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prolonged labor to accomplish results that perhaps 
cannot otherwise be attained. 
Upon the land, man’s dominion is supreme; its face, 
where fairest, he may scar, ravage and make bare, that 
stranger winds may come and wither it into an abiding 
desolation ; he may reclothe his desert with its raiment 
of verdure, and if so willed, bend to his purpose every 
form of its animal and vegetable life. But need we 
RES fe with Byron in his noble apostrophe to the 
ocean ! 
Man marks the earth with ruin— 
His control stops with thy shore. 
We who girdle its bed with thought-flashing cables, who 
in floating palaces skim its seas with birdlike speed and 
grace, who sound its remotest depths and reveal its 
uttermost secrets, we who do all this should be as little 
of the poet’s mind as we are of his generation. More- 
over the ruin of which he speaks has not stopped with 
the ocean’s shore; beyond that dread-bound man has 
ravaged and despoiled, its harvests he has withered, 
and the blight of his hand lies heavier upon the sea than 
upon the land. For upon the scarred earth he has 
spread the cloak of his repentance, into her wounds he 
has poured the balm of peace, and with careful nurture 
and thoughtful ministration he brings her back to glad- 
ness and beauty. The sea is still the object of his 
rapacity, his destruction is constant, his warfare merciless 
and he sees not in his blind greed the shadow of the 
coming desolation. 
Upon the land bitter experience has taught us that 
conservation is better than reparation and dumb indeed 
need we be if our lesson has revealed not only a new 
field for its application, but also the means of achieve- 
ment. To obtain dominion over the dwellers of the sea, 
to set apart the available and destroy the harmful, to 
make the sea our preserve as we have the land our 
pasture, this should be our purpose, our ultimate hope. 
