If anyone believes that this growth of expenditure is a consequence of the general material growth of the country, let him study the following brief table of comparative statistics. It establishes the indictment of national extravagance:
| Increases | ||||
| Wealth | 1870 to 1890 | 116.0% | 1890 to 1904 | 65.0% |
| Foreign Trade | 1870 to 1890 | 99.0% | 1890 to 1908 | 85.4% |
| Value Manufactured Product | 1870 to 1890 | 121.0% | 1890 to 1905 | 58.0% |
| Net Ordinary Exp. U. S. Govt | 1870 to 1890 | 1.4% | 1890 to 1908 | 121.4% |
| Expenditures of 30 States | 1890 to 1909 | 201.6% | ||
This debauch of capital and credit has sent a poison circulating through the veins of the Nation. Everywhere the individual imitates the profligacy of his Government. Industry and saving are at a discount. Any luxury, any extravagance is warranted if funds for it can be raised by wasting capital or creating debt. There is just so much less money for productive employment: for payrolls and the extension of commerce and industries, and the creation of those new facilities for want of which the commerce of the country is and always must be limited (applause). Hence come also high prices, curtailment of business, distrust, and eventual distress. Hence come waste and idleness, and the increased cost of production that makes both business and employment slow and insecure. Any Conservation movement worthy of the name must place high upon its program the saving of capital and credit from the rapacious hands of socialist as well as monopolist (applause). Extravagance is undermining the industry of this country as surely as the barbarians broke down and looted that mighty empire with whose civilization and progress Ferrero repeatedly insists that ours has so much in common.
We must stand for Conservation everywhere; in the tedious as well as in the interesting application; where it cuts into our pleasure and habits, and jostles our comfortable, easy-going ways of thought, just as firmly as where it is hand in glove with self-interest. This is, above all things, an economic question. It is neither personal nor political. In such petty and partial interests it has found its worst obstructions and encountered its most serious reverses.
The tariff in some respects is a great enemy of Conservation (applause). Whatever we may think of it as a general industrial policy, everyone can see that, by excluding the raw products of other countries, it throws the entire burden of their consumption upon our own resources, and thus exhausts them unnecessarily (applause). This appears clearly when we consider such commodities as we might obtain from Canada, a country that gained nearly 400,000 immigrants from the United States in the nine years up to April, 1909, and has probably taken another hundred thousand since; a country where it is absurd to talk about any actual advantage in the wage scale as compared with our own. The tariff on forest products cuts down our own forests, a tariff on coal depletes our mines, a tariff on any raw material forbids the conservation of similar natural resources here. (Applause).
This Congress announced from the first its purpose to deal with the subject of Conservation in a practical spirit. The present condition of the movement, now in the third stage of its development, demands it. We have to apply the Conservation principle, as we have eventually to apply every other, to our domestic economics; to work it out in the experience and practice of everyday life. How this may be done can be stated in the form of a few conclusions that raise the word Conservation from the name of a more or less vague, diffuse, and disputable theory to that of a practical guide to legislation and administration. (Applause)
Conservation is wholly an economic, not in any sense a political principle (applause). The Nation has suffered and still suffers so much from transferring other economic questions to politics that the mistake should not be repeated (applause). Whoever attempts to make Conservation the bone of a personal controversy or the beast of burden to carry any faction into power or popularity is its worst enemy. (Great applause)
"Conservative" is the adjective corresponding to the noun "Conservation." Any other attitude toward this movement, either radical or reactionary, is treason to its name and to its spirit. It should mean no more and no less than dealing with our resources in a spirit of intelligence, honesty, care for both the present and the future, and ordinary business common sense. (Applause)
Conservation does not mean forbidding access to resources that could be made available for present use. It means the freest and largest development of them consistent with the public interest and without waste. A bag of gold buried in the earth is useless for any purpose. So is an acre untilled, a mine unopened, a forest that bars the way to homes and human happiness.