we should be able to take honesty for
granted. What we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes
great enterprises succeed. The national house-keeping, the Government's
vast machinery, should he the cleanest, the most effective, and the best
in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the Nation at
every point is constant and vital.

There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are
more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of
land. Under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by
obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in
the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question
whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants
under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or
free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance
of the decision.

We have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether
the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has
followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by
protecting the timberlands we shall assure the prosperity of all of the
users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply.
Nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the
country is in the balance. No other conservation question compares with
this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national
life.

Other great questions only less vital I cannot even refer to, but one of
the central ones remains--our whole future is at stake in the education
of our young men in politics and public spirit. The greatest work that
Theodore Roosevelt did for the United States, the great fact which will
give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone
to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in
settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in
business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the attitude of
the American people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward
public questions and public life. The time was, not long ago, when it
was not respectable to be interested in politics. The time is coming,
and I do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable
not to be interested in public affairs. Few changes can mean so much.

Among the first duties of every