Notes and Correspondence. 65 



itself in desolation, for that vast waste, so singularly like the 

 United States in contour and extent, and once, geologists insist, 

 as well wooded and watered as was our favored land a century 

 ago, has somber dignity in its barrenness — a dignity completely 

 absent from our civiHzed Saharas of culm-bank and ore-dump, 

 from timber-slashing and filth-filled river. 



Scenery of some sort will endure as long as sight remains. 

 It is for us to decide whether we shall permanently retain as 

 a valuable national asset any considerable portion of the natural 

 scenery which is so beneficently influential upon our lives, or 

 whether we shall continue to substitute for it the unnatural 

 scenery of man's careless waste. Shall we gaze upon the smiling 

 beauty of our island-dotted rivers, or look in disgust upon great 

 open sewers, lined with careless commercial filth, and alternating 

 between disastrous flood and painful drought? Are we to con- 

 sider and hold by design the orderly beauty of the countryside, 

 or permit unthinking commercialism to make it a horror of 

 unnecessary disorder? Is the Grand Canon of the Colorado 

 to be really held as nature's great temple of scenic color, or must 

 we see that temple punctuated and profaned by trolley poles? 

 Shall we hold inviolate all the glories of the Yosemite, or are we 

 to permit insidious corporate attacks upon its beauty under the 

 guise of questionable economics? Shall the White Mountains 

 be for us a great natural sanitarium, or shall they stand as a 

 greater monument to our folly and neglect? 



It is certain that there has been but scant thought given to 

 scenic preservation hitherto. I remember the contempt with 

 which a lawyer of national renown alluded to the absurdity of 

 any legislation by Congress in preservation of scenery, when, 

 in its wisdom, that body chose to give a measure of temporary 

 protection to a part of Niagara's flood. 



Indeed, one of the potent forces of obstruction to the legisla- 

 tion now demanded by the country in scant protection to the 

 almost destroyed mountain forests of the East has expressed 

 itself in a contemptuous sneer at national expenditures for the 

 preservation of scenery! 



We meet in a historic place, in a historic city. The Father 

 of our Country was not only greatest in war and in statesman- 

 ship, but one of the greatest of his time in esteem of natural 

 beauty, and in the desire to create urban beauty in what he 

 wisely planned as the Federal City. George Washington loved 

 dignified beauty, and the wisdom of his plan has resulted in 

 making a national capital not only admirable in its adaptation 

 to the public needs, but destined, as his plans are carried out, to 

 be beautiful beyond compare. 



