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bounty of Nature was not inexhaustible. With the developments 
of recent years, the gradual settlement of the West, the increase 
of facilities for transportation, and most of all in the better 
understanding of the relation between the right use of the natural 
resources and continued economic prosperity, a new view point 
has been reached which necessitates the readjustment of our atti- 
tude on a number of subjects. We find that we may have now 
to revise laws that have long been on the statute books ; laws 
without which the Nation could never have reached its present 
stage of development. Primarily, it has come to be seen that 
the remaining sources of material wealth ought to be rationally 
developed and systematically exploited, not for the benefit of the 
few but in the interest of all the people, their rightful owners. 
Certain of the natural resources, if once exhausted may be re- 
placed. Forests can be made to grow again and streams that 
have wasted away because their watersheds were denuded of 
vegetation can be renewed — albeit only with the expenditure of 
long time and heavy labor. Other resources, like coal and oil 
and phosphate deposits, and in many places the soil itself when 
lost through unchecked erosion, are gone forever. 
The object of Conservation is to bring about the wise use of 
these resources of wealth so that they may serve man now and 
also in the days to come. It is no part of the plan to lock them 
up for the sole benefit of posterity, but rather to use them that 
those that are renewable shall be brought into ever better pro- 
ducing condition, and those that must in time be used up shall 
be made, while serving fully the needs of the present, to go as 
far as may be toward supplying the wants of the future. Above 
all Conservation stands for the retention by the people of the ulti- 
mate ownership in this great heritage. Let the development be 
by private capital by all means, under reasonable conditions and 
with grants of sufficient duration to permit justifiable profits, but 
never let such grants be made in perpetuity or without just com- 
pensation. These are the basic principles of Conservation — 
the objects for which the movement stands. 
And the reason for it all is plain. With the rapid development 
following the application of science to modern industrial life, with 
the diminishing supply of many of the resources and the steadily 
increasing demand, it is essential that the people retain the owner- 
ship of the supplies of coal, wood and water that still vest in the 
Nation. By so doing absolute monopolistic control can be 
averted and the rights of the future safeguarded. If, however, 
the ownership of these things, more especially of the coal and the 
water powers, passes into private hands we and our children shall 
be at the mercy of the few as have never a people been before. 
The temptation for complete control through combination is too 
strong to be resisted. It is not what has so far been done that 
counts, but the liability — nay the practical certainty of what al- 
most surely will happen if the tendencies of today are not 
