10 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



time. It is the height of foolishness to give away something that is 

 absolutely and perpetually necessary for our use, and which can not 

 be destroyed, and for the privilege of using which we, because of our 

 absolute and perpetual necessities, will be forever compelled to pay 

 more money and constantly increasing profits. 



There is, to be sure, sentiment to be invoked in the argument for the 

 conservation of our natural resources. But the men and women of 

 to-day have the right to demand, from the merely prosaic standpoint 

 of their necessities, from the sordid standpoint of dollars and cents, to 

 be saved to them, that the giving away of their natural resources, and 

 the consequent wastage and destruction of such of them as can be 

 wasted and destroyed, shall cease. And the boys and girls of to-day, 

 who will be the men and women of to-morrow, have the right to demand 

 that their fathers and mothers shall not continue to give away, or even 

 to sell, those natural resources which now belong to the people. The 

 men and women of to-morrow have the right to demand that that which 

 ought to be theirs, as it is their fathers and mothers, by right of 

 inheritance, shall not be taken from them, and their already heavy 

 burdens be incalculably increased thereby. 



Conservation means much to the men and women of to-day; it will 

 mean much more to each future generation of men and women that 

 comes upon the stage of life. The grown-ups of to-day ought not to 

 strip their children of those things which will be of great, absolute, 

 necessity to them when they shall have grown up. The unnecessary 

 burdens borne by the men and women of to-day, because so much of 

 our natural resource-wealth has been given away, ought to be sufficient 

 warning to those men and women not to increase those burdens on 

 themselves nor to pass still greater ones on to be carried by their 

 children. 



GEORGE C. PARDEE. 



The Ex- President of the United States. 



''The necessity for a comprehensive and systematic improvement of 

 our waterways, the preservation of our soil and of our forests, the 

 securing from private appropriation the power in navigable streams, 

 the retention of the undisposed of coal lands of the Government from 

 alienation, all will properly claim from the next administration earnest 

 attention and appropriate legislation. 



Without the resources which make labor productive, American enter- 

 prise, energy, and skill would not in the past have been able to make 

 headway against hard conditions. Our children and their children 

 will not be able to make headway if we leave to them an impoverished 

 country. Our land, our waters, our forests, and our minerals are the 



