692 



CONSERVATION 



telephones. Its own cement-mill has 

 manufactured 80,000 barrels of cement, 

 and the purchased amount is 403,000 

 barrels. Its own sawmills have cut 

 3,036,000 feet board-measure of lumber, 

 and 23,685,000 feet have been pur- 

 chased. The surveying parties of the 

 Service have completed topographic 

 surveys covering 10,970 square miles — 

 an area greater than the combined areas 

 of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. 

 The transit lines had a length of 18,900 

 linear miles, while the level lines run 

 amount to 24,218 miles, or nearly suffi- 

 cient to go around the earth. 



The diamond drillings for dam sites 

 and canals amount to 66,749 feet, or 

 more than twelve miles. To-day the 

 Service owns and has at work 1,500 

 horses and mules. It operates nine lo- 

 comotives, 611 cars, and twenty-three 

 miles of railroad ; eighty-four gasoline 

 engines, and seventy steam engines. It 

 has constructed and is operating five 

 electric-light plans. There have been 

 excavated 42,447,000 cubic yards of 

 earth and rock. The equipment now 

 operated by the Service on force- 

 account work represents an investment 

 of a million dollars. 



This work has been carried on with 

 the following force : 



Classified and registered service, 



including Washington office.. 1,126 



Laborers employed directly by 



the Government 4448 



Laborers employed by con- 

 tractors 10,789 



or a total of all forces of 16,363. The 

 expenditures now total nearly £250,000 

 per month. As a result of the opera- 

 tions of the Reclamation Service eight 

 new towns have been established, 100 

 miles of branch railroads have been con- 

 structed, and 14,000 people have taken 

 up their residence in the desert. — Thr 

 Statistician. 



WASTF 



Nothing in all the history of civilized 

 nations in modern times has shown a 

 wastefulness so reckless, so insensate, 

 so criminal, as the wastefulness of the 

 American people with the natural re- 



sources of their continent. The net 

 result is the modern American billion- 

 aire and the imminent bankruptcy of 

 the continental domain. Whatever grat- 

 itude posterity may cherish for insti- 

 tutions bequeathed, may be overcome 

 by the indictments of the disinherited 

 descendants of those who^ in their in- 

 sane scramble for immediate gain, have 

 cried, "After us the deluge," and have 

 burned the Nation's patrimony. 



For a President to have discovered 

 this ; to have been intelligent and force- 

 ful enough to have, in a measure, 

 stopped it; to have guaranteed our 

 great-grandchildren the remnants of 

 use left of a great geographical inher- 

 itance, is quite enough for one man in a 

 lifetime to have accomplished. 



The report of the National Conser- 

 vation Committee, now in the hands of 

 Congress, presents an appalling indict- 

 ment of the political intelligence of the 

 American people. 



Three generations ago the American 

 forest covered an area of a million 

 square miles, one-third the land surface 

 of the United States. Now there is not 

 enough timber left to last the genera- 

 tion playing marbles in the school-yard. 



Although the mineral production of 

 the United States is second only to ag- 

 ricultural value, adding £400,000,000 

 per year to the national wealth, the 

 waste in mining and treatment of min- 

 eral substances sum up an average loss 

 to the American people of about i6o,- 

 000,000 a year. The use of fuels which 

 supply light, heat, and power, owing 

 specially to the fact that manufactur- 

 ing has increased so rapidly, has itself 

 increased much more rapidly than the 

 I)opulation of the country. The avail- 

 able and accessible supplies of coal in 

 the United States aggregate 1,463,- 

 800,000,000 tons. Rut this includes the 

 poor coal ; we have been using the best 

 and most accessible. We have already 

 used seven and one-half billion tons 

 and wasted nine billion tons of coal. 

 The anthracite will hardly last twenty 

 years, and the bituminous 100, at the 

 present rate. But the use of coal is in- 

 creasing almost, as it were, in geomet- 

 rical progression, for in the decade 



