But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not. The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of perfect human character, may be a process requiring all eternity,—longer than we can wait,—so that the present deposits may some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection, is—conservation.
Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or the roundness of the “Square Deal”)—except, I say, for a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands.
The day of the abandoned farm is past; the time of the adopted, of the adapted, farm has come. We are not going to abandon anything any more, because we are not going to work anything to death any more. We shall not abandon even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn them into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet undreamed. We have found a way to utilize the arid land of the West—a hundred and fifty thousand acres of it at a single stroke, as President Taft turns the waters of the Gunnison River from their ancient channel into a man-made tunnel, and sends them spreading out
Here and there,
Everywhere,
Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the lowlying lanes,
And the desert is meshed with a million veins,—
in order that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet, saying, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
We are utilizing these arid lands, reclaiming the desert for a garden, with an effort of hands and a daring of soul, that fall hardly short of the original creative work which made the world—as if the divine fiat had been: “In our image, to have dominion; to subdue the earth; and to finish the work we leave undone.” And while we are finishing these acres and planting them with fruit at so lavish a cost, shall we continue stupidly and criminally to rob, despoil, and leave for dead these eleven thousand acres of natural clam garden on the Massachusetts coast? If a vast irrigating work is the divine in man, by the same token are the barren mountain slopes, the polluted and shrunken rivers, the ravished and abandoned plough-lands, and these lifeless flats of the shore the devils in him—here where no reclaiming is necessary, where the rain cometh down from heaven, and twice a day the tides flow in from the hills of the sea!
There are none of us here along the Atlantic coast who do not think with joy of that two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-acre garden new-made yonder in the distant West. It means more, and cheaper, and still fairer fruit for us of the East; more musk-melons, too, we hope; but we know that it cannot mean more clams. Yet the clam, also, is good. Man cannot live on irrigated fruit alone. He craves clams—clams as juicy as a Redlands Bartlett, but fresh with the salty savor of wind-blown spray.