758 



CONSERVATION 



diurnal nightmare for the incredible un- 

 intelligence which refuses immediate 

 expenditure of that £100,000,000 which 

 will save £1,000,000,000 a year, and 

 possibly the future of our race. The fu- 

 ture belongs to those nations who own 

 the soil and rule the sea — whose peo- 

 ple shall have to use and not to abuse 

 the natural resources of the earth. 

 There is no future to any nation with- 

 out these. 



The time has come in the history 

 of western civilization for a new poli- 

 tics. There is something wrong with 

 our politics ; there is something the 

 matter with our theory of life — Indi- 

 vidualism. Anglo-Saxondom, in par- 

 ticular, is losing ground, and on the 

 racial escutcheon should be blazoned 

 Waste. Individualism made the Anglo- 

 Saxon great, but it cannot keep him 

 great. Individualism has ceased to be 

 true. Once we wanted protest — prot- 

 estantism ; reform — reformation ; revolt 

 — revolution. Now we want something 

 else, something archetectonic — we want 

 overmind — "oversoul." The infallible 

 inspiration of the gospel of helter- 

 skelter is succumbing to the higher crit- 

 icism of the science of economic geog- 

 raphy. For in the United States things 

 can never be again as if Theodore 

 Roosevelt had never been. He has not 

 merely given us the idea; he has em- 

 bodied the idea in an immortal, scien- 

 tific achievement. His politics means 

 that the principles of intelligence, sci- 

 entifically applied to the physical condi- 

 tions of life in North America, have 

 not only made progress possible, but 

 acceleration of that progress possible. 

 It means the quintupHcation of the eco- 

 nomic resources of the people of the 

 great Mississippi Basin. It means the 

 renaissance and enrichment of the 

 South, and vast good to central Canada. 

 It means this because one man had 

 sense enough to know that things could 

 not get themselves scientifically done by 

 themselves ; that progress is rational, 

 not fortuitous. What he has already 

 achieved is the guarantee of what his 

 scientific policies have promised, and a 

 warrant for the hope which most Amer- 



' Lecture delivered winter of 1830-31. 



icans have been holding in a dreamy 

 way, but which a few great minds have 

 foreseen as an accomplished thing in 

 future time, of a superlative destiny for 

 this new western world, this world of 

 the morn and the dew, this world whose 

 vast fallow and fecund wildernesses 

 have lain so long in the dark, while suc- 

 cessive civilizations have depleted the 

 potentiality of the larger and antipodal 

 hemisphere where so much of humanity 

 has grown old and gray. 



"America," says Hegel, "is the land 

 of the future, where, in the age that 

 lies before us, the burden of the world's 

 history shall reveal itself. * * * Jt is 

 the land of desire for all those who are 

 weary of the historical lumber-room of 

 old Europe. Napoleon is reported to 

 have said: 'Cette vicille Europe m'en- 

 niiie.' It is for America to abandon the 

 ground on which hitherto the history of 

 the world has developed itself. What 

 has taken place in the New World up 

 to the present time is only an echo of 

 the Old World — the expression of a 

 foreign life.'" 



Mr. Roosevelt has worked out his 

 idea on rational and constitutional and 

 human lines. This was his task. His 

 struggles for a square deal for the com- 

 mon people have been successful. His 

 geographical economics have been un- 

 paralleled. But his chief distinction is 

 that he has given an ethical and con- 

 structive democracy a chance, for the 

 first time on the Western Hemisphere, 

 on principles which, avoiding both an- 

 archy and socialism, shall conserve the 

 ends of liberty, not merely as an end 

 in itself, but as the condition of a na- 

 tional moral perfection. 



Facing the failure of the democracy 

 of individualism, already about re- 

 duced to its lowest terms of economic 

 slavery and financial despotism, and so- 

 cialism ready to occupy the field by rea- 

 son of sheer want of another, and more 

 rational, program, he is the first Amer- 

 ican statesman who has wrought into 

 deeds a fundamental body of doctrine 

 involving a rationalization and moral- 

 ization of the American democracy. 

 The foimdations of the new construct- 



