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THE GOVERNORS' CONFERENCE. 
The following is President Roosevelt's address at the historic 
conference at the White House called to determine upon a means 
to check our vanishing- national resources : 
Governors of the Several States and Gentlemen: — 
1 welcome you to this Conference at the White House. You come 
hither at my request so that we may join together to consider the ques- 
tion of the conservation and use of the great fundamental sources of 
wealth of this Nation. So vital is this question that for the first time 
in our history the chief executive officers of the states separately, and 
of the states together forming the Nation, have met to consider it. 
"With the gu vernors come men from each state, chosen for their 
special acquaintance with the terms of the problem that is before us. 
Among them are experts in natural resources and representatives of na- 
tional organizations concerned in the development and use of these re- 
sources; the Senators and Representatives in Congress; the Supreme 
Court, the Cabinet, and the Inland Waterways Commission have like- 
wise been invited to the Conference, which is therefore national in a 
peculiar sense. 
This Conference on the conservation of natural resources is in effect 
a meeting of the representatives of all the people of the United States, 
called to consider the mightiest problem now before the Nation; and the 
occasion for the meeting lies in the fact that the natural resources of 
our country are in danger of exhaustion if we permit the old wasteful 
methods of exploiting them longer to continue. 
With the rise of peoples from savagery to civilization, and with the 
consequent growth in the extent and variety of the needs of the average 
man, there comes a steadily increasing growth of the amount demanded 
by this average man from the actual resources of the country. Yet, 
rather curiously, at the same time, the average man is apt to lose his 
realization of this dependence upon nature. 
Savages, and very primitive peoples generally, concern themselves 
only with superficial natural resources; with those which they obtain 
from the actual surface of the ground. As people become a little less 
primitive, their industries, although in a rude manner, are extended to 
resources below the surface; then, with what we call civilization and 
the extension of knowledge, more resources come into use, industries 
are multiplied, and foresight begins to become a necessary and promi- 
nent factor in life. Crops are cultivated; animals are domesticated; 
and metals are mastered. 
Every step of the progress of mankind is marked by the discovery 
and use of natural resources previously unused. Without such progres- 
sive knowledge and utilization of natural resources population could not 
grow, nor industries multiply, nor the hidden wealth of the earth be de- 
veloped for the benefit of mankind. 
From the beginnings of civilization, on the banks of the Nile and 
the Euphrates, the industrial progress of the world has gone on slowly, 
with occasional setbacks, but on the whole steadily, through tens of cen- 
turies to the present day. But of late the rapidity of the process has in- 
creased at such a rate that more space has been actually covered during 
the century and a quarter occupied by our national life than during 
the preceding six thousand years that take us back to the earliest monu- 
ments of Egypt, to the earliest cities of the Babylonian plain. 
When the founders of this Nation met in Independence Hall, in 
Philadelphia, the conditions of commerce had not fundamentally changed 
