BuEEAU OF Ageictjltuee. 213 



to whom the farmer should look as the divinely chosen 

 agent for that work. 



I do not intend to approach this question from 

 either of the two aspects mentioned. In the first place I 

 am not seeking the farmer 's vote ; I am not a candidate 

 for any office, and if I were I would have too much politi- 

 cal sense to be caught in a convention of bankers. Bank- 

 ers are a hard-headed, unimaginative lot, who are little 

 influenced by perfervid oratory or rhetorical pictures of 

 things as they ought to be. Their minds are essentially 

 trained to deal with facts, with things as they are, how- 

 ever unpleasant and unattractive they may be. In fact, 

 the better trained a, banker is, the more quickly he wants 

 to know the worst and to prepare himself to cope with 

 the greatest difficulty which the facts may present. 



When our forefathers settled this country they 

 found it a vast uninhabited wilderness of apparently in- 

 exhaustible resources, and, acting on the appearance of 

 these resources as inexhaustible, they began a settled 

 policy of exploitation calculated in the least possible time 

 to exhaust its resources. The whole nation seems from 

 the beginning to have been seized with a monomania of 

 trying to convert the material resources in the shortest 

 space of time possible into the largest fortunes regardless 

 of the amount of wasteful extravagance and destruction 

 which such a policy entailed upon the sum total of our 

 country's resources. Far-seeing economists and think- 

 ers twenty-five years and more ago, began to point out to 

 the nation in public addresses and written articles the 

 rapidity with which we were approaching the goal of 

 desolation by such a process. But only in the last few 

 years, largely through the instrumentality of one of the 

 imost conspicuous and able Presidents of the United 

 States, was this idea brought prominently to the fore- 

 front and took an abiding place in the thought of the 

 people, and was crystalized in the phrase, ' ' Conservation 

 of our Natural Resources." The readiness with which 

 the public seized upon this idea is significant of a peculiar 

 characteristic of our Anglo-Saxon people. The conserva- 

 tion of natural resources means a preservation of the 

 property values of the people. It was some years later 

 before the attention of the people was directed towards 



