such leases to be in such amounts and subject to such regulations as to prevent monopoly and needless waste; and that in case of doubt as to availability of such mineral deposits, or while they are waiting exploration, surface rights to the land should be transferred by lease only under such conditions as to promote development and protect the public interest. Natural and manufactured fertilizing materials should be limited and regulated by law.

Since present conditions in the mining industry result in heavy and unnecessary loss of life and great waste of natural gas, coal and other mineral resources, we call to public attention the need of specific and uniform laws for the betterment of these conditions-laws as rigid and comprehensive as we enact for the protection of life and for the right use of property in any other fundamental industry.

WATER POWER.

We reaffirm the previously expressed belief of the Conservation Congress than all parts of every drainage basin are related and inter-dependent, and that each stream should be regarded and treated as a unit from its source to its mouth.

Recognizing the vast economic benefits to the people of water power derived largely from inter-state and navigable rivers, we favor public control of their water power development; and we demand that the use of their water rights be permitted only for limited periods, with just compensation in the interests of the people.

COUNTRY LIFE.

We applaud the betterment of conditions affecting country life, such as good roads, and organizations for co-operative buying and selling; and we urge the study of rural credit systems whereby the farmer may more easily borrow capital at a reasonable rate of interest.

We applaud the work of making rural schools fit rural needs.

DR. W J MCGEE.

We here place on record our sense of the deep loss by the country through the untimely death of Dr. W J McGee, a member of a Committee of this Congress, a scientific man of broad attainment, and of the widest human sympathy, whose helpfulness in these Congresses and many similar meetings will be sadly missed.

THE EXHIBIT.

We mention with appreciation the work of the Committee on Exhibits, Mrs. Philip N. Moore, Chairman, which made the instructive health exhibit under the management of Dr. Winthrop Talbot.

We record our grateful appreciation of the hospitality and helpfulness of the State Government of Indiana, and of the City Government of Indianapolis; and of the Local Board of Managers, Mr. Richard Lieber, Chairman; of the Reception Committee, Mr. Albert E. Metzger, Chairman; of the Commercial and Industrial organizations which, through the Commercial Club, made the Congress here possible; of the State Board of Agriculture, and of the Claypool Hotel, for their helpful courtesies and generous co-operation; and we thank the newspapers of Indianapolis for their unusually generous and accurate reports.

We wish to assure the retiring President, Captain White, of the heartiest appreciation of the Congress and of the country for his generous and efficient administration of the complicated business of the Congress; and Mr. Thomas R. Shipp, the Executive Secretary, for his zealous labor and good judgment and skilful management; and Mr. James C. Gipe, the Recording Secretary, for his energy and efficiency; and Colonel John I. Martin, the Sergeant-at-arms, must add one more vote of thanks to his ever-lengthening collection.

FOURTH

NATIONAL CONSERVATION CONGRESS.

OPENING SESSION.

The Congress convened in the Murat Theater, Indianapolis, Indiana, on the morning of October 1, 1912, President J. B. White in the chair.

President WHITE-The Fourth National Conservation Congress will now come to order, and the audience will please rise while the Rev. Dr. F. S. C. Wicks invokes Divine blessing.

INVOCATION.

Infinite and Eternal One, we would open our Congress with an acknowledgment of Thee as the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Thou hast placed us in a rich and fertile land, teeming with the things needful for Thy children, and Thou hast laid upon us the great responsibility of conserving these resources so that these blessings will extend to our children's children and to all generations forevermore. To Thee be all the praise and the glory. Amen.

ADDRESSES OF WELCOME.

President WHITE-On behalf of the State of Indiana, your fellow citizen, the Honorable Charles Warren Fairbanks, will address the Congress in words of welcome. (Applause.)

Mr. FAIRBANKS-Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Indiana has frequently been honored by the presence of conventions of national importance. Our countrymen, engaged in various and vast pursuits and in the consideration of a large variety of questions, religious, social, fraternal, economic and political in their character, have assembled here from time to time to take counsel together with respect to the subjects. engaging their particular attention, and to the advancement of our common welfare.

Our State has a hospitality for all who are engaged in promoting the moral, material and political well-being of our rapidly multiplying millions. I will not be misunderstood, I know, when I say that we have never more heartily welcomed to our midst any body of men than we now welcome the Fourth National Conservation Congress. (Applause.)

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We recognize in this great assembly one of the most beneficent agencies for good which has taken on the form of systematic organization, national in its scope. It is not sectional, but is as comprehensive in its purpose as the ample limits of the Republic. It takes thought, not of the few, but embraces within its generous purpose one hundred millions of people of all conditions and without suggestion or partiality for white or black, native or alien born. How vast and how vital the field of its activities!

How full of promise such an assembly as this is! It is, Mr. Chairman, a complete answer to the pessimist. No thought of commercial gain has brought you here; a spirit of altruism, love of country and of mankind has been the impelling motive which has caused you, at your ewn expense, to leave the comforts of your homes and firesides and your daily vocations to come here and deliberate upon great themes of larger interest to the great community of which you are a part than to yourselves.

You hold no commission from the government, yet your service is of profound importance to it. You are not public servants in a narrow sense, but in a broad sense you freely serve the public in the best possible way.

The lesson of men voluntarily devoting themselves to the betterment of their fellows without the thought of sordid gain is a fine one and must impress itself in a very vivid and beneficial way upon the minds of others and tend to elevate the entire mass. What tends to impress us with our interdependence and to stimulate a feeling of homogeneity among us as this movement does is of incalculable benefit. It is a splendid thing for people to fellowship together in this manner, to take counsel of each other with reference to questions concerning the common good. It shows that we are interested more in what concerns the great body of the community than in what concerns ourselves.

General Harrison, gifted statesman and our fellow citizen, once very happily expressed the fact of the strength of confederated numbers in a good cause. He told of an engagement during the great Civil War when he was colonel of an Indiana regiment that was fighting in the midst of a woods and thicket. The enemy was pressing hard in front and fighting every inch of ground with a desperation that was unsurpassed. The Indiana regiment was feeling the shock of war in an extreme degree, and was almost on the point of discouragement. They felt they were fighting the battle alone. But in the course of time, as they emerged into a savannah, they saw a New York regiment, with its battle flags flying to the breeze; and over there another regiment from Kansas, and a shout of victory went up all along the line, for they found they were not a mere detachment, but part of a great army fighting for

a common cause.

So it is a fine thing to feel that we are part of a great army fighting for a common cause--for home and country, rather than detached units fighting for ourselves.

(Applause.)

Conservation is comparatively new in the vocabulary of our modern domestic economy, but it is a great word. It has come to be one of the greatest words of the human language from a practical standpoint. It is a continent-wide word in America. Conservation in some aspect of the subject touches every community, every city, every State and every individual. In other words, in a vital degree, it touches the welfare of one hundred millions of American citizens. Its importance is just beginning to be appreciated. Great today, but greater tomorrow in the progress of affairs. (Applause.)

A good Providence endowed us so abundantly with the prime necessities of our being that we have not fully realized the fact that there was either a possibility or danger of dissipating them. We were wont to boast of our inexhaustible resources. Nature has been prodigal, and we have been prodigal in the use and abuse of what she had so gener ously placed at our hands.

The forests-how vast and how majestic! We were obliged to fell them for the plow and the harvest, and for homes and cities. We came to look upon them as in our way-obstructions to our progress, as in a certain sense they were, but in a large way they were not. And we carried the work of demolition to the danger point before we realized our mistake. What nature had been centuries creating for us we frequently recklessly destroyed in a day.

The soil, the primary source of human life and strength, was rich beyond compare. In the laboratory of nature the chemical elements had been so nicely compounded that, to use a familiar simile, the farmer had only to tickle the land with a hoe and it laughed with the harvest. In time, Mother Earth began to resent neglect and abuse, and the crop vield diminished; but that mattered little to the unthinking, for there were still vast areas of virgin soil and the food supply was adequate to our needs. In the course of time, however, there were no unoccupied lands to be pre-empted, no fresh soil for the asking.

MILLIONS COME TO OUR SHORES.

Millions of men and women flocked to our shores every ten years from every land beyond the seas, seeking home and opportunity; millions every decade were added to our population at home by natural increase. Students of statistics came to realize that in the face of an increasing demand for food supply at home, regardless of the millions in the Old World dependent upon our granaries, soil exhaustion was a subject of very vital importance, a crime, if you please, not by the