sy for these enemies to raise
the cry of illegality, novelty, and excess of zeal. But in every
instance the Service has been fortified either by express statutes, or
by decisions of the Supreme Court and other courts, of the Secretary of
the Interior, of the Comptroller, or the Attorney-General, or by
general principles of law which are beyond dispute. If there is novelty,
it consists simply in the way these statutes, decisions, and principles
have been used to protect the public. The law officers of the Forest
Service have had the Nation for their client, and they are proud to work
as zealously for the public as they would in private practice for a fee.

So I think the ghost of illegality in the Forest Service may fairly be
laid at rest. But it is not the only one which is clouding the issues of
conservation in the public mind. Another misconception is that the
friends of conservation are trying to prevent the development of water
power by private capital. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The
friends of conservation were the first to call public attention to the
enormous saving to the Nation which follows the substitution of the
power of falling water, which is constantly renewed, for our coal, which
can never be renewed. They favor development by private capital and not
by the Government, but they also favor attaching such reasonable
conditions to the right to develop as will protect the public and
control water-power monopoly in the public interest, while at the same
time giving to enterprising capital its just and full reward. They
believe that to grant rights to water power in perpetuity is a wrongful
mortgage of the welfare of our descendants, and to grant them without
insisting on some return for value received is to rob ourselves.

I believe in dividends for the people as well as taxes. Fifty years is
long enough for the certainty of profitable investment in water power,
and to fix on the amount of return that will be fair to the public and
the corporation is not impossible. What city does not regret some
ill-considered franchise? And why should not the Nation profit by the
experience of its citizens?

There is no reason why the water-power interests should be given the
people's property freely and forever except that they would like to have
it that way. I suspect that the mere wishes of the special interests,
although they have been the mainspring of much public action for many
years, have begun to lo