some speed, have exterminated most of our wild game, endangered 

 the food supply which comes from the waters, and, in general, done 

 all we could to put an end to our great resources, recklessly spending 

 not only our interest but also our principal. We have not even left 

 unscathed the pleasant land. Not only are we using up at mad speed 

 the natural products of the soil, but also are using up the soil itself. 

 If you think that the soil is exhaustless, or that it can be replaced, 

 it might behoove you to take a homoeopathic dose of geology and also 

 take another guess. Mr. Roosevelt and most of the Congress of the 

 United States would like to have us all take the trouble of studying 

 the ground we stand on. Mr. Roosevelt's recent message asked us to 

 pass our bank-books in at the window for a balance. It is an un- 

 pleasant thing to do. There are always so many more vouchers out 

 than we thought. The balance is always so much smaller than we 

 thought, and the bank has such an unpleasant way of being right in 

 its figures. Yet the time has come for a show-down between the 

 American people and America itself. 



Out on the Blackfoot Reservation there stands a tall, lone moun- 

 tain, rising like a monument above the surrounding plain, and nearly 

 detached from the Rockies, which lie behind it. This peak the Indians 

 call Chief Mountain. Here the Blackfoot sometimes comes to pray. 

 In his mysticism his prayer runs : " O Thou, at whose feet the buried 

 years lie fallen." That is to say, there is in his mind the thought of 

 the slow forces of Nature. He reverences the idea of erosion. He 

 would understand and not forget that hymn if he sung it, which in 

 effect tells us that all we have in this world comes of the relations 

 of soil and water. There will be a few million American farmers who 

 will learn that same truth some time. The somewhat mad and drunk- 

 en American people have ignored and inverted that truth heretofore. 

 They have done all they could to go bankrupt, to ruin one of the 

 richest portions of the earth's surface, one of the pleasantest lands 

 ever taken over for human habitation, one obviously intended by the 

 Great Forces as the place for the development of the highest form of 

 civilization and the most splendid flowering of human endeavor. 



What is the pleasant land, and where does it come from ? Of course, 

 the average man supposes that the soil was always there, like Uncle Joe 

 Cannon, Niagara Falls and the tax deficit ; but, as a matter of fact, the 

 soil grew. In that vast story the action was rather more deliberate than 

 that of a vaudeville sketch. Geology is not dramatic in that neurotic 

 sense of the world which customarily we employ today. Yet you and 

 I, and this country and other countries, are figures in the great drama. 

 It might not harm us to note what a leading scientist says as to the 

 time of the action of the play : 



"For average rock under ordinarily favorable conditions in our 

 range of climate, the usual estimate has been a foot of waste in four 

 thousand to six thousand years, which includes the channel cutting 

 and bank undermining. These are too rapid for ordinary soil-waste 

 under our normal natural conditions. Without any pretensions to a 

 close estimate, I should be unwilling to name a mean rate of soil 

 formation greater than one foot in ten thousand years on the basis of 

 observation since the glacial period. I suspect that, if we could posi- 



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