re that
the people should retain and exercise control of water-power monopoly on
navigable as on non-navigable streams. If the difficulties are greater,
then the danger that the water powers may pass out of the people's hands
on the lower navigable parts of the streams is greater than on the upper
non-navigable parts, and it may be harder, but in no way less necessary,
to prevent it.

It must be clear to any man who has followed the development of the
Conservation idea that no other policy now before the American people is
so thoroughly democratic in its essence and in its tendencies as the
Conservation policy. It asserts that the people have the right and the
duty, and that it is their duty no less than their right, to protect
themselves against the uncontrolled monopoly of the natural resources
which yield the necessaries of life. We are beginning to realize that
the Conservation question is a question of right and wrong, as any
question must be which may involve the differences between prosperity
and poverty, health and sickness, ignorance and education, well-being
and misery, to hundreds of thousands of families. Seen from the point of
view of human welfare and human progress, questions which begin as
purely economic often end as moral issues. Conservation is a moral issue
because it involves the rights and the duties of our people--their
rights to prosperity and happiness, and their duties to themselves, to
their descendants, and to the whole future progress and welfare of this
Nation.

CHAPTER VIII

PUBLIC SPIRIT

Violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own
remedies. They grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and
usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs.
But the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of
importance. The quiet turning point, reached and passed often with
slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less
decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld
in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical
character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can
say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was
actually accomplished.

The United States has been in the midst of such a period of decision
since the Spanish War called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and
we are still face to face with questions