fruits as they ripen he compels the soil to yield a harvest a million- 

 fold more abundant, and this harvest he stores up against days of 

 want. Instead of migrating with the birds he fixes his home where 

 he will, and pursues his work and his pleasure in his own time. 



Discovery and invention place new implements in his hands. With 

 his intelligence quickened and his body trained by new experience and 

 new occupations, he continues to increase his mastery over time, tem- 

 perature, and place. New material riches become available. He is 

 able to satisfy his wants more readily and more certainly than ever 

 before. The standard of his living is raised. He now possesses and 

 enjoys, besides all that his fathers required, a host of things of which 

 they knew nothing. Wants multiply with prosperity, till his life be- 

 comes highly complex. He is lord of nature, because he has learned 

 how to appropriate her resources. 



But if the resources of nature should fail, where would be his 

 mastery then ? 



This is the point which we commonly overlook. Man has laid 

 nature tribute, and has become powerful because nature was rich. 

 Impoverish nature and her tribute stops. Ingenuity, capacity, labor, 

 are incapable of extracting wealth from the gutted mine, from the 

 fire-scorched brush land, from the sun-baked stream bed, from the 

 impoverished soil. Civilization is achieved by the use of the resources 

 of nature ; it can endure no longer than the resources upon which it 

 depends. 



Living as we do today in the midst of conveniences which give us 

 apparent independence of nature, it is almost inevitable that we should 

 lose sight of this truth. It is difficult for us to realize that we, stand- 

 ing at the height of western civilization, are in fact vastly more de- 

 pendent upon tributary nature than is the savage of the South Seas. 

 Suppose the coal supply should give out in the middle of winter? 

 Suppose a huge conflagration should sweep our forests from the hill- 

 sides ? Suppose sudden floods should lay waste our fertile farm lands, 

 scoring them with gullies or heaping them with sand? Would not 

 any single one of these calamities bring upon us incalculable losses 

 and suffering! 



And yet these suppositions are not imaginary. We need to look 

 only a very little way ahead, as things are going now, in order to see 

 them realized, in effect. True, the failure of our resources will not 

 come suddenly, and such of our resources as can be renewed need 

 never fail if we use them wisely. But the exhaustible resources, chief 

 among which are the mines, are coming to an end as certainly as if 

 the end were today, while those resources whose exhaustion is due 

 not to necessity, but to folly, have no future unless we insure it by 

 our own provision. 



It is clear, therefore, that the question how we shall make the best 

 use of our natural resources, renewable or not renewable, is a press- 

 ing question of the hour. Where renewal is impossible, there is need 

 of the strictest economy; and where renewal can be secured by pru- 

 dence and foresight, the very existence of the nation demands that 

 prudence and foresight be exercised. 



70 



