movement worthy of the name must place high 

 upon its program the saving of capital and credit 

 from the rapacious hands of socialist as well as 

 monopolist. Extravagance is undermining the in- 

 dustry of this country as surely as the barbarians 

 broke down and looted that mighty empire with 

 whose civilization and progress Ferrero repeatedly 

 insists that ours has so much in common. 



We must stand for conservation everywhere; in 

 the tedious as well as in the interesting applica- 

 tion ; where it cuts into our pleasures and habits and 

 jostles our comfortable, easy-going ways of thought 

 just as firmly as w^here it is hand in glove with self- 

 interest. This is, above all things, an economic 

 question. It is neither personal nor political. In 

 such petty and partial interests it has found its 

 worst obstructions and encountered its most serious 

 reverses. 



The tariff in some respects is a great enemy of 

 conservation. Whatever we may think of it as a 

 general industrial policy, every one can see that, by 

 excluding the raw products of other countries, it 

 throws the entire burden of their consumption upon 

 our own resources and thus exhausts them unneces- 

 sarily. This appears clearly when we consider such 

 commodities as we might obtain from Canada, a 

 country that gained nearly 400,000 immigrants 

 from the United States in the nine years up to 

 April, 1909, and has probably taken another hun- 

 dred thousand since; a country where it is absurd 

 to talk about any actual advantage in the wage scale 

 as compared with our own. The tariff on forest 

 products cuts down our ow^n forests, a tariff on coal 

 depletes our mines, a tariff on any raw material for- 

 bids the conservation of similar natural resources 

 here. 



14 



