science in these matters that the blame--if blame there be--cannot be
laid on one group more than on the other. Strange it is, however, that
we should not have insisted at least that those who appropriate the
accumulations of the earth should complete their work, cleaning up the
remainders, leaving the areas wholesome, inoffensive, and safe. How many
and many are the years required to grow a forest and to fill the pockets
of the rocks, and how satisfying are the landscapes, and yet how
desperately soon may men reduce it all to ruin and to emptiness, and
how slatternly may they violate the scenery!

All this habit of destructiveness is uneconomic in the best sense,
unsocial, unmoral.

Society now begins to demand a constructive process. With care and with
regard for other men, we must produce the food and the other supplies in
regularity and sufficiency; and we must clean up after our work, that
the earth may not be depleted, scarred, or repulsive.

Yet there is even a more defenseless devastation than all this. It is
the organized destructiveness of those who would make military
domination the major premise in the constitution of society,
accompanying desolation with viciousness and violence, ravaging the holy
earth, disrespecting the works of the creator, looking toward
extirpation, confessing thereby that they do not know how to live in
co-operation with their fellows; in such situations, every new implement
of destruction adds to the guilt.

In times past we were moved by religious fanaticism, even to the point
of waging wars. To-day we are moved by impulses of trade, and we find
ourselves plunged into a war of commercial frenzy; and as it has behind
it vaster resources and more command of natural forces, so is it the
most ferocious and wasteful that the race has experienced, exceeding in
its havoc the cataclysms of earthquake and volcano. Certainly we have
not yet learned how to withstand the prosperity and the privileges that
we have gained by the discoveries of science; and certainly the morals
of commerce has not given us freedom or mastery. Rivalry that leads to
arms is a natural fruit of unrestrained rivalry in trade.

Man has dominion, but he has no commission to devastate: And the Lord
God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to
keep it.

Verily, so bountiful hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn
from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if