62 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



We have abused, and wasted, and exhausted so much that there is the 

 gravest danger that our prosperity to-day will have been made at the 

 price of the suffering and poverty of our descendants. We may now 

 fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural 

 interest in those who are to come after us. No patriotic citizen expects, 

 this nation to run its course and perish in a hundred, or two hundred r 

 or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in 

 influence and power, and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the 

 happiness and prosperity of our people. But we have as little reason 

 to expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been 

 for the men who established this nation to expect that a United States 

 would grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. It was their 

 duty to found this nation, and they did it. It is our duty to provide 

 for its continuance in well-being and honor. That duty it seems as 

 though we might neglect. Not in wilfulness, not in any lack of 

 patriotic devotion, when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere 

 thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of 

 the moment long enough to realize that what we do now will decide 

 the future of the nation. For, if we do not take action to conserve the 

 natural resources, and that soon, our descendants will find them gone. 



Let me use a homely illustration: We have all known fathers and 

 mothers, devoted to their children, whose attention was fixed and limited 

 by the household routine of daily life. Such parents were actively 

 concerned with the common needs and precautions and remedies entailed 

 in bringing up a family, but blind to every threat that was at all 

 unusual. Fathers and mothers such as these often remain serenely 

 unaware while some dangerous malady or injurious habit is fastening 

 itself upon a favorite child. Once the evil is discovered, there is no 

 sacrifice too great to repair the damage which their unwitting neglect 

 may have allowed to become irreparable. So it is, I think, with the 

 people of the United States. Capable of every devotion in a recognized 

 crisis, we have yet carelessly allowed the habit of improvidence and 

 waste of resources to find lodgment. It is our great good fortune that 

 the harm is not yet altogether beyond repair. 



The profoundest duty that lies upon any father is to leave his son 

 with a reasonable equipment for the struggle of life and an untarnished 

 name. So the noblest task that confronts us all to-day is to leave this 

 country unspotted in honor, and unexhausted in resources, to our 

 descendants, who will be, not less than we, the children of the founders 

 of the republic. I conceive this task to partake of the highest spirit of 

 patriotism. 



