1 66 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE WEALTH OF THE COMMONWEALTH 



By Dr. A. C. LANE 



STATE GEOLOGIST OF MICHIGAN 



TN these days of evolutionary theories and dominance of biology it 

 -*- has become fashionable to apply the analogies and language of 

 biology in other fields — for the geographer to speak of mature rivers, 

 and youthful drainage, and the sociologist and historian to speak of 

 society and nations as organisms. So, without going so far as to as- 

 sume that there are units of consciousness apart from brains, and that 

 there is an American or Michigan consciousness standing in somewhat 

 the same relation to your consciousness and my consciousness as ours 

 may be supposed to stand in relation to the sensitiveness which may 

 belong to each individual cell of the body, we may still accept the com- 

 parison of the nation or state to that of an organism so far as it may 

 help to remember and connect real facts. 



The youth of a people is in reality like that of a man, full of hope, 

 extravagant, feeling boundless resources and inclined recklessly to 

 squander them in attaining the objects of desire. If it is wisely 

 guided, age may bring riches which are not merely in prospect, but in 

 possession, which are the fruits of useful industry and the relics and 

 mementoes of a noble ancestry. Unwisely guided, age may bring the 

 exhaustion of the resources thought to be boundless, with nothing worth 

 while to show for them ; and as the individual man may be found bank- 

 rupt in purse and pride, so the nation or community may suddenly find 

 its supposedly inexhaustible supplies exhausted, the fabulous fertility 

 of its fields failing, its hills once clad in forests naked and seamed and 

 gashed by gullies until they remind one of the beggar's clothes whose 

 spendthrift habits have dragged him down to like depths of destitution. 



Mill* says that ' looking on the world as not only the home of man, 

 but as subservient in all its phenomena to the welfare of the human 

 race, we may consider the development of any region to mean such 

 treatment of its natural resources as will enable the land to continue 

 to support an increasing number of inhabitants/ and ventures the sug- 

 gestion that, " fortune hunting is inimical to development in its true 

 sense. A fortune acquired through production or speculation can 

 usually be made by only a few individuals and almost always entails 

 the exhaustion of natural resources or the lowering of wages; a pros- 



* Hugh R. Mill, ' New Lands,' p. 7. 



