acts in public office, and I would prefer that my acts in connection with my official conduct shall speak rather than my words.

I have been in the last few days conserving a great deal of Yakima dust, looking into the question of conserving the waters of the Yakima Valley. They claim in that country that they have not water enough to cover all the hills and benches and lands in that valley, but I beg to say that by the proper use of water and conservation and irrigation there is hardly an acre of land in the higher benches of that country that will not within ten years from now be using the waters of the valley. The same is true in the matter of irrigation throughout the country. What we may today be able to accomplish is not what we will be able to accomplish by the development of intelligence and the application of intelligent principles in the various vocations of life in the saving of natural resources and in the development of everything which comes to us for the benefit of the people. In the public domain are vast resources. As times have gone by great portions of natural resources have been subverted to personal interests, have been destroyed and wasted, and I say as a representative of this Government that it is the desire of the Administration as far as it is possible to limit waste and to insist upon utility and conservation.

I did not come here this afternoon prepared to deliver an address. I had no idea of being able to reach your convention before you adjourned. As trains are late and as I only left the committee on irrigation of the Senate this morning and have been for the entire week devoting my time to studying conditions in Yakima Valley, I did not anticipate being able to be with you.

May I say again that it is a source of pleasure that I have been able to meet with you, and I trust in parting

with you that this organization may be perpetuated and that whatever you do you will do practically, earnestly and profitably to the interests which you advocate.

MR. FRANCIS J. HENEY, upon being called upon for an address, said:

It gives me great pleasure to have this opportunity of addressing a few words to you today. When I was invited to speak I was informed that I would be limited to five minutes and I was inclined to say that it would take about two days and a half to tell all I wanted to tell you on this subject, but as I have only five minutes I will tell you what I think is the most important thing to be conserved.

I was very glad to hear the Secretary of the Interior express himself as he has done today. I am glad to know that he takes an interest in the work of this Congress, because I believe that the work of this Congress is the most important work that is being done in the United States today. I am glad also to assure Secretary Ballinger that we intend to judge him by his acts and not by his declarations. The American people are fast learning that that is the only way to judge any public officer. When the history of this country is written, with the history of the past seven years, Theodore Roosevelt will figure as the greatest President the United States has ever had, and all the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, each and every one, has tended to one single purpose and end, and that single purpose and end is the conservation of equal opportunities for all men. And, to my mind, while it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to conserve the forests in order that they may conserve your water, and while it is necessary to conserve your water in order that you may reclaim your desert lands, it is of far greater importance that you shall conserve the ownership of water power in all the people of the United States. We may find a substitute for oil and for wood, but we shall

never find a substitute for energy. Energy represents the essence of human labor, and whenever a man owns what corresponds to the energy of millions of men,-owns the absolute title to it,-is greater than a king; he has as his slave the equivalent of millions of men without the trouble of clothing or feeding them, and when you permit 98 per cent of all the anthracite coal east of the Mississippi River to go into the hands of one corporation you are committing stupendous folly, you are destroying the chances for equal opportunity to all men. Now in this great West, we have in these Olympic Mountains-which I also watched last night-the energies of millions upon millions of men. They call it horsepower, but the power of one horse is equal to that of many men and the power that lies over there is equivalent to the energies of millions of men; and yet we are told that it is a wise policy to permit someone to become the owner of all that energy in perpetuity. I say to you that your children and your children's children will have the right to denounce you as a set of fools who knew nothing about self-government or the preservation or conservation of equal opportunities if you permit that to happen. I am afraid I have already gone over my five minutes, but I wish to say that I think the most important of all Mr. Roosevelt's policies was that we must retain ownership; we must prevent the concentration of this enormous power which ownership carries with it in a few hands; and we must watch carefully-I had almost said our representatives when I should have said the representatives of our interests in Congress-we must watch them carefully to see that they do not by legislation permit this ownership of ours to be taken away from us; because very little of the natural resources of this country have been stolen by fraudulent methods of individuals; all the timber that was stolen in Washington, Oregon, and California by

fraud is only a drop in the bucket as compared with the amount obtained by big corporations and those to whom they sold, by legal means. The Act of 1897, which authorized the President to declare Forest Reserves. A rider was attached to that act, under the disguise of protecting the individual. It was contended that the poor homesteader would go into the forest to help build up this great State of Washington and make a little home in the hope and expectation that others would come in and do likewise, and that after a while, after the Rooseveltian policies had given him children enough to start a school, he would be isolated by having a forest reserve created around him so that no one could come and settle there. So for his protection they thought it necessary to put the rider to the Act of 1897. But instead of mentioning the homesteader, this said that any owner of land afterwards placed within a forest reserve should have the right to select other land elsewhere. The representatives of the people in Congress thought that that was a good thing for the protection of the individual. Yet what was the result? Millions upon millions of acres of worthless land belonging to railroad corporations and granted to them in alternate sections for the building of the road, were turned into forest reserves and afterwards exchanged for these magnificent timber belts of the States of Washington, Oregon, and California, and you have the ownership of these vast tracts now in the hands of these corporations. I fail to see how that tends to conserve equal opportunities to all men, and if it fails to conserve that we have failed in the very object and purpose of the Constitution of the United States. And now I know my five minutes is up. (Applause. )

MR. GIFFORD PINCHOT, upon being called on, said:

I certainly am greatly touched by your kindness, and I hardly know just what to talk about. My message, if I had

one to this convention, was given the other day, and the substance of all I can say in regard to the great cause that calls us together has already been said. And yet I cannot help being a little aroused by what Mr. Heney has just been saying. As we get to thinking about what all this means, as the subject impresses itself upon us in a thousand different ways, we always get right back to the question we were speaking about, the equality of opportunity for the plain American citizen. Now this is the situation. Mr. Heney is absolutely right when he says that this water power problem is the largest problem that confronts any body of people interested in conservation right now. There is nothing else that begins to compare with it, because in no other possible way can a few men achieve such control over a whole body of men as by owning one great, stable source of power.

Mr. Heney is my text. He said another thing I should like to have you remember. There is now being fought in the great arena of public opinion a determined fight on the water power question. The situation is such that Congress must take action either to preserve or not to preserve these powers next winter. The fight cannot be put off, it cannot be avoided; there must be a decision either one way or the other. Either these powers will continue to be grabbed as in the past without the possibility of popular control, and that will be legalized by Congress, or they will be conserved and controlled for the benefit of the people, and that will be legalized by Congress. It seems to me that there is no other question throughout the length and breadth of the land in the minds of all the people that can compare with this decision which must be made next year. It has got to be one way or the other, and will have to be made in the face of the most vigorous, adroit, persistent, and able opposition that can be imagined, because the stake is so tre