CONSERVATION
There are certain words which have come into general circulation since the war. One of the very best of these is "Conservation."
Conservation is a fine, rich-sounding, round word, agreeable to the ear and eye, and much more aristocratic than the word "Reform," which seems to carry with it the unpleasant suggestion of something that needs to be changed. The dictionary, which knows everything, says that "Conservation means the saving from destructive change the good we already possess," which seems to be a perfectly worthy ambition for any one to entertain.
For many people, changes have in them an element of wickedness and danger. I once knew a little girl who wore a sunbonnet all summer and a hood all winter, and cried one whole day each spring and fall when she had to make the change; for changes to her were fearsome things.
This antagonism to change has delayed the progress of the world and kept back many a needed reform, for people have grown to think that whatever is must be right, and indeed have made a virtue of this belief.
"It was good enough for my father and it is good enough for me," cries many a good tory (small t, please), thinking that by this utterance he convinces an admiring world that all his folks have been exceedingly fine people for generations.
But changes are inevitable. What is true to-day may not be true to-morrow. All our opinions should be marked, "Subject to change without notice." We cannot all indulge ourselves in the complacency of the maiden lady who gave her age year after year as twenty-seven, because she said she was not one of these flighty things who say "one thing to-day and something else to-morrow."
Life is change. Only dead things remain as they are. Every living thing feels the winds of the world blowing over it, beating and buffeting it, marking and bleaching it. Change is a characteristic of life, and we must reckon on it! Progress is Life's first law! In order to be as good as we were yesterday, we have to be better. Life is built on a sliding scale; we have to keep moving to keep up. There are no rest stations on Life's long road!
The principle of conservation is not at enmity with the spirit of change. It is in thorough harmony with it.
Conservation becomes a timely topic in these days of hideous waste. In fact it will not much longer remain among the optional subjects in Life's curriculum. Even now the Moving Finger, invisible yet to the thoughtless, is writing after it the stern word "Compulsory." Four hundred thousand men have been taken away from the ranks of producers here in Canada, and have gone into the ranks of destroyers, becoming a drain upon our resources for all that they eat, wear, and use. Many thousand other men are making munitions, whose end is destruction and waste. We spend more in a day now to kill and hurt our fellow men than we ever spent in a month to educate or help them. Great new ways of wasting and destroying our resources are going on while the old leaks are all running wide open. More children under five years old have died since the war than there have been men killed in battle!—and largely from preventable "dirt-diseases" and poverty. Rats, weeds, extravagance, general shiftlessness are still doing business at the old stand, unmolested.