Proceedings of the second National Conservation Congress at Saint Paul, September 5-8, 1910

by United States. National Conservation Congress

Much has been done also among the mountain whites of the South. Every mountaineer, child or adult, that in our work we help to educate toward intelligent citizenship—and many of these mountaineers are of Revolutionary ancestry—is a barrier raised against the anarchistic tendencies and the unrest of our great cities; is a guarantee for the supremacy of the Caucasian race in America. Read, if you can secure it, Mr Thomas Nelson Page's plea for the education of the Southern Mountain whites in his magnificent address delivered at Washington before the last Continental Congress! We are also preserving, all over this broad land, landmarks of history—sacred relics of a vanished age—which are object-lessons for our own youth and for the strangers who crowd our shores. Every monument we rear, every tablet we place, every statue we erect, every old fort or bastian, every Revolutionary relic or Revolutionary soldier's grave we honor, is a tribute to those to whom we owe the imperishable gifts of liberty, of independence, of the right to worship God in our own way. Every fountain or stone recording the trail of the pioneer, the priest, the trader, the soldier, or the devotion of the Revolutionary heroine, is a breath of incense wafted back to the immortals, an inspiration for "tangible immortality" for ourselves, and those who come after us. (Applause)

The Conservation of our natural resources is a subject of intensely practical importance to the D. A. R. Representing as we do the motherhood of the Nation, we feel that it is for us to see that the children of this and future generations are not robbed of their God-given privileges. It is our high privilege and mission to see to it that the future shall be the uncankered fruit of the past. The ideal democracy solemnly dedicated by the Founders, we, as their Daughters, declare shall not be forestalled. As women we cannot be silent and see the high ends at which they aimed made futile by the growth of a grovelling lust for material and commercial aggrandizement. This headlong haste for enormous gain, the total disregard of the future for the present moment, if not stopped will bring us to the condition of the Old World where the fertility and habitability of past ages have been destroyed forever. We feel that it is for us, who are not wholly absorbed in business, to preserve ideals that are higher than business—the outlook for the future, the common interests, and the betterment of all classes. The wasteful scrambling and greedy clutching at our natural treasures has made the present generation rich; but the mothers of the future must be warned by us lest they find that our boasted prosperity has been bought at the price of the suffering, of the poverty, and class war of our descendants. There is no lack of patriotic devotion in the country; but the mere thoughtlessness and inability or unwillingness of the commercial class to drop the interests of the moment long enough to realize how they are compromising the future—this hot haste and heedlessness, it is for us with our larger outlook, to restrain.

Women have already preserved a large National forest in the Pennsylvania mountains; the women of Minnesota have to their credit the Minnesota National forests; it was the women of California who saved the immemorial groves of the Calaveras big trees. Our own work in behalf of the preservation of the Appalachian watersheds, in behalf of the preservation of historic sites, as well as the efforts being made by various women's organizations to preserve the natural beauty of the Palisades, of Niagara Falls, and of other precious scenic treasures of the Nation, are all steps in the right direction, are all preparation for the larger Conservation interests which the D. A. R. have begun actively to champion. It should be a second nature to women, with the spirit of motherhood and protecting care innate in them, to take an effective stand in the spirit of true patriotism—against the spirit of rank selfishness—the anti-social spirit of the man who declines to take into account any other interests than his own. (Applause)

There is another great world interest that is peculiarly our own as Daughters and descendants of the peace-loving patriots who took up arms a century and a half ago. They were not professional soldiers, but plain citizens hastily rallied together in often-wavering lines of defense of home and country. All the world wondered when at Lexington and Concord, on the village green and at the wooden bridge, the embattled farmers stood across the line of march of the British regular army, and fired "the shot heard round the world." It is the opening decade of the twentieth century of the Christian era; it is time that brute force—the recourse of primitive, barbaric man—cease to be the last arbitrament between great nations calling themselves Christian and civilized, and that the Conservation of peace be established by international arbitration. (Applause)

Again, it is one of the glories of our great organization that we are first, last, and all the time, considering the child. Today in all civilized countries the child is leading the way. I am happy to be able to say that through the instrumentality of our chapters in different parts of the country, interest has been awakened in homeless and dependent children; organizations have been formed for children of foreign birth to teach them respect for the flag, and some things about our form of government. Many chapters provide instructive lectures in their own language for foreigners, who listen eagerly. Many chapters offer prize medals for the best essays on historical subjects—American history especially—and for memorizing our National songs. Nothing is more important than our organized work for the "Children of the American Revolution"—children of American birth and descent—unless it be our work for the "Children of the Republic" in teaching to be American citizens boys of foreign parentage who come to us with little idea of the difference between liberty and license. For patriotism consists as much in making good citizens as in saving the Nation from bad ones (applause). Every boy of foreign birth or extraction that we can help to transform into a thorough American through this magnificent branch of our work, every lad of foreign birth or extraction that we can help train to become a useful citizen and grow up into honorable manhood as a credit to his adopted land is an added asset to the ethical wealth of the country. Think for a moment what it means to help train these young foreigners in the plastic period of their life in the patriotic principles of their adopted country! A long stride has been taken in their patriotic and civic education, when through the exertions of noble women they have been given some idea of the great principles which are the basis of our form of government.

Another branch of our Conservation work which is especially near my heart, and which I think must be near to the heart of every mother in this broad land, is that in connection with the splendid crusade now being carried on against the evil of child labor. We have attempted, in dealing with this as with every other problem, first to obtain a wide and sure knowledge of the facts, and secondly to avoid everything savoring of the spirit of fanaticism in concentrating our energies on some great constructive policy. The committee on child labor, under the leadership of its noble chairman—the late Mrs J. Ellen Foster, whose life was dedicated to the needs of humanity—has made herculean efforts to bring this matter properly before the attention not only of the D. A. R. but of all the women of our land who are capable of responding to the pathetic appeal of suffering and stunted childhood, that we may wipe away this inexcusable stain on our National honor and this irreparable blight on that product which is more valuable than all the combined harvests of this fertile continent—the splendid American crop of human souls. (Applause)

If in a serener atmosphere than that of the politics of the hour, we as patriotic women can meet and help to solve these and other equally important problems in the eternally feminine way that has always given us power over men—if we would indeed, in the words of the old Athenians, help to transmit our fatherland not only undiminished but better and greater than it was transmitted to us, and if we are indeed unwilling to transmit to posterity mere material possessions unillumined by divine ideals; if we can but rise to the height and might of a pure, disinterested, passionless consecration to the principles which time has proved to be the soul of the purpose of the Fathers of the Republic, and on that high level, above the distracting personalities and passing incidents and accidents of the hour, "live and move and have our being" as a National Society, then we shall best establish and preserve the useful influence and leadership in the country to which we loyally aspire. Our interest and work for these great Conservation interests we cannot too often reiterate for our own encouragement and inspiration and for the enlightenment of the public.

As I said before, in the light of recent incidents and experiences, it has been borne in upon me that there are two great Conservation interests we have not yet sufficiently touched. With all the advance in learning, all the discoveries of science, all the enlightenment and uplifting of religion, all the refining of manners, all the acquisitions of men through invention and additions to the facilities for work and comfort of living, all the improvements of institutions providing for the farther and farther spread of well-being among the children of men, still, in the great underlying physical principles of existence, in the "main travelled roads" of humanity from birth to death, there is and can be no essential change. Nevertheless, there are an infinite number of variations and gradations in the product of these eternal operations of nature. Man's battle with nature—for human progress is a constant struggle against natural conditions, a continual re-making of the planet—has been ever accompanied, step by step, by the battle within himself against the contradictions in his inescapable heredity. It is the degree of success in this struggle for the triumph of the spiritual and the intellectual that marks the differences in racial types. Here then are the grand elements of the problem, the condition as well as theory confronting every well-wisher to humanity, every lover of her kind and her country, especially among women. For it is woman who is the divinity of the spring whence flows the stream of humanity—nay, she is the source herself. To her keeping has been entrusted the sacred font. In her hands rests the precious cup, the golden bowl of life. Holier than the Holy Grail itself is this chalice glowing ever, with its own share of the divine fire, its own vital spark from the altar of Almighty power. Never has this office of cup-bearer to creation placed greater responsibility upon woman than in this our own day, and this our own country. Freely we have received, and generously must we respond; and deeply must we realize what a charge to keep we have—nothing less than the Conservation of the greatest experiment in enlightened self-government the world ever saw. Is that sacred trust to be jeopardized by untried, impracticable, uncalled for innovations upon the institutions of Government sufficing for the Fathers of the Country, and providing for its splendid development thus far? Shall we grasp at a shadow in the stream, like the dog in the fable, and drop the substance to sink away from us beyond recall? Is any real interest of the women of the land in danger? Is any real interest of women inseparable from the interests of the fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons of the women of the land? Is there any interest of women to be compared in vital importance to themselves, with the conservation of true womanliness?

I plead, as the representative of a great National organization of the women of the land, for the Conservation of true womanliness, for the exalting, for the lifting up in special honor, of the Holy Grail of Womanhood. But not merely the cup whence flows the stream of human life, must we guard and cherish; we must look to the ingredients which are being cast into the cup. We must protect the fountain from pollution. We must not so eagerly invite all the sons of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, wherever they may have first seen the light, and under whatever traditions and influences and ideals foreign and antagonistic to ours they may have been reared, to trample the mud of millions of alien feet into our spring. We must conserve the sources of our race in the Anglo-Saxon line, Mother of Liberty and Self-government in the modern world. I would rather our coming census showed a lesser population and a greater homogeneity. Especially do I dread the clouding of the purity of the cup with color and character acquired under tropical suns, in the jungle, or in paradisian islands of the sea alternately basking in heavenlike beauty and serenity and devastated by earthquake and tornado and revolution. (Applause)