square miles of the richest portion of the earth. It is ours to
use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy. The
fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall we do with it?

That question cannot be answered without first considering the condition
of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day. As a
people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources
to be inexhaustible. To no other resource more frequently than coal has
this stupidly false adjective been applied. Yet our coal supplies are so
far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption
shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to
prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and
of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. From the point of view
of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important
factors in our civilization within the immediate future. Not a few coal
fields have alread