A HALF CENTURY OF CONSERVATION 339 



These national museums must at all cost be pre- 

 served. It was another instance of the educative 

 power of a phrase. 



Another interesting reaction followed the early 

 charges that the struggle lay between "eastern sen- 

 timentalism and western progress." Alternate in- 

 dignation and tears choked the voices of Congress- 

 men describing the heartlessness of long-haired east- 

 ern professors and spectacled club-women in con- 

 demning to starvation western farmers whose crops, 

 apparently, would not thrive except on waters 

 dammed inside National Park boundaries ; and sev- 

 eral western newspapers assaulted eastern National 

 Park defenders by name with expletives reminiscent 

 of old-time frontier journalism ; the writer was him- 

 self for awhile the target of the Rocky Mountain 

 press. The reaction was the swift spread of con- 

 servation sentiment through the West and its active 

 expression to Congress. In one western state Na- 

 tional Parks conservation elected a Congressman 

 while all his running mates were soundly defeated. 



The long struggle, emphasized here and there 

 with sensational episodes and concentrating power- 

 fully for a time in this western state or that, sensi- 

 tized the public mind throughout the country, pre- 

 paring the way to swift results. Concurrently, in 

 this favorable atmosphere, conservational activities 

 of many kinds have prospered. Game preservation, 

 the earliest of all nature conservation causes and per- 

 haps the most highly vitalized, has enormously ex- 



