26 Pioneers and Principles 



attached as riders to bills dealing with other subjects. Prominent 

 among those who deserve credit for this achievement, and whose 

 names should appear in any roster of early conservationists, were 

 Dr. Hough, first chief of the Division of Forestry in the United States 

 Department of Agriculture; John A. Warder, founder of The Ameri- 

 can Forestry Association; Bernhard E. Fernow, also a chief of the 

 Division of Forestry and a leading member of The American Forestry 

 Association; Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz; Commissioners of 

 the General Land Office James A. WilUamson and William Andrew 

 Jackson Sparks; Assistant Commissioner Edward A. Bowers; and 

 Charles S. Sargent, chairman of the Forestry Commission of the Na- 

 tional Academy of Sciences. 



Dr. Fernow coupled the twin philosophies of the indispensability 

 of all natural resources and of the responsibility of government for 

 their wise use in a way that anticipated their popularization under 

 Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt and in the 1908 Conference 

 of Governors. In a vice-presidential address before the AAAS in 1895 

 on "The Providential Functions of Government with Special Reference 

 to Natural Resources," he made these trenchant statements: "Only 

 those nations who develop their natural resources economically, and 

 avoid the waste of that which they produce, can maintain their power 

 or even secure the maintenance of their separate existence. A nation 

 may cease to exist as well by the decay of its resources as by the 

 extinction of its patriotic spirit. . . . Whether fertile lands are turned 

 into deserts, forests into waste places, brooks into torrents, rivers 

 changed from means of power and intercourse into means of destruc- 

 tion and desolation — these are questions which concern the material 

 existence itself of society. ... It is true that as individuals the knowl- 

 edge of the near exhaustion of the anthracite coal-fields does not in- 

 duce any of us to deny ourselves a single scuttle of coal, so as to make 

 the coal field last for one more generation, unless this knowledge is 

 reflected in increased price. But we can conceive that, as members of 

 society, we may for that very purpose refuse to allow eaf-h other or 

 the miner to waste unnecessarily. . . . Here the general principle of 

 Roman law, Utera tuo ne alteram noceas, prevention of the obnoxious 

 use of private property, establishes readily the propriety of State in- 



