sod BR 
FOrULAR scien ox 
MONTHLY 
OCTOBER, 1910 
ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CONSERVATION 
CONGRESS 
By PRESIDENT WILLIAM H. TAFT 
ONSERVATION as an economic and political term has come 
to mean the preservation of our natural resources for econom- 
ical use, so as to secure the greatest good to the greatest number. In 
the development of this country, in the hardships of the pioneer, in the 
energy of the settler, in the anxiety of the investor for quick returns, 
there was very little time, opportunity, or desire to prevent waste of 
those resources supplied by nature which could not be quickly trans- 
muted into money; while the investment of capital was so great a de- 
sideratum that the people as a community exercised little or no care to 
prevent the transfer of absolute ownership of many of the valuable 
natural resources to private individuals, without retaining some kind 
of control of their use. 
The impulse of the whole new community was to encourage the 
coming of population, the increase of settlement, and the opening up of 
business; and he who demurred in the slightest degree to any step 
which promised additional development of the idle resources at hand 
was regarded as a traitor to his neighbors and an obstructor to publie 
progress. But now that the communities have become old, now that the 
flush of enthusiastic expansion has died away, now that the would-be 
pioneers have come to realize that all the richest lands in the country 
have been taken up, we have perceived the necessity for a change of 
policy in the disposition of our national resources so as to prevent the 
continuance of the waste which has characterized our phenomenal 
growth in the past. To-day we desire to restrict and retain under pub- 
lic control the acquisition and use by the capitalists of our natural re- 
sources. 
The danger to the state and to the people at large from the waste 
VOL, LXXVII.—22. 
