e lower; a principle which is illustrated by the
fact that we have got over settling disputes between individuals by the
strong hand, but not yet between nations.

So we have allowed ourselves as a Nation, in the flush of the tremendous
progress that we have made, to fail to look at the end from the
beginning and to put ourselves in a position where the normal operation
of natural laws threatens to bring us to a halt in a way which will
make every man, woman, and child in the Nation feel the pinch when it
comes.

No man may rightly fail to take a great pride in what has been
accomplished by means of the destruction of our natural resources so far
as it has gone. It is a paradoxical statement, perhaps, but nevertheless
true, because out of this attack on what nature has given we have won a
kind of prosperity and a kind of civilization and a kind of man that are
new in the world. For example, nothing like the rapidity of the
destruction of American forests has ever been known in forest history,
and nothing like the efficiency and vigor and inventiveness of the
American lumberman has ever been developed by any attack on any forests
elsewhere. Probably the most effective tool that the human mind and hand
have ever made is the American axe. So the American business man has
grasped his opportunities and used them and developed them and invented
about them, thought them into lines of success, and thus has developed
into a new business man, with a vigor and effectiveness and a
cutting-edge that has never been equalled anywhere else. We have gained
out of the vast destruction of our natural resources a degree of vigor
and power and efficiency of which every man of us ought to be proud.

Now that is done. We have accomplished these big things. What is the
next step? Shall we go on in the same lines to the certain destruction
of the prosperity which we have created, or shall we take the obvious
lesson of all human history, turn our backs on the uncivilized point of
view, and adopt toward our natural resources the average prudence and
average foresight and average care that we long ago adopted as a rule of
our daily life?

The conservation movement is calling the attention of the American
people to the fact that they are trustees. The fact seems to me so
plain as to require only a statement of it, to carry conviction. Can we
reasonably fail to recognize the obligation which rests upon us in this
matter? And, if we do fail to re