vation policies is that the privileges of the
few may continue to obstruct the rights of the many, especially in the
matter of water power and coal. Congress must decide immediately whether
the great coal fields still in public ownership shall remain so, in
order that their use may be controlled with due regard to the interest
of the consumer, or whether they shall pass into private ownership and
be controlled in the monopolistic interest of a few.

Congress must decide also whether immensely valuable rights to the use
of water power shall be given away to special interests in perpetuity
and without compensation instead of being held and controlled by the
public. In most cases actual development of water power can best be done
by private interests acting under public control, but it is neither
good sense nor good morals to let these valuable privileges pass from
the public ownership for nothing and forever. Other conservation matters
doubtless require action, but these two, the conservation of water power
and of coal, the chief sources of power of the present and the future,
are clearly the most pressing.

It is of the first importance to prevent our water powers from passing
into private ownership as they have been doing, because the greatest
source of power we know is falling water. Furthermore, it is the only
great unfailing source of power. Our coal, the experts say, is likely to
be exhausted during the next century, our natural gas and oil in this.
Our rivers, if the forests on the watersheds are properly handled, will
never cease to deliver power. Under our form of civilization, if a few
men ever succeed in controlling the sources of power, they will
eventually control all industry as well. If they succeed in controlling
all industry, they will necessarily control the country. This country
has achieved political freedom; what our people are fighting for now is
industrial freedom. And unless we win our industrial liberty, we can not
keep our political liberty. I see no reason why we should deliberately
keep on helping to fasten the handcuffs of corporate control upon
ourselves for all time merely because the few men who would profit by it
most have heretofore had the power to compel it.

The essential things that must be done to protect the water powers for
the people are few and simple. First, the granting of water powers
forever, either on non-navigable or navigable streams, must absolutely
stop. It is perfectl