Read Ebook: Proceedings [of the] fourth National Conservation Congress [at] Indianapolis October 1-4 1912 by United States National Conservation Congress

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ADDRESSES OF WELCOME.

President WHITE--On behalf of the State of Indiana, your fellow citizen, the Honorable Charles Warren Fairbanks, will address the Congress in words of welcome.

Mr. FAIRBANKS--Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Indiana has frequently been honored by the presence of conventions of national importance. Our countrymen, engaged in various and vast pursuits and in the consideration of a large variety of questions, religious, social, fraternal, economic and political in their character, have assembled here from time to time to take counsel together with respect to the subjects engaging their particular attention, and to the advancement of our common welfare.

Our State has a hospitality for all who are engaged in promoting the moral, material and political well-being of our rapidly multiplying millions. I will not be misunderstood, I know, when I say that we have never more heartily welcomed to our midst any body of men than we now welcome the Fourth National Conservation Congress.

We recognize in this great assembly one of the most beneficent agencies for good which has taken on the form of systematic organization, national in its scope. It is not sectional, but is as comprehensive in its purpose as the ample limits of the Republic. It takes thought, not of the few, but embraces within its generous purpose one hundred millions of people of all conditions and without suggestion or partiality for white or black, native or alien born. How vast and how vital the field of its activities!

How full of promise such an assembly as this is! It is, Mr. Chairman, a complete answer to the pessimist. No thought of commercial gain has brought you here; a spirit of altruism, love of country and of mankind has been the impelling motive which has caused you, at your own expense, to leave the comforts of your homes and firesides and your daily vocations to come here and deliberate upon great themes of larger interest to the great community of which you are a part than to yourselves.

You hold no commission from the government, yet your service is of profound importance to it. You are not public servants in a narrow sense, but in a broad sense you freely serve the public in the best possible way.

The lesson of men voluntarily devoting themselves to the betterment of their fellows without the thought of sordid gain is a fine one and must impress itself in a very vivid and beneficial way upon the minds of others and tend to elevate the entire mass. What tends to impress us with our interdependence and to stimulate a feeling of homogeneity among us as this movement does is of incalculable benefit. It is a splendid thing for people to fellowship together in this manner, to take counsel of each other with reference to questions concerning the common good. It shows that we are interested more in what concerns the great body of the community than in what concerns ourselves.

General Harrison, gifted statesman and our fellow citizen, once very happily expressed the fact of the strength of confederated numbers in a good cause. He told of an engagement during the great Civil War when he was colonel of an Indiana regiment that was fighting in the midst of a woods and thicket. The enemy was pressing hard in front and fighting every inch of ground with a desperation that was unsurpassed. The Indiana regiment was feeling the shock of war in an extreme degree, and was almost on the point of discouragement. They felt they were fighting the battle alone. But in the course of time, as they emerged into a savannah, they saw a New York regiment, with its battle flags flying to the breeze; and over there another regiment from Kansas, and a shout of victory went up all along the line, for they found they were not a mere detachment, but part of a great army fighting for a common cause.

So it is a fine thing to feel that we are part of a great army fighting for a common cause--for home and country, rather than detached units fighting for ourselves.

Conservation is comparatively new in the vocabulary of our modern domestic economy, but it is a great word. It has come to be one of the greatest words of the human language from a practical standpoint. It is a continent-wide word in America. Conservation in some aspect of the subject touches every community, every city, every State and every individual. In other words, in a vital degree, it touches the welfare of one hundred millions of American citizens. Its importance is just beginning to be appreciated. Great today, but greater tomorrow in the progress of affairs.

A good Providence endowed us so abundantly with the prime necessities of our being that we have not fully realized the fact that there was either a possibility or danger of dissipating them. We were wont to boast of our inexhaustible resources. Nature has been prodigal, and we have been prodigal in the use and abuse of what she had so generously placed at our hands.

The forests--how vast and how majestic! We were obliged to fell them for the plow and the harvest, and for homes and cities. We came to look upon them as in our way--obstructions to our progress, as in a certain sense they were, but in a large way they were not. And we carried the work of demolition to the danger point before we realized our mistake. What nature had been centuries creating for us we frequently recklessly destroyed in a day.

The soil, the primary source of human life and strength, was rich beyond compare. In the laboratory of nature the chemical elements had been so nicely compounded that, to use a familiar simile, the farmer had only to tickle the land with a hoe and it laughed with the harvest. In time, Mother Earth began to resent neglect and abuse, and the crop yield diminished; but that mattered little to the unthinking, for there were still vast areas of virgin soil and the food supply was adequate to our needs. In the course of time, however, there were no unoccupied lands to be pre-empted, no fresh soil for the asking.

MILLIONS COME TO OUR SHORES.

Millions of men and women flocked to our shores every ten years from every land beyond the seas, seeking home and opportunity; millions every decade were added to our population at home by natural increase. Students of statistics came to realize that in the face of an increasing demand for food supply at home, regardless of the millions in the Old World dependent upon our granaries, soil exhaustion was a subject of very vital importance, a crime, if you please, not by the statute, but by moral law; and this may be said with respect to the reckless or ignorant dissipation of all our natural resources.

We are in a very real sense trustees of the fields and forests, mines and other sources of wealth, not to use and abuse at our will, but rather to use for our own reasonable necessities and then to transmit them unimpaired, so far as possible, and if possible increased in life-sustaining power, to our children.

The importance of Conservation derives emphasis from the rapidity with which our population grows. Our cities will not only multiply in number, but their inhabitants will increase, population will become congested everywhere, and the demand upon our natural resources will be greatly increased. We have added nearly ninety millions to our population in one hundred years. One hundred years ago we were small in numbers compared with the older countries. We have outstripped all but the older empires and republics of Continental Europe. Take Russia, with her 172,000,000; take India, with 325,000,000, and China, where they are building a republic upon the ruins of an empire, with her 400,000,000, and the United States stands fourth in magnitude of population among the nations of the world, having outstripped all but these, and with the present ratio of increase, in one hundred and fifty or two hundred years we will stand not the last of these great populous countries. And what does this signify? It signifies that the great subject of Conservation that you are taking hold of with such intelligent, patriotic interest, will be the overmastering question then as it is today.

Who can put a practical limitation upon a definition of Conservation? Conservation of our natural resources does not go far enough. The public health falls within the subject of Conservation in the fullest and best sense, and that is susceptible of many subdivisions. Conservation of the minds and morals, Conservation of our political institutions--all of these and many more subjects of but little less importance engage the attention of such men as are assembled here.

I understand, Mr. Chairman, that the human side of Conservation is to receive particular emphasis in this Congress. I am glad it is so. We have been so long concerned with the physical resources that we have failed to give proper credit to really a larger aspect of Conservation. As important as is the conservation of our natural resources, far more important is the question of conserving the health, conserving the intellect, conserving the morality of the one hundred millions of people we have. I have known men who were more solicitous regarding the health of a fine horse or dog than the health of the family. I have sometimes seen ladies that had a more affectionate solicitude for a fine cat or a fine poodle than for the members of her household. We are getting beyond that. We are coming to appreciate that that greatest assets in the United States today are men and women, and we must know how to conserve them.

There is manifest and gratifying awakening upon this subject throughout the country. We have not begun to appreciate the possibilities in this field. Men of science, the microscope, the laboratory and carefully gathered and well-digested statistics have opened up a new world to our vision. Physicians and surgeons have been exploring the mysteries of the physical man and familiarizing themselves with the perils of his environment and learning how to arrest the work of his destroyer.

They have learned how to locate his worst enemies by the use of the searching eye of the microscope, enemies who destroy more thousands than those enemies who come with fleets and armies and flaunting banners. It was not the Chagres river and Culebra cut which defeated the French Company in the construction of the Panama Canal, but the mosquito.

An American physician opened up the way to the completion of this work of world-wide moment by destroying the insect which had successfully defeated the French. The white plague, which takes such tremendous toll annually, is now under siege from every quarter, and science will in due time win a new victory in removing this scourge. Better sanitation in cities, villages, schoolhouses, workshops, homes, on farms and in cities, guarding our water supply against pollution, insuring pure food and pure drugs and their better preparation, are a few of the imperative requirements of the day. And when I speak of pure food and drugs, Dr. Wiley comes to my mind. He has to do with an aspect of practical Conservation that will entitle him and his associates to perpetual remembrance in the United States.

These are all practical questions, the importance of which cannot be over-emphasized. They concern the health and happiness of many millions of people and the destiny of the Republic itself.

INDIANA NOT INDIFFERENT.

Indiana has not been indifferent to this great movement. It has taken up the work of Conservation with full appreciation of its magnitude and its direct bearing upon the present and future of the State. Our interests are so diversified that our conservationists in all branches of the movement find full opportunity for the exercise of their activities.

We have an agricultural college which is doing much to advance agriculture, horticulture, stock raising and the like along advanced lines. Farmers are being interested in the necessity of cultivation of the soil and the importance of seed selection, drainage and the like. We have farmers' short courses instituted by the college which are proving of immense value. We are conserving the health of the livestock upon the farms. Sanitation has played an important part in this branch of work, as it has upon the human side.

We have a board of forestry supported by the State, and a Forestry Association organized by the people; also a commission to protect the food supply of our lakes and streams. These are only a few of the evidences of our progress in Conservation.

We are conserving with particular care the health of our school children with admirable results. We have learned, somewhat slowly perhaps, that sound bodies and sound minds should and can go together, and that to educate the mind and allow the body to become diseased is false economy on the part of the State and is nothing short of a crime, committed through either our ignorance or indifference.

We have sought to guard against and cure occupational diseases which impair and disqualify so many wage earners. We have more and more sought to throw around them such safeguards as well protect them against injury and death, and then to provide an adequate measure of compensation in case of accident as one of the legitimate burdens upon industry of the community which ultimately rests upon the public.

HAVE REDUCED ACCIDENTS.

In fifteen years diphtheria has decreased sixty per cent., consumption has decreased in this same period six to eight per cent.; deaths from typhoid fever have fallen in the last two years from almost two thousand to 936 in 1911. Education, better living, improved sanitation, and an efficient State Board of Health, with its excellent organization of health officers in every locality, the co-operation of the press in the education of the people and support of our health officers, have accomplished a great work in increasing in a very considerable degree the health, vigor and happiness of our people.

The net result of it all is told in the vital statistics of the State. In the last fifteen years the duration of life has been increased from 38.7 years to 44.6 years.

We are advocating the creation of a State Conservation Board with supervisory power over all subjects of Conservation now committed to separate and independent boards or commissions, so as to more effectively co-ordinate their efforts in a scientific manner, avoiding duplication and intensifying the work. It is suggested that a building be erected by the State for the proper accommodation of the entire Conservation service.

We regard this as a matter of great importance, and there is no doubt whatever that the State will liberally respond to the prevailing sentiment in favor of broadening the work of Conservation. It never pursues any parsimonious policy in supporting whatever concerns the education, health, moral safety and welfare of our people, so far as this may be appropriately accomplished under the law.

It is not inappropriate in this presence to observe that the Conservation of our political fabric must not be left out of consideration. This is a matter we must always hold uppermost in our minds, lest we allow harm to come to our priceless heritage.

Partisan utterance would, of course, contravene good taste, and I shall not offend against it; but I may suggest with propriety that we should hold fast to the fundamental principles of republican government, which have been our guaranty of liberty and human rights and of orderly progress for a century and a quarter.

The political wisdom of our forefathers has been abundantly vindicated in our experience. Older countries in continental Europe and in the Orient are turning toward us more and more and fashioning their political institutions after ours.

We need not be quick to surrender the present well-tried guaranties we have of justice and the rights of men for theories which neither upon good reason nor upon experience are commended to our best judgement.

The program which lies before you is full of the promise of entertainment and instruction. Men of wide experience, students of our economic and social needs, will lay before you the rich fruit gathered by them in the fields of their activities. Specialists in many branches of the great work of Conservation will make you their debtors. I shall not, of course, attempt to anticipate the subjects upon which they will enlighten you.

Custom, my friends, alone has led me to make the observations in which I have indulged in extending you welcome on behalf of the State of Indiana. It is quite unnecessary to occupy your time in discharge of this pleasant duty, which but for his enforced absence would have been performed by the distinguished Governor of the State.

You would understand me, I know, if I merely said "Welcome." You would know that it was no perfunctory utterance, but that it came from the bottom of the Hoosier heart. In a sense we do not look upon you as our guests; we prefer to regard you as members of our household.

President WHITE--The thanks of the delegates, the thanks of the visitors, and the thanks of the people of the United States are due and will be given to the Hon. Charles W. Fairbanks for this most intelligent address, this statement of the principles that lie at the heart of every true conservationist. He has taken a forward step, he has led in the great movement in his own State, and he is now president of the Indiana Forestry Association.

I want to say that it is very fortunate for the people of the country that this address, and others that will follow, will be published and sent broadcast over this great land. We are going to teach the principles of conservation in every home.

It is now fitting that the next speaker should be also a conservationist--a conservationist of a different type, but no less a true conservationist, for at his hands, through his work, has come to the City of Indianapolis a reduction in fire loss from 0,000 to 0,000 annually. He is President of the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Insurance Bureau, and has practiced conservation in a most practical manner by reducing the fire loss and saving money to the people. We who have investigated that subject in Germany and other countries know how necessary it is that it should be brought home to us here in our cities and our homes. I now have the pleasure of introducing to you the Chairman of the Local Board of Managers, Mr. Richard Lieber.

Mr. LIEBER--Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is a very great pleasure and a distinguished honor to welcome you to our city upon this auspicious occasion. The City of Indianapolis deeply appreciates your coming and knows that through participation in your assemblages and deliberations it will materially profit in those matters which are of such vast and comprehensive benefit to its citizens. From here, through your able and learned speakers, potential knowledge will be disseminated throughout the length and breadth of our beloved country, which, in its application, will increase the happiness, contentment and usefulness of our people.

You have come here to consider most serious problems regarding the conservation of national wealth, more particularly that of vital resources, and above all, the conservation of human life.

For that reason, coupled with our welcome, is our expression of thanks for your coming, for "your worth is warrant of your welcome."

The thought of conservation is comparatively new. It marks a new era in the development of the country, and nowhere are its lessons more intensely needed than in a country like ours, vast in its expanse, relatively sparsely populated and apparently inexhaustible in its natural riches.

But are these riches inexhaustible? Can we go on in the manner of our fathers and forefathers, who frequently had to destroy in self defense?

Not since the days of the migration of nations, not even since the legendary days of the fall of Troy has the world witnessed anything like this stupendous conquest of a virgin continent. It is an intensified Iliad of modern days. No comparison with former ages can suffice. What are even the wondrous tales of Moses' messengers of the great land where "floweth milk and honey" compared with the gigantic proportions and abounding riches of this modern promised land?

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