The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

None the less is the prophecy a long way toward fulfilment when the vision is seen. And that it has been seen is intimated by this sentence, too optimistic no doubt, from a book on the subject by one of the major prophets of conservation, recently published in America. "Conservation," he says, "has captured the nation."

It is not the thrifty, nepotic, static conservation of the St. Lawrence habitant, which depends upon the self and family interest of each landholder to keep the fields enriched and to prevent the washing away of the soil. It is a dynamic and paternalistic conservation—a conservation that thinks of great dams for the restraint of waters and reservoirs for their impounding to the extent of millions or billions of cubic feet, forestation of great stretches of mountain slope, of restrictions and compulsions of other than personal and family interests—a paternalism that looks beyond the next generation or even two generations and to the feeding of other children than one's own lineal descendants—a paternalism that is not exploiting but fiduciary.

It is interesting to observe again how the beginnings of this conservation have been made in the fields where stood the first hospitals for the sick among the living, the first memorials to the dead, the first schools for the children of to-day that are to be the nation of to-morrow. Here also begin to rise the structures of the thought for the day after to-morrow.

The first notable assembling of men in the interest of conservation, chiefly of men already in public service—the President of the United States, the Vice-President, members of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, members of Congress, the governors of thirty-four States, representatives of the other States, the governors of the Territories, and other public officials, with a number of representatives of societies and a few guests—met in 1908, to discuss questions relative to conservation. Probably not in the history of the nation has there sat in its borders an assembly of men so widely representative. This gathering resulted in the appointment of a National Conservation Commission by the President, but Congress made no appropriation for meeting the expense of its labors; and so private enterprise and providence have undertaken the carrying out of the movement.

A great body of men and women scientists, public-spirited citizens from all parts of the nation, under the presidency of Doctor Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard University, began a campaign of education to the end that ultimately and soon—before the riches have gone—this concern for the far future may become fixed in the law and conscious provision of the people.

I spoke in the last chapter of Hennepin's seeing a savage making sacrifice to the spirit of the Mississippi, supposed to live under the Falls of St. Anthony. You will recall the description of the great public university beside it that represents the sacrifice of the democracy of to-day for the nation of to-morrow. Instead of the beaver-skin which the poor Indian hung in the branches of a tree near the falls as his offering, the State has hung its gift of forty million dollars for the highest training of its sons and daughters. But there is still, if possible, a nobler aspiration to put against that primitive background and beside the Indian's beaver- skin, for the gift is as yet little more than an aspiration.

A few miles back from these same falls there was held in 1910 a convention of many thousands from all parts of the Union, the President of the United States and his predecessor among them, assembled under the auspices of the National Conservation Congress to consider, as they avowed, not alone their own affairs, not even the good of their children with theirs, but primarily the welfare of unborn millions as well. It cannot be assumed that all were looking so far ahead, but the declaration of principles which had called this great assemblage had in it this import—something loftier than any declaration of personal rights. It was a declaration of duty—of duty not to the past, not even to the present, but to the long, long distant future.

"Recognizing the natural resources of the country as the prime basis of property and opportunity, we hold the rights of the people in these resources to be natural and inherent and justly inalienable and indefeasible; and we insist that the resources should and shall be developed, used, and conserved in ways consistent with current welfare and with the perpetuity of our people."

When this or a like sentiment is framed out of the consciousness of a free people into a controlling declaration of public policy, we shall have not merely a nobler offering to put beside the beaver-skin and the university, but a document worthy to be put above our Declaration of Independence even, and an interpretation of the words "the people of the United States" in our Constitution that will give them an import beyond the highest conception of its authors.

The movement which embodies this sentiment is as yet chiefly a private effort, as I have said, but its influence is beginning to run through the sentiment of the individualism which has so rapidly exploited the riches of the valley and spent with such generous hand for the immediate future. And the boundaries of public service are already enlarged in making room for the previsions of the "Children of Always," as the mankind now in the thought of conservationists may well be called.