CONSERVATION THROUGH ENGINEERING. 3 



NATIONAL STOCK TAKING. 



The Government should have a more complete knowledge of the 

 coal and of other foundation industries than can be found elsewhere, 

 and we should not fear national stock taking as a continuing process. 

 It is indeed the beginning of wisdom. The war revealed to us how 

 delinquent in this regard we had been in the past. One day when the 

 full story is told of the struggle of the Army engineer to meet war 

 emergency demands, and this is supplemented by the tale of the 

 effort made by the Council of National Defense and the War In- 

 dustries Board, it will be realized more seriously than now how lit- 

 tle of stock taking we have done in this generous, optimistic land. 



When any such undertaking is proposed, however, it at once ap~ 

 pears to arouse the fear that it is somehow the beginning of a 

 malevolent policy called " conservation," and conservation has had 

 a mean meaning to many ears. It connoted stinginess and a pro- 

 vincial thrift, spies in the guise of Government inspectors, hateful 

 interferences with individual enterprise and initiative, governmental 

 haltings and cowardices, and all the constrictions of an arrogant, 

 narrow, and academic-minded bureaucracy which can not think 

 largely and feels no responsibility for national progress. Needless ; 

 to say this fear should not, need not be. The word should mean 

 helpfulness, not hindrance helpfulness to all who wish to use a 

 resource and think in larger terms than that of the greatest im- 

 mediate profit; hindrance only to those who are spendthrift. ^A* 

 conservation which results in a stalemate as between the forces of 

 progress and governmental inertia is criminal, while a conservation 

 that is based on the fuller, the more essential use of a resource is 

 statesmanship. 



To know what we have and what we can do with it and what we 

 should not do with it, also ! is a policy of wisdom, a policy of last- 

 ing progress. And in furtherance of such a policy the first step is 

 to know our resources our national wealth in things and in their 

 possibilities; the second step is to know their availability for im- 

 mediate use; the third step is to guard them against waste either 

 through ignorance or wantonness ; and the fourth step is to prolong 

 their life by invention and discovery. 



COAL AS A NATIONAL ASSET. 



Enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate how vast are the fields 

 of coal which this country holds. It may be that any day some 

 genius will release from nature a power that will make of little value 

 our carboniferous deposits save for their chemical content. By the 

 application of the sun's rays, or the use of the unceasing motion of 



