44 



Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



all this was laid out in the intent of Nature to produce you and me and 

 support us. It is beautiful in the beauty of utility. It is laid out on 

 precisely the right lines to keep up the balance of the aforesaid little 

 drops of water and little grains of sand, of which the one supports the 

 other in the making of this pleasant land. It got its contours out of 

 that balance. We grew out of the contours. This vast and splendid 

 landscape is the portrait of our mother. We forget the hymn about it. 

 Like a weak, irritable, nasty-tempered child, we strike the great Mother 

 in the face, presuming on her vast indifference or her vast pity. And 

 all the while Man is only the last animal that has been invented, and 

 some time there will be a successor for him. If we destroy the soil we 



The soil of a whole valley washed away by a freshet. Observe 

 the little island of good land left in the midst of a hopeless waste 

 of cobblestones. 



hasten that day when the successor shall come. Now the undeniable 

 truth is that we are spending more than our inch of soil per thousand 

 years. 



Civilized man, money-mad business man, crazed man, average man, is 

 doing all he can to destroy the balance between the little drops and the 

 little grains. Not only is he doing all he can to invite the successor of 

 man in the scheme of life, but he is hastening all he can that incidental 

 intermediate thing to give it, perhaps, the only interesting form into 

 which the statement can be put in the terms of commercial To-day the 

 show-down between the American standard of living and that of other 

 peoples who never had so big a bank account as ours, and who, there- 

 fore, learn to save. 



