Elk City mining news. (Elk City, Idaho) 1903-1913, 1910-09-15
PRESIDENT TAFT'S UNDERSTAND
ING OF CONSERVATION.

ING OF CONSERVATION.
At the meeting of the Conservation
Congress, at st. Paul, last week, Presi-
dent Taft delivered two addresses which
made it plain that he was in complete
control of the subject. In commenting
on the addresses the Lewiston Tribune
says:
Comparisons are usually odious and
are besides generally useless, since the
only comparison that counts is that
which each makes for himself and not
that which someone else makes for him.
1t will be found though, we believe,
that President Taft knows more about
conservation, in its essential relations,
than Roosevelt and Pinchot put
together, because they seem to ignore
facts and conditions while President
Taft is combining himself to facts and
conditions. This leads him to say that
the newness of the problems to be met
is such that we may have to attempt
first one way and then another. The
Roosevelt-Pinchot dogma has resented
any such sane conclusion and demands
that it's way, and no othec, be SUBMIT
ed to. From this one contrast alone
self governing citizens can determine
which is the wise counselor and the safe
magistrate.
President Taft throws a new light
on the power-site entanglements. The
states own the streams and the national
power owns the adjacent lands, neither
of which is available for generative
purposes without the other. The pre-
vailing proposal has been to tie up the
lands under a lease-hold that would
carry with it requirements as to the
use of the product from the water.
such an indirect control over the state S
sovereign right to dispose of its waters
would be valid. He suggests the diff
fculties and asks congress to surmount
them if it can. The reader must again
draw his own conclusions as to whether
President Taft is a sound and prudent
ruler in frankly facing an organic di-
lemna like that or whether he is a
mollycoddle, nature faker, and a NAL
factor of great wealth.
president Taft says there are with
in the forest reserves of the United
States 166, 200, 600 acres, but of these
%, ZOO, 600 acres belong to the states OF
to individuals. This 22,000,000 acres
we reasonably infer comprises the 18th
and Both school sections which inferred
in the states with the act of their adj
mission. The Roosevelt inchot propa-
ganda has denied the right of the states
to their school endowments granted by
congress, and for President Taft to
ignor thrifty efforts to cover back into
the NAV of the forest fires this inheri
lance of the schools will call for furthe,
laborious mental processes in determin
ing the relative character of the two
lines of political thought.
''Some, at least one, of President
Taft's proposals will not suit the west
There are plenty of other things, fol
that matter, that do not suit the west
But the fact is that the president I:
doing his best, with kindly and far see
ing eyes, to get things down to some
sort of working basis. How he is going
to come out and how the west is goins
to come out one cannot tell. There is /;
good deal to indicate how he is going K
come out, and that is the way Grover
Cleveland did, both victims of the same
sort of leadership, at TIE head of thu
same sort of ardent, impulsive and il
lusioned recruits who fancy themselvel
patriots and deliverers. Enough O.
them will be sobered and chastened be
fore the great test has come, as the.
were in the parallel days of 1896, blu
that will hardly save Taft any NOR,
than it Saved Cleveland.
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