have come to get the best of it. It used to thwart us, and steer us, and 

 tell us what we must do. Now we tell it what we want it to do, and 

 make it do it for us. We have fettered its strengths with steel and 

 made them work for us. We force its down-hill waters to carry us 

 up hill. We use its own treasures of fuel to belittle its size and 

 dignity ; to curb it and humble it, and even to reshape it. 



This is all very well, but of late men have been finding this robbing 

 and humiliating of the prostrate body of nature so easy and so inter- 

 esting as to make it a form of sport. They rob and exploit without 

 reference to any present need, just to show what they can do. It is 

 like the killing of the buffaloes for the fun of shooting, until all at 

 once it appeared they were practically exterminated. 



This generation will have for one thing at least a great name in 

 history. Men of the future centuries will surely call it the generation 

 of the great destroyers, and historians and economists will write of 

 the riotous days of nineteen hundred, when the people used up all 

 the petroleum, all the natural gas, all the anthracite and most of the 

 other coal, and most of the handy iron. It will be the period when 

 the forests were cut down or burnt up, the lands stolen, and the waters 

 given away. We are sure to be the subject of earnest remark." 



BENJAMIN IDE WHEELER. 



The Secretary of the Interior. 



"Why should a great resource, which is owned by the people at 

 large, be used by private interests, by somebody who is looking only 

 to his own benefit, and not to the benefit of the people of the country ? 

 The people as a whole own these natural resources. They are not 

 divided. But the people as a whole, as I say, own them, and it is 

 for them to determine whether those resources shall be used for the 

 benefit of all, or shall be turned over to be used unregulated for the 

 benefit of those who may perchance first get a foothold in any special 

 locality. In any law that is passed, in any theory of disposition that 

 is adopted, we must look not only to their conservation and use, but 

 we must look to the prevention of their monopolization in the hands 

 of a few favored interests." 



JAMES R. GARFIELD. 



A Great Labor Leader. 



"In our mad rush for spoils and profits we not only waste and 

 destroy those material resources with which God has so bountifully 

 endowed us, but we press forward in the race, sacrificing, unnecessar- 

 ily, the lives and the comfort of our fellow-beings. It seems to me 

 that the time has come when we should stop for a moment and think 

 not alone of those inanimate things that make for comfort and pros- 

 perity, but also of the men, and the women, and the children, whose 

 toil and deprivation have made and will continue to make our country 

 and our people the most progressive and the most intelligent of all 

 the nations and of all the peoples of the earth. ' ' 



JOHN MITCHELL. 



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