er-statement, and if it is not true it certainly is unpardonable. Let
us consider the facts. Some of them are well known, and the salient ones
can be put very briefly.

The five indispensably essential materials in our civilization are wood,
water, coal, iron, and agricultural products.

We have timber for less than thirty years at the present rate of
cutting. The figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have
increased twice as fast as our population.

We have anthracite coal for but fifty years, and bituminous coal for
less than two hundred.

Our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil, and natural gas are being rapidly
depleted, and many of the great fields are already exhausted. Mineral
resources such as these when once gone are gone forever.

We have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to impoverish
and, over thousands of square miles, to destroy our farms. The
Mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than 400,000,000 tons
of the richest soil within its drainage basin. If this soil is worth a
dollar a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from
soil-wash to the farmers and forest-owners of the United States is not
far from a billion dollars a year. Our streams, in spite of the millions
of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were fifty
years ago, and the soil lost by erosion from the farms and the
deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason. The great cattle and
sheep ranges of the West, because of overgrazing, are capable, in an
average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support and
should still. Their condition affects the price of meat in practically
every city of the United States.

These are but a few of the more striking examples. The diversion of
great areas of our public lands from the home-maker to the landlord and
the speculator; the national neglect of great water powers, which might
well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon our
non-renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken from
the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and by
caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible; the disuse of the
cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves comparatively
slight demand upon our non-renewable supplies of iron ore, and the use
of the rail instead--these are other items in the huge bill of
particulars of national waste.

We have a well-marked national tendency to