12 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



investment yielding an annual return. If any of these expenditures 

 fail to bring a return at once the money expended is like a bequest to 

 those who come after us. And as the parent lives for his child as well 

 as for himself, so the good citizen provides for the future as well as 

 for the present." 



WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN. 



The President of the University of California. 



"This small revolving globe we dwell upon has been used as a home 

 by us humans, by us and our ancestors, for a goodly row of centuries. 

 But we were too few and weak to master it and put it clean beneath our 

 feet. It mostly got the best of us. Of late we have come to get the best 

 of it. It used to thwart us, and steer us, and tell us what we must do. 

 Now we tell it what we want to do, and make it do it for us. We have 

 fettered its strengths with steel and made them work for us. We force 

 its down-hill waters to carry us up hill. We use its own treasures of 

 fuel to belittle its size and dignity ; to curb it and humble it, and even 

 to reshape it. 



This is all very well, but of late men have been finding this robbing 

 and humiliating of the prostrate body of nature so easy and so interest- 

 ing as to make it a form of sport. They rob and exploit without refer- 

 ence to any present need, just to show what they can do. It is like the 

 killing of the buffaloes for the fun of shooting, until all at once it 

 appeared they were practically exterminated. 



This generation will have for one thing at least a great name in 

 history. Men of the future centuries will surely call it the generation 

 of the great destroyers, and historians and economists will write of the 

 riotous days of nineteen hundred, when the people used up all the 

 petroleum, all the natural gas, all the anthracite and most of the other 

 coal, and most of the handy iron. It will be the period when the forests 

 were cut down or burnt up. the lands stolen, and the waters given away. 

 We are sure to be the subject of earnest remark." 



BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER. 



The Secretary of the Interior. 



' ' Why should a great resource, which is owned by the people at large, 

 be used by private interests, by somebody that is looking only to his 

 own" benefit, and not to the benefit of the people of the country ? The 

 people as a whole own these natural resources. They are not divided. 

 But the people as a whole, as I say, own them, and it is for them to 

 determine whether those resources shall be used for the benefit of all, 

 or shall be turned over to be used unregulated for the benefit of those 



