# Our Common Country/Chapter 10

What a wonderful land is ours! No one has ever come to a full realization of the incomparableness of these United States. Nature has been very generous with her bounty and has given us, in the great and measureless West a variegated and picturesque empire as beautiful as Switzerland, multiplied many times over in extent, and with a diversification of industry and enterprise which Switzerland could not develop because her mountains are well nigh barren of the riches which characterize the Rockies and the Coast ranges.
Some day, perhaps, we shall come to an ​appraisal of the mountain West and shall learn something about its contents in coal, copper, iron, gold and silver, and almost every useful mineral deposit; but these are not all; because the mountain West is rich in forests, and lakes of potash, and vast deposits of phosphates, and possesses almost measureless areas that need only water to make them blossom like a garden of Eden; and the water is available and needs only the genius and the courage and capacity of man to apply it practically. People of the United States contemplate the wonderful West from varying view-points. In the East, the tendency is to think of it only as a wonderland, but those of the West, who have seen it from the intimate view-point, not only find unbounded interest in its possibilities, but want to sense the pride in its development.
We have come to an era when further development, attended by both reclama​tion and conservation, which go hand in hand, is an important and urgent problem. The world has always had a struggle to provide its food. In the practical development of the United States, we must ever continue the enlargement of the available food supply. Industrial development in the cities and agricultural development have gone more or less in harmony, because the one is absolutely essential to the other. Basically, we must be sure of our food supply first. The development of the Mississippi Basin was contemporaneous with the development of our wonderful American cities, and the marvel of American development began immediately after the Civil War. In that conflict we made certain of indissoluble union and put an end to all doubts in the Federal Constitution and then turned to expanded settlement and development with full confidence in the future.
When the Union armies were dispersed, ​farms in the West were made available to tens of thousands of the defenders of union and nationality, the central plains were awaiting, almost untouched, and out of them were builded a dozen splendid commonwealths. There is a partially analogous situation now. There is an undeveloped mountain West awaiting the touch of genius and industry and there are doubtless thousands of service men who would be glad to turn to this most desirable development very much as service men did in the after period of the Civil War. There are, of course, differences in condition, and the mountain lands are not so ready to answer man's call as were the prairies; but with a helpful policy on the part of government these lands can be made available for limitless contributions to the sustenance of the Republic and the compensation of those who participate in developing them.
It does not matter whether one thinks ​that agriculture is the inspiration of great cities and their supporting industrial areas, or whether one believes that agriculture is inspired and encouraged by the necessities of the industrial centers—they are, in fact, interdependent, and the fortune of one is inseparably linked with the fortune of the other. One thing is very certain, that intensive industrial development and the concentration of population in cities can not go on unless we have an expansion of the food supply upon which they depend for sustenance.
It is fairly contended that the American expansion of agriculture has had a very considerable part to play in the development of the great industrial centers of the Old World, as well as the magic building of our own. Nottingham and Manchester, Dusseldorf and Berlin, Turin and Barcelona, are almost as much concerned with the size of the American food surplus as are our own great cities.
​When all else is said, the fact still remains that all human endeavor must be assured of an ample food supply else nothing is to be accomplished. It is not to be said that we have outlived the world's capacity to produce a surplus of agricultural products, but, confessedly, we have got out of a properly-balanced proportion in the development of our agricultural supply. Much of the world, of course, remains undeveloped. It is said that the plains of Siberia, or the productive tropics, could accommodate the world's population with an abundance of food, but the trouble is that the great, virile, progressive peoples of the world are not inclined to live in Siberia, nor are they attracted to the tropics. As a matter of simple truth they lose the distinct activity and aggressiveness when taken out of the zones of present-day activity.
It is perfectly useless to talk about transplanting populations. The practical ​tasks of life are to make old Mother Earth contribute to the call of population wherever it may be located. Thus transportation becomes the key to the problem of supply.
The inter-mountain and Pacific West is endowed with riches known to no other region of the world. We came to a new appreciation of these riches during the anxieties of the World War. Necessity and a new realization of self-dependence led us to appraise the vast deposits of phosphates and the lakes of potash and the mines of tungsten, and we revived the production of silver and added to the output of lead and copper, because the warring world had no other such dependable supply. We turned to the abundance of spruce for our aeroplanes, and the rare metals for alloys, and we found the limitless abundance of coal and used it to bunker the shipping of the Pacific. We increased the supply of the long staple ​cotton, and of wool, and of meats and fruits. Whatever it was that the world greatly needed and was listed in our own necessities, we discovered a goodly and reassuring share of it in the vast storehouse of the almost untouched natural resources of the great West.
During the war we made a good deal of progress toward development of these resources, because the war made rapid and intensive effort necessary. But with the end of the war there came a tendency to slacken development. We find that some things were started, and then neglected or forgotten. With correct vision of a long future, contemplating continued growth, we might well recognize that to this inter-mountain empire we must turn for the same service as that rendered by our central plains when they were brought into productivity following the Civil War.
Our vision, then, of the ultimate devel​opment of the mountain empire, reveals a great region, developed uniformly, with regard to all its variegated possibilities. I have never been able to think of "reclamation" as connoting merely the construction of ditches, and dams, and reservoirs, to put water on dry lands. In my view this has been only a phase—though a most important phase—of reclamation. I have believed that our mountain West is one day to be one of the richest and most completely self-contained economic areas in the world. My vision of the future pictures it as a wonderland whose streams are harnessed to great electrical units, from which flows the power to drive railway trains, to operate industries, to carry on the public utilities of cities, to smelt the metals, and to energize the activities of a teeming population.
Not long ago, a great journal of the South published an interview in which I attempted to suggest my hope and aspira​tion for the new South as a developed, renewed and finished community, based on the proper and complete utilization of all its opportunities. I have a similar thought about the possibilities of the mountain West. The "Great American Desert" disappeared out of our minds and geographies long ago, but we have retained the impression that our Rocky Mountain area could never sustain populations and industries comparable with those of the central valley, or the East, or the South. This has done injustice to the Far West. The richness of its mountains, the power of its streams, the productivity of its valleys, the variety of its climate and opportunity, the possibility of its dry areas, all suggest its destiny to become the seat of an ideal civilization.
I undertake to say that there is no region in all the world whose resources could be developed to the utmost, with greater benefit to the world as a whole, ​and America in particular, than our mountain West.
It requires no effort of imagination to contemplate, a few generations hence, our country as a land of from two hundred to three hundred million people, with a third of them happily planted in this area.
We have come to the time when the problem of our Far West is one of wisely directed development, rather than of too much conservation, or, perhaps, to put the thought more accurately, the bringing about of a degree and character of development which will constitute the wise form of conservation. One can not go on saving all of nature's bounty and be fair to the generations of to-day. I do not mean that the time has come to break recklessly into our treasure house and squander its contents; but I do decidedly mean that we can not longer delay encouragement and assistance to rational, natural and becoming development. We ​must have that far-western awakening which shall prove an effective corrective of the concentration of population and the regional specialization of industry which has been repeatedly called to our attention and has inclined to make of us a sectional America.
Conservation, it must always be kept in mind, does not consist in locking up the treasure house of our natural resources. That would be the most objectionable form of waste. Conservation, in its truest sense, consists in the judicious use of the resources which are ours. The conservation policy in its application to coal is not the same as in its application to the forest. Coal, once it is taken from the earth, can never be replaced; the forests, by proper care and attention, may be made to yield a never-ending return. The conservation policy, as applied to rivers and streams, presents still another phase, since the tree which we leave standing in ​the forest, and the coal we leave lying in the mine, remain for the use of those who may come later on, while the water which flows unused to the sea is lost beyond reclaim. It is impossible, by the utmost utilization of our flowing waters, to affect to the extent of a single drop, the automatic and eternal replenishment at the source. Emphatically, therefore, in the case of our water-power resources, there is not even a seeming paradox in saying that the more we use the more do we save.
The only problem in the conservation of waters is to see to it religiously that this great inheritance of the people is not monopolized for private enrichment, and of this there can be little danger if the state—and the nation, when it has the jurisdiction—shall wisely exercise the powers of regulation which it possesses in respect to all public utilities.
In a somewhat different manner, the same principle will apply to our other ​natural resources. Emphasis must be placed upon their use rather than upon their storage, only it must be a use which, while providing for the present needs, must keep an ever watchful guard upon their preservation for the need of generations yet to come.
Theodore Roosevelt had a clear vision of the vast possibilities of our West. In a chapter of his autobiography devoted to "Natural Resources of the Nation," he says: "The first work I took up when I became president was the work of reclamation." In his view, reclamation, conservation and proper utilization, were all parts of the same program. That must be our view to-day. "It is better for the government to help a poor man to make a living for his family, than to help a rich man to make more profit for his company," declared President Roosevelt. This he laid down as one of the principles upon which he based his policy toward ​public land areas. The principle is particularly sound to-day. We have need to make these areas the seat of millions of new American families, just as we broke up our prairies and distributed them among strong, enterprising, vigorous men who developed them into the great states of the Mississippi Valley.
We must make our mountain West a country of homes for people who need homes. It has everything that they will need. It can provide them with food, with the materials for industry, with lumber from its forests, with metals and minerals from its mines, with power from its streams, and waters for the irrigation of its land. And the work must be so done that it will inure most to the advantage of society and the development of the independent, self-sustaining family unit in our citizenship. There must be proper cooperation and direction in this development, but there must be all care to ​prevent monopolization of resources and opportunities.
It has been intimated by some who take, I feel, the narrow view, that the industry of the East, and the agriculture of the Middle West and South, will not view favorably the proposal to develop new industry and new agriculture in the mountain country to compete with them. I confess to very little sympathy with this attitude. The sons of New York and New England built the great states of the Ohio Valley; and the sons of the Ohio Valley reared the splendid commonwealths beyond the Mississippi. The sons of every generation, in our country, have been the pioneers of some new land.
Well do I remember the covered-wagon days of the early seventies, when the resolute sons of Ohio took up the westward journey. They had little more of valued possession than unalterable determination to start afresh and be participants in ​the development of the wonderful land awaiting their coming. They wrought their full part in the miracle of development and gave an added glow to the westward march of the star of empire. Many who went were those who had found new soul of citizenship in the preservation of union and nationality; and it is not impossible that thousands of those who battled to maintain American rights in the world will be eager to participate in the development of the wonderland we are considering to-day. We owe to them the fullest and widest opportunities, and we owe it to them to give of government encouragement and aid in bringing about the development so much to be desired. For them and for America inestimable possibilities are in store.
To-day we are informed on the basis of statistics that if the demands of a rapidly-increasing population are to be met, new farms must be opened at the rate of one ​hundred thousand annually. The sad fact is that only half that number are being added to our equipment for production every year. The United States has changed, from a basically agricultural to an agricultural and industrial nation. The 1920 statistics, we are told, show that our population is preponderantly urban. More food-stuffs must be had; farms now operating will not supply present demands. The one solution is to bring more land into production.
Reclamation, as I have viewed it, means a good deal more than merely putting water on arid land. There are regions in which it means draining the water away from swamps. There are other regions in which it means restoring forests that have been thoughtlessly destroyed. There are still others in which it means frank recognition of the fact that forests have gone forever, that stumps must be removed and the land utilized for agriculture.
​Nobody wants isolated communities of agricultural producers in remote reclaimed valleys, to produce things for which there is no available market. There have been some instances of this sort. But with better transportation, with encouragement to wide and varied development, the problem of markets will solve itself rapidly enough.
In dealing with our public lands hereafter we are not to be too profligate in the disposal of their resources. There has been profligacy practised in the past, though I take it that some of it was entirely justifiable, but there must be no further doling out of natural resources to favored groups. We have passed the stage when there must be exceptional bidding for pioneer development. It was against profligacy that Roosevelt raised his voice and exercised the veto power. He started the great reclamation movement and it came none too soon. Doubt​less he had in mind the time when these resources must be opened for free, full and independent development. Undoubtedly, if he were alive to-day, he would be a cordial sympathizer with the same policy of development combined with a rational policy of conservation of resources for Americans yet to come, all of which is consonant with square dealing with all Americans engaged in the fulfillment of our obligations of to-day.
It is all a forward-looking program with an ever mindfulness of the passing day. The great change in our whole economic situation, and the realization that our opportunities of providing for increased population have a definite limit, must enforce this view. Roosevelt performed a great service to the nation, and what he did for his time we must carry forward to the future. I would not have the West return to the era of speculative operations, tending to monopolies. ​I want to see, as he did, a development of our public land country which will insure the utmost equality of privilege and opportunity.
In some places private capital, in others public funds can best do the work that is required. I have no particular preference for either program, except that I would like to see in each instance the policy that will on the whole best serve the national purpose. I would not hesitate to employ federal credit for certain types of reclamation work, and on the other side I would not stand in the way of having that work done by private enterprise, if this seemed best.
Western states desirous of cooperating with the federal government in reclamation contemplate enactment of uniform laws to aid in financing reclamation work in conjunction with the federal plan of impounding waters. Lack of unified effort and policy has been a misfortune in ​the past, and the time has come for a fixed and comprehensive program.
In broadest contemplation, we must keep in mind the thing which inspires all of our activities. I have an abiding conviction that American nationality has been the inspiration from the beginning. We found that inspiration renewed and magnified when we made sure of indissoluble union and started afresh for the supreme American fulfillment. The impelling thought now is to go on as Americans, free and independent and self-reliant, to make the United States a great Republic, unafraid and confident of its future and rejoicing in American accomplishment.