profess religion, or sincerely believe in the Deity, the
designer and maker of this world and of every living thing,
as well as all lovers of Nature, should treat the wanton and
brutal destruction of living things and of forests as among
the first of forbidden sins. In his own words, "All the
works of Nature, animate or inanimate, should be invested
with a certain sanctity, to be used by us but not abused,
and never to be recklessly destroyed or defaced. To pollute
a spring or a river, to exterminate a bird or a beast,
should be treated as moral offences and as social crimes.
Never before has there been such widespread ravage of the
earth's surface by the destruction of vegetation, and with
it, animal life, and such wholesale defacement of the earth.
The nineteenth century saw the rise and development and
culmination of these crimes against God and man. Let us hope
that the twentieth century will see the rise of a truer
religion, a purer Christianity." I have condensed what Mr.
Wallace said because it is too long to quote in full. He
shows that this wanton and brutal defacement of Nature, this
annihilation of the natural resources that should be part of
the National capital of our children and children's
children, this destruction of so much that is beautiful and
grand, goes hand in hand with the sordid selfishness which
is responsible for so very much of the misery of our
civilization. The movement for the conservation of our
natural resources, for the protection of our forests and of
the wild life of the woods, the mountains and the coasts, is
essentially a democratic movement. Democracy, in its
essence, means that a few people shall not be allowed for
their own selfish gratification, to destroy what ought to
belong to the people as a whole. The men who destroy our
forests for their own immediate pecuniary benefit, the men
who make a lifeless desert of what were once coasts teeming
with a wonderfully varied bird life, these, whether rich or
poor, and their fellows in destruction of every type, are
robbing the whole people, are robbing the citizens of the
future of their natural rights. Over most of the United
States, over all of South Africa and large portions of
Canada, this destruction was permitted to go on to the
bitte