ceived with enthusiasm at every port of call, and nowhere with greater cordiality than at Yokohama and Tokio. When the battleships steamed into Hampton Roads on February 22, 1909, the President was there to greet the officers and crews. From the deck of Admiral Sperry's flagship he congratulated them on their unique achievement: "You have been in the northern and southern hemispheres; four times you have crossed the line; you have steamed through all the great oceans; you have touched the coast of every continent. . . . This is the first battlefleet that has ever circled the globe. . . . As a war machine the fleet comes back in better shape than it went out. . . . In addition you have shown yourselves the best of all possible ambassadors and heralds of peace. Wherever you have landed you have borne yourselves so as to make us at home feel proud of being your countrymen." Four days after the return of the fleet a conference of ten naval powers which had been sitting at London submitted a set of rules (the Declaration of London) to govern maritime warfare, especially in the important matters of contraband and the protection of neutral rights. The declaration was never formally ratified, but it was tacitly accepted as "embodying the generally recognized principles of international law."

In a long letter to Sydney Brooks of London (December 28, 1908) President Roosevelt reviewed with pardonable pride the achievements of his administration. He gave the first place in the list to the improvement of the navy, which had more than

2

1It had been Roosevelt's purpose to summon a second Hague Conference in August, 1904, but the Russo-Japanese War interfered. After the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth the new Russian ambassador, Baron Rosen, proposed the conference in the name of the Czar, and on June 15, 1907, delegates from fortyfour nations met at the Hague. The American delegation, presided over by Joseph H. Choate, tried in vain to secure an agreement on the limitation of naval armaments (the era of the dreadnaughts was just opening) and the establishment of a permanent court of justice. The conference made some slight advance toward the settlement of international disputes by arbitration and some recommendations for the more humane conduct of war, but the great cataclysm of 1914 showed how impotent these conventions were in the face of the rivalries of aggressive nationalism. 2The letter is printed in Bishop's "Theodore Roosevelt and his Time," Vol. II, pp. 129-132.

doubled in size during his term. Among a score of other accomplishments (most of which we have noticed in this chapter) he mentioned his work for the conservation of our forests and the reclamation of the arid regions of the great plains of the West. But he spoke too modestly of this most beneficial and lasting service which he continued zealously from the passage of the Newlands act in the first year of his administration to the project for a world conference on conservation at the Hague in the last month of his term. "I do not hesitate to affirm," wrote President Charles R. Van Hise of the University of Wisconsin, "that from the point of view of our descendants this question of the conservation of our natural resources is more important than any political or social question in the solution of which we are now engaged."1 And Gifford Pinchot, now (1924) governor of Pennsylvania, who, as Chief Forester of the United States from 1898 to 1910, was, next to Roosevelt, the leader of the movement, said: "The central thing for which Conservation stands is to make this country the best possible place to live in, both for us and for our descendants. It stands against the waste of natural resources which cannot be renewed, such as coal and iron; it stands for the perpetuation of the resources which can be renewed, such as the food-producing soils and the forests; and, most of all, it stands for an equal opportunity for each American citizen to get his fair share of benefit from these resources, both now and hereafter."2

Until the disappearance of our frontier toward the close of the nineteenth century, the natural resources of the United States seemed to be inexhaustible. Opportunity was free to all. Free homesteads in the West beckoned to the men who were uneasy or unsuccessful in the East. The prospector had only to stake out his claims in the regions of the newly discovered gold or silver mines or to sink his shaft in the oil fields. The 1 Charles R. Van Hise, "The Conservation of the Natural Resources of the United States," p. 375.

2 Gifford Pinchot," The Fight for Conservation," p. 79. To supplement the necessarily brief account of the conservation movement which we give here, the student should read the enthusiastic chapter in Roosevelt's "Autobiography" entitled "The Natural Resources of the Nation," pp. 428-461.

forests, which had been obstacles to be cleared away by the pioneer, became rich treasures to be exploited by the "land shark." In their absorbing passion for the accumulation of wealth, men were plundering the resources of the country like burglars looting a palace. They wasted the timber by reckless cutting and wholesale logging; and if fire caused by their carelessness destroyed a forest on a mountain slope, they moved on unconcerned to cut elsewhere. In their haste to get at the richest seams of coal for immediate sale with least labor, they tunneled the mines in such a way as to make it impossible to work the larger but less productive layers for fear of cave-ins. For every ton of anthracite that they took out they left a ton and a half forever inaccessible. They let streams of oil flow from the wells to film the rivers of western Pennsylvania. If they struck reservoirs of natural gas in drilling for oil, they made no attempt to preserve the valuable fuel as it rushed from the well, but lighted it and let it burn itself out. In the Caddo field of Louisiana, where the wells burned year after year in "giant flambeaux," 70,000,000 cubic feet of gas were wasted every day-enough to light ten cities the size of Washington. Professor I. C. White, the state geologist of West Virginia, declared that the state had for years been losing its "unrivaled fuel" from burning wells and leaking pipe lines at the rate of not less than 250,000,000 cubic feet a day, an equivalent of the waste in heating value of a 45-ton car of coal every minute. "What an appalling record," he cried, "to transmit to posterity." Like an

1 According to the estimate of the anthracite-coal commission, over 3,000,000,000 tons must have been lost by wasteful mining during the twenty-five years preceding the close of the Roosevelt administration. At the latter date (1909) there were estimated to be but 15,354,000,000 tons left in the ground. At the same time that this reckless process of mining went on, the demand for anthracite grew by leaps and bounds, as the following table shows:

irresponsible young man who runs through an inherited fortune that seemed inexhaustible, the nation was squandering its priceless inheritance of timber, soil, and mineral wealth. "The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of national welfare," says Roosevelt in his "Autobiography" (p. 430), "had not yet dawned upon the public mind."

The foresters and geologists and physiographists sounded their warnings. Our timber would last but for thirty years at the present rate and with the present methods of cutting. The demands on our forests had increased doubly as fast as our population. The average price of building-woods had increased over 50 per cent since 1900. We had anthracite coal for only fifty years, and bituminous coal for one hundred and fifty years. Our unrenewable supplies of iron ore, oil, and natural gas were being rapidly diminished. The destruction of the forests, whose roots acted like great sponges to absorb the rains and prevent floods and erosion, had wrought incalculable damage to the fertility of the farms. The Mississippi was carrying four hundred million tons of the rich soil of its drainage basin down to the Gulf every year, robbing the farmers of the priceless covering for their seeds and choking the river channel with silt. With the cessation of the great cattle drive from Texas and the Indian Territory up through Kansas and Nebraska, and the fencing in of the ranges by the sheep-raiser and the homesteader, the proportion of food animals to the population of the country had steadily decreased (from 82.5 per cent in 1860 to 72.4 per cent in 1880 and 53.9 per cent in 1900), and the mounting price of meat was felt in every home in the land. The farmer, too, accustomed from the days of abundant land and scarce labor to seek the greatest return per labor unit instead of per land unit, had not learned the habits of intensive cultivation, such as scientific fertilization, subsoiling, drainage, crop rotation, and irrigation. As a result, we produced less wheat per acre than any of the great European countries except Russia.1 It was evident

1 The figures are as follows: Great Britain, 32.2 bushels per acre; Germany, 28 bushels; France, 19.8 bushels; Austria-Hungary, 17.7 bushels; the United States, 13.8 bushels; Russia, 13.2 bushels.

that a campaign of education in the responsibilities of the present generation for the welfare and even for the existence of the future generations was necessary to turn our people from their long habit of individualism to the recognition of the paramount interest of the community. It was evident, too, that this campaign would have to be waged against the selfish opposition of all those "pioneer pillagers" who had fastened their grip upon the natural resources of the country, and who deemed it their right to remain undisturbed in the enjoyment of the monopoly of land, lumber, coal, water sites, phosphate beds, ores, and oil fields. For the report of Herbert Knox Smith of the Bureau of Corporations showed, in respect to one item alone, that, whereas at the close of the Civil War three fourths of the standing timber of the United States was owned by the public, forty years later four fifths of it was in private hands; that fewer than two hundred men owned more than half of it; and of that half, the Union and Southern Pacific railroads and the great Weyerhauser Timber Company controlled more than 20 per cent. "The conservation issue is a moral issue," said Gifford Pinchot, "and the heart of it is this: for whose benefit shall our natural resources be conserved-for the benefit of us all or for the use and profit of the few?"

It was in this spirit that President Roosevelt took up the work. The chief points in his program were four: irrigation projects for the reclamation of arid lands, the enlargement and protection of the national forests, the improvement of our internal waterways, and a campaign of publicity for the stimulation of the conservation movement in all the states of the Union, in the North American countries, and among the nations of the world. Within four years after the passage of the Newlands act twenty-eight irrigation projects in fourteen states, from Kansas to California and from Montana to New Mexico, were under way. They resulted in the reclamation of over 3,000,000 acres of land and the watering of 30,000 farms. By June 30, 1907, there had been paid into the reclamation fund $41,156,576. Three years later Congress recognized the importance of the work by authorizing a bond issue of $20,000,000 to provide capital for