the public welfare demands of
us, and then of caring enough for the public welfare not to set personal
advantage first. It is a question of inspiring our future citizens while
they are boys and girls with the spirit of true patriotism as against
the spirit of rank selfishness, the anti-social spirit of the man who
declines to take into account any other interest than his own; whose one
aim and ideal is personal success. Women both in public and at home, by
letting the men know what they think, and by putting it before the
children, can make familiar the idea of conservation, and support it
with a convincingness that nobody else can approach.

However important it may be for the lumberman, the miner, the
wagon-maker, the railroad man, the house-builder,--for every
industry,--that conservation should obtain, when all is said and done,
conservation goes back in its directest application to one body in this
country, and that is to the children. There is in this country no other
movement except possibly the education movement--and that after all is
in a sense only another aspect of the conservation question, the seeking
to make the most of what we have--so directly aimed to help the
children, so conditioned upon the needs of the children, so belonging to
the children, as the conservation movement; and it is for that reason
more than any other that it has the support of the women of the Nation.

CHAPTER X

AN EQUAL CHANCE

The American people have evidently made up their minds that our natural
resources must be conserved. That is good, but it settles only half the
question. For whose benefit shall they be conserved--for the benefit of
the many, or for the use and profit of the few? The great conflict now
being fought will decide. There is no other question before us that
begins to be so important, or that will be so difficult to straddle, as
the great question between special interest and equal opportunity,
between the privileges of the few and the rights of the many, between
government by men for human welfare and government by money for profit,
between the men who stand for the Roosevelt policies and the men who
stand against them. This is the heart of the conservation problem
to-day.

The conservation issue is a moral issue. When a few men get possession
of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural
resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to
extort undue pr