THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY 



OCTOBER, 1910 



ADDRESS BEFOKE THE NATIONAL CONSERVATION 



CONGRESS 



By President WILLIAM H. TAFT 



CONSERVATION as an economic and political term has come 

 to mean the preservation of our natural resources for econom- 

 ical use, so as to secure the greatest good to the greatest number. In 

 the development of this country, in the hardships of the pioneer, in the 

 energy of the settler, in the anxiety of the investor for quick returns, 

 there was very little time, opportunity, or desire to prevent waste of 

 those resources supplied by nature which could not be quickly trans- 

 muted into money; while the investment of capital was so great a de- 

 sideratum that the people as a community exercised little or no care to 

 prevent the transfer of absolute ownership of many of the valuable 

 natural resources to private individuals, without retaining some kind 

 of control of their use. 



The impulse of the whole new community was to encourage the 

 coming of population, the increase of settlement, and the opening up of 

 business; and he who demurred in the slightest degree to any step 

 which promised additional development of the idle resources at hand 

 was regarded as a traitor to his neighbors and an obstructor to public 

 progress. But now that the communities have become old, now that the 

 flush of enthusiastic expansion has died away, now that the would-be 

 pioneers have come to realize that all the richest lands in the country 

 have been taken up, we have perceived the necessity for a change of 

 policy in the disposition of our national resources so as to prevent the 

 continuance of the waste which has characterized our phenomenal 

 growth in the past. To-day we desire to restrict and retain under pub- 

 lic control the acquisition and use by the capitalists of our natural re- 

 sources. 



The danger to the state and to the people at large from the waste 



vol. lxxvii. — 22. 



