EDITORIAL 469 



in accordance with our present practice, however proportioned, would 

 equally leave the problem of conservation to be worked out on its 

 own grounds. And so, though in like manner all questions of the 

 possession and distribution of values be marshaled under extreme 

 individuality, extreme monopoly, or some combination of individuals 

 and corporations lying between these extremes, all are alike political 

 and sociological in nature and, however they may issue in practice, they 

 leave the scientific and technical problems of conservation of natural 

 resources to be solved on their own bases. And these solutions must 

 be fundamentally much the same under any political or sociological 

 system. 



So obvious is all this that it can only be a careless lapse into con- 

 fusion of thought, or else a wilful perversion of what is legitimate in 

 the arts of persuasion, for an advocate of political or sociological 

 measures to glide without a note of warning from a conservational 

 premise which commands universal assent to a political conclusion 

 respecting ownership or distribution of values which has no logical 

 relation to conservation, and may even be incompatible with its 

 highest realization. In recent months we have perhaps met such 

 perversions or confusions of thought quite as often as legitimate 

 arguments for true conservation. Fallacies usually reveal themselves 

 in the end and hurt the cause in behalf of which they are urged, and 

 these perversions must ultimately stand in the way of the wisest 

 provisions for the distribution of natural values in behalf of which 

 they are putatively invoked. No class of men bear a more urgent 

 commission to keep the currents of thought clear and ethical respect- 

 ing our natural resources than geologists, for, more than any others, 

 they have, as a matter of history, been the fathers of the real con- 

 servation movement. Hence this note on the untoward set of a 

 sinister current. 



T. C. C. 



