22 McGEE MEMORIAL MEETING 



as a single problem the wise handling of all the natural resources of 

 the continent. As Secretary of this Commission and as unofficial 

 adviser and guide of all of the inland waterway associations, Me Gee 

 played a part in the development of our rivers the importance of 

 which it would be difficult to overstate. Of all his services to the 

 Conservation movement, this was the one which carried most clearly 

 the impress of his personality, and in which his contributions were 

 most effective. In convention after convention of commercial bodies 

 all over the United States and in the action of Governors and Legis- 

 latures on this deeply important subject, it was McGee's mind which 

 inspired and guided the decisions taken. His relation to the Na- 

 tional Irrigation Congress during the latter years of his life was hardly 

 less decisive, and yet in both of these directions, except among the 

 men who were actively responsible, his participation was compara- 

 tively little known. 



McGee was not a member of the Public Lands Commission, nor 

 of the Country Life Commission, yet in both, and especially in the 

 latter, his influence was deeply felt. He was one of the two men upon 

 whom rested the arrangements for the great Conference of Govern- 

 ors held at the White House in May, 1908. Many of the utterances 

 which attracted most attention at that conference were prepared by 

 him or with his assistance, and the breadth of view which character- 

 ized it would have been absolutely impossible without his aid. 



Out of the Conference of Governors grew the National Conserva- 

 tion Commission. Officially McGee was merely secretary of one of 

 its four divisions, that which dealt with the waters of the continent. 

 Practically, in every branch of the Commission's work he was the 

 trusted and effective adviser, a very fountain of knowledge, without 

 whom the material for its historic report, the first inventory of the 

 natural resources of any nation, could not have been brought together. 

 Important as his services were as a geologist, as an anthropologist, 

 and still more because of what he was as a man, I believe that his 

 work in Conservation will ultimately be seen to have outweighed all 

 the rest. 



McGee's grasp of human life as a progressive development in time 

 and space was as wide as his conception of the interrelation of nat- 

 ural resources, which is the basis of Conservation. He saw not only 



