HENRY C. H ART 35 



men made ours. That is the first of the four changes of context which, 

 if we take them into account, can help us solve these riddles. How 

 thoroughgoing the change is we can detect at once by sampling afresh 

 the common sense of the early 1900's as it was passed on to the 

 young. Mark Sullivan, gathering from the memories of men and 

 women still alive in 1927 the contents of the old-time singing geog- 

 raphies, recorded in Our Times that the state capitals were learned 

 this way: 



Maine, Augusta on the Kennebec 



New Hampshire, Concord on the Merrimac . , . 



But already, in 1927, he had to explain in a footnote to his modern 

 readers that "before the coming of the railroad, a navigable river was 

 an important element in the location and growth of a city." 



Thirty years later, not only railroads but highways were making 

 cities, and cities were, as often as not, making rivers. New York 

 brought in the Delaware through its aqueducts, Los Angeles the Colo- 

 rado, and even the Calumet is being given some economic dignity by 

 Chicago. An urban and, even more extensively, a suburban people 

 were remaking their environment. On the farm, fertilizer first restored 

 the soil, then enriched it beyond its primitive condition. The farm 

 catered to the city and bought from it the expensive equipment for 

 this transformation. 



People who live in a world made for them by other people take a 

 view of conservation different in two ways from that of fifty years 

 ago. They make their own demands on nature; conservation is no 

 longer merely saving, or even maximizing in any one direction, what 

 nature has to offer. The modern issue is seldom conservation versus 

 exploitation; it is often prudent exploitation for one purpose against 

 prudent exploitation for another. Of course, during these fifty years, 

 Americans living in an increasingly artificial environment demanded 

 more and more vigorously that some fragments of their continent be 

 kept wild. I myself believe this was not a defense of nature against 

 man, but a creative movement of some of our aesthetically most culti- 

 vated and imaginative people. In any event, the chief potential in- 

 vaders of the wilderness today are neither selfish nor parochial. They 



