Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [309]
Allowing for a few invitees not showing, and excluding a constant influx and egress of senators and congressmen, the Governors’ Conference totaled some 360 persons. The “Syllabus” prepared for its guidance by WJ McGee intimidatingly comprised ninety-five aspects of conservation, preservation, and planned exploitation under eleven headings: Mineral Fuels, Ores and Related Materials, Soil, Forests, Sanitation, Reclamation, Land Laws, Grazing and Stock Raising, Relations Between Rail and Water Transportation, Navigation, Power, and Conservation as a National Policy.
“The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land,” intoned old Edward Everett Hale, the Chaplain of the Senate, “a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness. Thou shall not lack anything in it—a land where stones are iron and out of whose hills thou mayest dig copper.”
Roosevelt delivered the opening address.
You have come hither at my request, so that we may join together to consider the question of the conservation and use of the great fundamental sources of wealth of this Nation. So vital is this question, that for the first time in our history the chief executive officers of the states separately, and of the states together forming the Nation, have met to consider it. It is the chief material question that confronts us, second only—and second always—to the great fundamental questions of morality.
Applause filled the room. Three days of serious discussion were only just beginning, yet already Roosevelt and Dr. Hale had sounded the conference’s keynote and pedal point: that the natural endowment was a gift of God, and that utilitarianism must be subject to human and spiritual constraints.
Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world’s resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature. Lacking that, he also lost his foresight, and unwittingly depleted the inheritances of his children. “We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.”
Further applause interrupted the President. In the elegantly printed little program every guest had been issued, his speech bore the title: Conservation as a National Duty.
He reviewed the energy policy of the United States from the days of General Washington, when “anthracite coal was known only as a useless black stone” and water was practically the only source of power outside human and animal exertion. Ignorant though Washington had been of the potentials of coal and steam, he had seen clearly that the future United States could be linked in perpetuity only by a common power network. To that end, the Father of the Country had pressed for, and brought about, an interstate waterways conference between Virginia and Maryland.
“It met,” said Roosevelt, allowing his listeners to make what comparisons they chose, “near where we are now meeting, in Alexandria, adjourned to Mount Vernon, and took up the consideration of interstate commerce by the only means then available, that of water; and the trouble we have since had with the railways has been mainly due to the fact that naturally our forefathers could not divine that the iron road would become the interstate and national highway, instead of the old route by water.” Washington’s conference had led to another, much greater one in Philadelphia, involving all the states, that “was in its original conception merely a waterways conference; but when they had closed their deliberations, the