106 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



varieties of birds and beasts. A birdless world would be 

 a dreary place to live in and a birdless air would be unfit 

 to breathe. 



The wild pigeon has gone to join the great auk and the 

 dodo in the realm of obliteration. 



We may well pause and consider the situation with 

 which we are confronted. 



I read the other day of a hunt in the South where two 

 prominent gentlemen from New York killed 1,600 ducks 

 in two days, and generously gave them away to show that 

 they were not mere ordinary pot hunters. 



These sanguinary sportsmen should have rather hired 

 out or volunteered to stick pigs for two days for the meat 

 packers, where they might have glutted their appetite 

 for gore in a more creditable way. The reckless, impro- 

 vident, and indiscriminate slaughter of our fish in the riv- 

 ers and the seas are only illustrations of that large waste 

 of our natural resources that is going on in all directions. 

 The natural gas was once worshiped as something super- 

 natural. Now it is used for the most practical of all 

 purposes. It has been recklessly wasted as though it had 

 been infinite in quantity, and the depleted fields show the 

 results of our extravagance. 



Oil and forests have been extravagantly exploited in 

 the same way. 



Take the state of Texas, where a few months ago we 

 were having many " gushers," supplying oil each at the 

 rate of 74,000 barrels a day, but now, the newspapers tell 

 us, the oil has ceased to flow. But experience shows that 

 all these resources are limited. 



Oil in Texas may long be pumped, but vast as the sup- 

 ply is it is exhaustible. 



Since I have been in public life I have devoted some 

 part of my time to the subject of the conservation and 



