crop; and there will be no timber famine in the near or distant future. Our foresters are studying the experience of France, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland, coupled with our own experience, and we are making successful progress. In Kansas five years ago, according to President Waters of the State Agricultural College, there was only one school that taught agriculture. Now nearly five hundred high schools and more than six thousand rural schools are teaching the principles of agriculture, forestry and domestic science.

The Commissioner of Internal Revenue reports that for the official year 1912 ending June 30, the people of the United States drank more whisky and rum and smoked more cigarettes than ever before in its history. The smoking of over 11,221,000,000 cigarettes exceeded the record of 1911 by nearly two billions. Does this make for or against human efficiency? In this huge traffic is it the man or the dollar that stands first in importance? Popular education will be the source of protection, that all may have a fair chance for a useful life. There are other great factors of vice and crime leading to national decay. Also there is the enormous waste of human life by our railroads, mills, mines and factories amounting to tens of thousands annually, and those permanently injured and made a burden to themselves and to society to tens of thousands more. In no civilized country in the world is this loss anywhere near as great in proportion to work accomplished as in the United States. The greatest part of this immense loss can be prevented. (Applause.)

Here is thought and work for those in the department of vital sta tistics and those in charge of our health departments, who are laboring for the conservation of human life. Surely there is a great moral and economic need for this national organization. May this Congress, which now begins the work of its program, prove to be another step in advance of its predecessors in the labor of love and of progressive activities. The work in this vineyard is for both men and women; for him with one talent as well as for him with ten talents. Conservation should be taught in our schools and preached in our churches. It is a call of and for all the people.

In the language of the official call of this Congress, the objects of this Congress are "to provide for discussion of the resources of the United States as the foundation for the prosperity of the people; to furnish definite information concerning the resources and their development, use and preservation, and to afford an agency through which the people of the country may frame policies and principles affecting the conservation and utilization of their resources and to be put into effect by their representatives in State and Federal governments." (Applause.)

President WHITE-The preliminary organization has now been completed. It was expected that the President of the United States would

be present to honor this occasion, at the opening of this Congress, or it was at least hoped that it would be possible for him to do so, but before he knew that he would send a personal representative he wrote a letter of greeting to the Congress, which I will now read:

MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT.

Beverly, Mass., September 7, 1912. Hon. J. B. White, President National Conservation Congress, Bemus Point, N. Y.:

My Dear Mr. White: Inasmuch as I have had to deny myself the pleasure of being present at the opening of the National Conservation Congress on October 1st, I want to take this means of conveying to the officers and delegates my very cordial greetings and good wishes for a most enthusiastic and instructive session.

You who know of my very real interest in the conservation of our national resources need no assurance of my hope that your meeting in every way may be a success, and I only want to say that that interest has not diminished in the slightest.

May your deliberations be productive of great geod in promoting the cause of Conservation and in enlisting public interest in the solution of the problems which must be met in giving the people of the present day the benefit of the nation's resources, while at the same time insuring to posterity its full heritage.

Sincerely yours,

WILLIAM H. TAFT.

It was afterwards found possible for the President to be represented personally, and he has sent the Honorable Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, to represent him here at this Congress. I now take pleasure in introducing to you Secretary Stimson. (Applause.)

ADDRESS BY THE SECRETARY OF WAR.

(Representing the President of the United States.)

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Conservation Congress: I unite very sincerely in the congratulations which the former speakers have tendered to you on your assembling here in such an important and such a noble cause.

I am very happy to be here as the representative of President Tafthappy, both because of the interest which I know he feels in the great movement for Conservation, and also because of my own personal association with and enthusiasm for that movement. Four days ago, when I was busily engaged in inspecting one of the army posts of northern Wyoming, in the far away Rocky Mountains, I received an urgent tele

graphic request from the President, that I should come here today and attend your meeting on his behalf. And the 1,600 miles or more which separate Fort Yellowstone from Indianapolis, may serve at the same time as a measure of the President's interest in your meeting, and a measure of the depth of my own unpreparedness to speak to you today. I know, therefore, that you will understand and pardon me if I talk to you rather informally, merely as one friend to others interested in a great common cause, and confine the brief remarks which I shall make to one of the phases of Conservation with which I have become familiar through the work of the War Department.

Parenthetically, I might say that inasmuch as the Department of War is not usually considered as a particularly appropriate agency for the conservation of life, I will have to hark back to the material side of Conservation in some of its aspects which have been presented at your former meetings.

Of course, the main work which the Federal Government performs in regard to Conservation is done through the Department of the Interior. Incidentally, the truest of all indications of the interest with which the President regards the conservation of the natural resources of this country lies in the character and attainments of the man whom he has placed at the head of that Department in order to conserve them-Walter L. Fisher. (Applause.) You will all of you remember how his thorough investigation and clear-cut decision of the famous Cunningham claims, has settled and disposed of, in the interest of the people, one of the most bitter controversies of our cause. You are also undoubtedly familiar with the careful investigation which he made last year into the very complicated and serious problems of conservation which confront our Nation in Alaska; and with the luminous address with which he reported his conclusions and pointed out a solution of these questions. Though the work of his Department in investigating and conserving in the public interest, the water power sites which remain on our public lands, and our remaining beds of coal and phosphate, has not attracted so much attention as his work in these former more controverted matters; yet there is, I think, a very general and well founded feeling throughout the country that in all these matters the interests of the people of the United States are being thoroughly protected by the Secretary of the Interior in accordance with the most intelligent and thorough views of Conservation. (Applause.)

I allude to his method of thorough investigation because I think it is characteristic of the attitude of the President himself toward this whole. subject. In order that progress should be real, it must be based upon carefully ascertained facts. In dealing with the problems of Conservation, we are dealing with problems which are new to our Nation. As the honorable speaker who first addressed you pointed out, we have only

recently passed from an era of exploitation into an era of Conservation. We are surrounded by thousands of our fellow countrymen who have been brought up to honestly believe that the only method of developing the country is to turn its resources as rapidly as possible over into private hands. In putting into effect, therefore, the new policy to which the Nation has now come, there must be care taken lest false steps, or the injustice which may come from hasty action, may not produce a reaction which will delay or imperil the reform. As a former District Attorney, representing the people in the enforcement of the law, I have long had it impressed upon me how essential it was that no hasty, or harsh, or intolerant action, taken in the heat and controversy of a jury trial, should thereafter imperil the entire work and by producing injustice, and a subsequent reversal in the higher courts, bring some great reform into disrepute or temporary delay. Patience, thoroughness, and courage, mark the only pathway towards permanent progress and reform. (Applause.)

Now, the subject which I am going to call to your attention briefly this morning is one of those few matters where my own Department, instead of the Department of the Interior, touches upon the problems of national Conservation. It is also a subject the history of which, I think, exemplifies clearly the importance of the methods to which I have just. alluded. I wish to point out to you the attitude of the administration as to the Federal regulation of water power in our navigable rivers.

It is needless to remind such a body as yours of the importance of that sphere of Conservation. All our other present sources of powersuch as coal, wood, oil, and the like are limited, and will be eventually exhausted. Water power alone is permanent. And just as we are coming to learn more and more the value of that permanence, we are simultaneously, through the development of electricity, learning to transmit its energy to greater and greater distances. No other subject occupied more keenly the attention of the past session of Congress, or was more vigorously debated upon the floors of that body.

For many years our national policy, or rather lack of national policy, towards our waterways and our water power, has presented a singular inconsistency. On the other hand, we have been spending hundreds of millions of the taxpayers' money on the improvement of the navigation of our great inland waterways. On the other, we have been granting away permits for the construction of dams on these same rivers and waterways, which will create waterpower of incalculable and increasing value; and we have been doing this without exacting for the taxpayers any return or compensation whatever.

I believe it was not until the administration of President Roosevelt that any effort was made to obtain for the public any compensation for the water power which was thus granted away. Mr. Roosevelt demanded

in his veto of the James River bill, and in several other messages, that no permits for dams in navigable rivers should be granted without a reservation of proper compensation to the public for the grant thus made. His action was courageous and right. But there were not as yet in the Eands of the public sufficient carefully ascertained facts upon which the constitutional power of the Federal Government to take such action could be confidently based. And there was therefore great ground for misapprehension in the public mind of any action attempting to take such a position. A bitter controversy at once arose with those advocates of States' rights, who contended that the Federal Government had no rights whatever in connection with water power, that under the Constitution its powers were limited solely to navigation, and that water power was an entirely separate and distinct sphere, falling wholly within the jurisdietion of the several States. Such advocates contended that for the Fedcral Government to exact compensation for a water power right, simply because it was in a position to withhold the permit altogether if it wanted to, was little better than legalized blackmail; and the progress of the reform was stubbornly and for a long time successfully contested.

Even as late as 1906, the General Dam Act, passed by Congress and approved by the President, conveys to the Executive no clear right to exact compensation for these grants. It has remained for Mr. Taft's administration, following the method of patient investigation and research which I have above mentioned, to collect the facts necessary to solve the problem; and to show from these facts that the jurisdiction of the Federal Government over navigation must necessarily include jurisdiction over water power as an incident of the navigation.

Most of the rivers of this country are long and comparatively shallow. in order to make them commercially navigable, there has become prevalent among engineers a method of improve ent known as the "slack water" method or the method of "canalization." The method consists in building throughout the length of these rivers, a series of dams and locks, by which the river is converted into a succession of deep pools, adequate for commerce of a far more important character than could use the river in its unimproved condition. In fact, many rivers which are not capable in their natural state of being used at all commercially, cau by this method be made useful and available for important commerce.

Now, most of the dams thus constructed in a "slack water" improvement, particularly in the rapid portions of the streams, will create water power of commercial value. It is also manifest that if the commercial value of the water power thus created can be realized by the Government and turned into further river improvement, the improvement of navigation on our rivers can be greatly expedited, and the expense to the general taxpayer very much lessened. And, on the contrary, unless this is done, the complete improvement of the river will be just so much delayed