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officials  you  have  already  taken  such  advanced  ground,  is  sure 
to  go  on. 
The  Conservation  movement  although  its  name  and  its  great 
prominence  are  recent,  is  not  new.  Like  all  great,  right,  move- 
ments, it  has  long  been  growing  slowly  and  had  really  acquired 
miuch  quiet  momentum  before  it  found  a powerful  advocate  in 
Theodore  Roosevelt. 
Men  here  and  there  all  over  the  Union  have  long  realized  the 
needless  waste  in  our  use  of  our  natural  products  and  have  depre- 
cated it.  Several  scientific  bureaus  in  Washington  have  been 
engaged  for  years,  some  of  them  for  a quarter  of  a century  or 
more  in  laying  the  foundation  for  the  present  policy.  But  the 
leaders  have  recognized  that  it  is  not  sufficient  before  the  bar  of 
public  opinion,  to  hold  convictions.  It  is  necessary  to  be  able  to 
prove  them  so  that  the  other  fellow  may  be  convinced  also. 
The  prophet  is  in  effect  a mere  dreamer  until  he  can  prove  that 
his  prophesy  is  based  on  sufficient  facts  and  sufficient  well  based 
theory.  Ten  centuries  ago  the  man  who  predicted  that  the  sun 
would  disappear  for  an  hour  at  noonday  a month  or  a year  or  a 
century  later  would  have  been  jeered  at.  Now  we  do  not  ques- 
tion the  accuracy  of  predictions  of  lunar  eclipses.  Eighteen  years 
ago  when  Major  J.  W.  Powell,  Second  Director  of  the  U.  S. 
Geological  Survey,  told  a great  gathering  of  irrigators  and  pro- 
moters in  the  Southwest  that  when  every  available  drop  of  water 
in  the  arid  states  and  territories  was  fully  utilized,  not  five  per 
cent,  of  the  deserts  could  be  irrigated,  he  was  greeted  by  yells  of 
derision.  He  was  right  by  a wide  margin,  and  the  10,000  who 
contradicted  him  were  wrong,  but  he  could  not  prove  his  point, 
because  the  necessary  facts  had  not  been  collected.  This  col- 
lection was  soon  begun,  however,  and  the  foundation  for  the 
Reclamation  Service  was  thereby  laid.  When  fifteen  or  twenty 
years  ago  forest  conservation  was  first  advocated  in  the  United 
States,  the  advocate  was  told  that  he  was  a fool,  that  the  timber 
resources  of  the  mainland  were  so  vast  that  they  could  not  be 
exhausted,  and  though  he  did  not  believe  it,  he  could  not  prove 
his  point ; but  the  mapping  of  forest  areas  and  the  estimation  of 
standing  timber  and  of  its  annual  reduction  began  forthwith,  and 
now  with  these  estimates  fairly  complete,  the  Forest  Service  is 
able  to  tell  us  authoritatively  that  without  a radical  change  in 
policy,  our  forests  will  disappear  in  30  or  40  years. 
From  time  to  time  voices  have  been  heard  advocating  regula- 
tion of  coal  and  iron  mining,  because  of  danger  of  exhaustion  of 
the  reserves  of  these  minerals,  but  facts  have  not  existed  until  re- 
cently to  prove  this  anxiety  to  be  well  based.  As  the  result,  how- 
ever, of  more  than  25  years  of  patient  exploration  and  investi- 
gation and  careful  mapping,  the  U.  S.  Geological  Survey  is  now 
able  to  present  fairly  satisfactory  estimates  of  the  reserves  of 
these  and  many  other  natural  resources,  and  of  their  rate  of  ex- 
haustion, so  that  here  also  the  advocate  of  a policy  of  Con- 
