do all the present mechanical work of the country, but not enough for all its future needs. There is peat available, there is lignite; but the supply of these is likewise limited. Where future generations will get all the energy they need, and the heat, and the light, no one now can say. All the more reason, then, for making our coal last as long as possible.

A few great corporations have been buying up water-power sites; and there are signs that we may have before very long a gigantic water-power trust, which, when oil and coal are approaching exhaustion, might easily become the dominating power in American industry. For without power nothing can be done. It is of the utmost importance that the nation should keep its water-power under public control, that it may be utilized in the public interest instead of for the benefit of a small group of people.

Parallel with water-power development should go the effort to make our streams navigable, and create a system of connecting canals. Water-borne traffic consumes less than half as much energy as freight carried by rail. If at the same time we improve our highways-only about twelve per cent of our roads are as yet improved by any sort of surfacing-we can save many hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In the face of all this need for work, the continual involuntary unemployment of thousands of men caused by the clumsiness of our industrial system is seen to have not only a personal but a public aspect. We need the labors of these men, at once, and badly.

The term conservation may well be stretched to include the conservation of public health and life, and all conservation of human effort. The movements to eliminate preventable accidents, to eradicate the diseases that can be stamped out by concentrated

control, the child-labor movement, the spread of the use of labor-saving devices, the development of scientific management, the diminishing of friction between the members of the industrial mechanism-all this, and much more, might be covered by the term. But these movements we have discussed in other chapters. What we are here specifically concerned with is the prudent use of the raw materials with which nature has so generously endowed us.

The leaders of our national life have not failed to warn us of our extravagance. Roosevelt gave strenuous efforts to make Conservation one of our American ideals. "It is time we should wake up the country," he said in 1910, "to the need of using foresight and common sense as regards our natural resources. We of this generation hold the land in part for the use of the next generation and not exclusively for our own selfish enjoyment."

Gifford Pinchot, former chief forester of the United States, has put the case even more trenchantly: "We are prosperous because our forefathers bequeathed to us a land of marvellous resources. Shall we conserve those resources, and in our turn transmit them, still unexhausted, to our descendants? Unless we do, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day. . . . Business prudence and business common-sense indicate as strongly as anything can the absolute necessity of a change in point of view on the part of the people of the United States regarding their natural resources. The way we have been handling them is not good business. Purely on the side of dollars and cents, it is not good business to kill the goose that lays the golden egg-to burn up half our forests, to waste our coal, and to remove

..

from under the feet of those who are coming after us the opportunity for equal happiness with ourselves."

As this chapter is being revised for the press, the February, 1921, number of the Atlantic Monthly appears, with a vigorous article by a chemical engineer of wide experience, who sums up his conclusions as follows: "We need sadly to develop a national common-sense, and to apply it to the spending of our natural resources, which are the basis of our national wealth. More than ever before is the whole world under a heavy responsibility to use its resources wisely; and the major portion of that burden falls upon us who are the most richly endowed of all.. We must substitute co-ordinated development by planning for opportunist development designed primarily for the enrichment of the individual."

SUGGESTED READINGS

C. R. Van Hise, The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States.

Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation.

H. J. Spooner, Wealth from Waste.

R. Cronau, Our Wasteful Nation.

American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, The Conservation of Natural Resources.

H. M. Gregory, Checking the Waste.

J. J. Hill, Highways of Progress.

J. H. Patton, The Natural Resources of the United States.

O. W. Price, The Land We Live In.

C. G. Gilbert and J. E. Pogue, The Energy Resources of the United States.

Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism: Chapters on Natural Resources, Conservation.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE COMMON GOOD

THE selfishness and shortsightedness that have shown themselves so flagrantly in the exploitation of our natural resources are to be found in a hundred ways impeding the socially efficient conduct of American business. Money is thrown into ventures that promise quick returns, and withheld from undertakings far more imperative from the public point of view. The bankers, who lend the funds for new enterprises, enlargements of plant, or production for future sale, have it within their power to considerable extent to favor or withhold favor at their discretion. The people as a whole, and their representatives, have little opportunity to decide whether, for example, agriculture or manufacturing or transportation should be aided with credit, whether housing should be encouraged, whether the savings of the American people should be invested in this country or abroad. Yet these are matters that vitally concern the nation as a whole.

Take the matter of housing. For several years we have been in dire need of hundreds of thousands of homes. The building of private houses, apartments, and tenements has fallen far behind the growth in population. The result is a widespread discomfort, much serious inconvenience, and, for the poor, an overcrowding that is undermining the health and the morals of a considerable section of the population.

Yet theatres and garages have been going up in unprecedented numbers; money has poured into foreign investment in a great volume, lured by the low exchange rates; all sorts of socially unnecessary undertakings have been launched. The country is prosperous, but it apparently can not get, under the present management of its savings, the homes it imperatively needs.

Moreover, in the conduct of a given business, the criterion of success has been the amount of profits it has paid to its stockholders, rather than the service it has rendered to the public. Recently an advertising circular of a well-known moving-picture concern stated, with pride, that it had taken in five million dollars in less than three years from an original investment of $114,000. In other words, movie patrons had been made to pay for their seats enough more than the cost of producing and showing these pictures to pile up this yield to the producers. But this is not social efficiency, it is merely efficiency in making money for a few people by charging unnecessarily high rates to the rest of the people.

So, to take another example, has it been in lifeinsurance. The companies pay high salaries to their officers and high commissions to their agents, with the result that fifteen per cent cost of doing business has been considered reasonable. The United States government during the war insured four million Americans at an overhead cost of less than two per cent. It is needless to multiply instances. Mr. Roger Babson, the conservative financier, has expressed the point of the matter in the following words: "The dominant thought in our whole industrial machinery is not how we can produce the most, but how we can profit the most."