THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



555 



plained of their lack of equipment to 

 do the country's business, as is shown 

 by the single remark before quoted from 

 James J. Hill, that there was not money 

 enough in the world to lay the track to 

 take the traffic the country ofifered. It 

 is no wonder that the farmers of the 

 wheat belt and those dependent upon 

 them complained if their wheat was rot- 

 ting in the bins for want of cars to carry 

 it to market ; if the maize of the corn 

 belt was rotting in the cribs, or being 

 burned for fuel in the stoves of the 

 farm houses ; and that the cotton of the 

 cotton belt was heaped away unsold, 

 because the railroads, taking advantage 

 of the situation, charged all the stuff 

 was worth to haul it. No wonder they 

 complained when there was a fuel fam- 

 ine over a dozen western states, and 

 farmers were burning their furniture 

 and farm products, and some of them 

 were freezing to death, because there 

 were no cars to haul them coal ; and if, 

 at the same time, the railroads were 

 being centralized through blind pools 

 and other inventions of new and devious 

 methods of modern finance to put more 

 railroads into fewer hands, with more 

 irresponsible power of watering stock 

 and inflating tariffs to pay dividends on 

 them. No wonder that there was a 

 movement in the whole Mississippi 

 basin, in which, through "river and 

 harbor congresses," "trans-Mississippi 

 congresses," "Lakes to Gulf associa- 

 tions," "deep waterways conventions," 

 etc.. this population of forty millions 

 made their protest, and said to the Gov- 

 ernment at Washington : "We must 

 have transportation, and we must have 

 a rate which will let us live. If you 

 don't want to undertake the job we will 

 do it ourselves, only we must have 

 transportation and living tariffs." Out 

 of the tremendous activity and discus- 

 sion on the platform and in the press 

 which attended this movement and fol- 

 lowed it arose the growing revolt 

 against the prodigious waste of the 

 laissec-faire policy. And out of this dis- 

 cussion, too, could be marked the prog- 

 ress of the increasing determination to 

 organize the national assets and con- 

 serve and utilize the natural resources. 



especially those so obviously available 

 as the navigable deep waterways of the 

 Mississippi basin, whose channels na- 

 ture has digged so conveniently in their 

 ramifications for the uses of this great 

 area. 



As the public education on this sub- 

 ject grew out of the matter of transpor- 

 tation and the intolerable situation 

 which it presented, so, again, one of the 

 most important results of the whole 

 movement will be a question of trans- 

 portation. For the perfection of this 

 scheme, which includes as one of its 

 subsidiary measures the main idea of 

 national and international waterways, is 

 the Panama Canal. The perfecting of 

 the Panama Canal and the Lake Michi- 

 gan Canal, the canalization of the Illinois 

 River, the perfecting of the channel of 

 the Mississippi itself, and the deepening 

 and otherwise perfecting of the channels 

 of its larger tributaries, will finish the 

 backkbone of the great conservation 

 scheme. So that, as far as transporta- 

 tion is concerned, steamers from Hono- 

 lulu and Yokohama can load their 

 freight at Duluth and Fort William, To- 

 ronto or Buffalo, and freight may be 

 carried direct from the wharves of 

 Minneapolis or Chicago, Pittsburg or 

 Omaha, to Bombay, Liverpool, or 

 Hong-Kong. 



Back of this great transportation idea 

 are also the problems toward the head- 

 waters of the rivers where the products 

 for transportation are grown or made. 

 For example, it is very interesting to 

 study the relation of the mere conser- 

 vation of waters to the building of dams 

 or reservoirs among the thousand 

 sources of headwaters, which shall, of 

 themselves, serve a score of uses. For 

 instance, one of the most obvious things 

 to any one who will take trouble to 

 think about it, is the dynamic value of 

 water. And if every pennyworth of 

 coal saved is a pennyworth digged, it 

 will readily be seen what a saving of the 

 coal-beds will follow the scientific use 

 and development of the wasting water 

 power of the country. Whenever a rain- 

 storm, for example, has left a million 

 tons of surplus water over a given area 

 and over and above that which soaks 



