second to Massachusetts in woolen and worsted goods generally, but first of all in carpets. In most leather manufactures it is pre-eminent, although surpassed by New England in boots and shoes. In glass production it is without a rival; first also in limestone, roofing slate, tiles, Portland cement, and natural gas. It ranks second in several other important products of mine and farm, and is included among the first half-dozen for several more. Certain of our counties are unrivalled in special lines; as the anthracite regions of our Lehigh and Upper Schuykill and Susquehanna; Lancaster and Lebanon Counties for farm fertility; Allegheny County for steel and iron work. But the great characteristic of the Keystone State is the variety of its production. More than any other, it may be regarded as an epitome of the whole country. Pennsylvania, therefore, may rightly feel and show a peculiar degree of interest in conservation.

"Conservation" means saving. The saviors of their country are not those alone who risk their lives for her in the endeavor to destroy other lives, but quite as truly those who try to leave her in no worse condition than they found her; to transmit unimpaired to posterity the heritage they received from their forefathers. It hardly needs to be said that to save is not to leave unused (for the gifts of Providence, the country's resources, are of value only as they are used), but it is to suffer no waste in the using-to do as well for those who come after us as was done for us by those who went before us.

The forest is the central and vital point in the conservation issue, for there is no material thing that is connected with the interest of the great mass of the people in so many ways. The value of the timber, great and varied as it is and always must be, is one of the less important of these ways; for the vegetable kingdom has already furnished us with fuel in other forms, and may do more for us in the

future than it has ever yet done, while the progress of invention has been largely shown in the substitution of mineral materials for wood in tool and building construction. A more important way in which our interests are involved in the preservation of the forests is through their influence on the flow of springs and streams.

If it were only with neglect that our National and State Governments could be charged in their treatment of our precious heritage of forests the case would be serious enough against them; but they make it even worse by acts that, did we not know them due rather to heedlessness or stupidity, we could only ascribe to malignant enmity. Of such character is their abuse of the power of taxation. Dr. J. T. Rothrock, long and most honorably known for his work in establishing the forestry work in Pennsylvania and guiding its activities, has called attention in most emphatic words to the folly of most of our States in taxing lands stocked with growing timber, thus positively encouraging the owners to get rid of the timber, instead of applying the tax to timber when cut and so made a source of income. His advice, in which all good citizens should earnestly sustain him, is: "So long as land remains in the condition of timber land, the owner or owners thereof should pay no taxes upon it, except in so far as he or they derive an actual revenue from it." Annual crops are taxed but once; and the timber crop, requiring a century to ripen, should not pay a hundred successive imposts.

The conservation of our watercourses, in the interest of commerce, of the reclamation of arid agricultural lands, of a household supply for our cities, is so bound up with that of the woodlands about their sources that I have given it some notice already. In its turn, a fuller use of watercourses in transportation is imperatively needed to economize our coal and iron supply. Mr. Carnegie has proved

that while the moving of 1,000 tons of heavy freight by rail requires, for every ten miles, the use of an equal weight of metal, the same freight could be moved by water, using only 100 to 250 tons in the carriage; and that the coal consumed would be reduced 50 to 75 per cent by water transportation, even taking no account of what would be saved in smelting, rolling, casting or forging the weight of iron no longer needed. Nothing, he assures us, "would do more to check the drain on iron and coal than the substitution of watercarriage for rail-carriage wherever practicable." And yet, this necessarily involves large "river and harbor appropriations."

Water was employed before coal became the favorite power in manufacture, and will be employed after coal becomes too scarce for use; but it can also be employed to advantage in many ways meanwhile, to lengthen the time for which coal may remain to do our work-applied either directly, as by waterwheels, or indirectly in the form of electricity. Whether we use falling water or burning coal, we are applying power once stored from solar radiation; in the one case dating from last week, or perhaps last year, when the drops were evaporated whose collection as rain on a higher level gave them power to transmit motion in seeking the lower level; in the other case dating from primeval ages, when the chemistry of extinct plant-races enabled them to use sunlight in tearing apart the atoms of atmospheric carbonic acid, and in storing for their own growth the combustible carbon. But in the first case, what the sun did so lately it may do again-is doing at this very minute; in the second, the long ages required for the carbon in a paleozoic atmosphere to become wood, lignite, and finally coal, might have to repeat themselves before coal could create itself anew when once burnt. This difference, now apparently theoretical, might have before long the serious practical import

ance here that it has already attained in Europe. "Great Britain maintains 4,000 miles of canals and improved rivers; France has 3,600 miles of canals," the use of which is increasing, while Germany also is energetically developing her canal system; but in the United States, with an area more than five times that of the three combined, but 2,000 miles of canals are reported, and those are largely neglected.

A no less important economy of falling and flowing water, in its use for many purposes of the dwelling houses, public offices and streets, parks and factories throughout our cities, but chiefly as drink for human beings, must not be overlooked, but that is more closely associated with vital economy than with the other uses of watercourses.

Intimately connected with the nation's food-supply, and thereby with the growth of its population, is the question of soil deterioration. There has been a decided loss of fertility, seriously cutting down the power of land to sustain human life, in some places by flood-erosion sweeping off the best soil; in others by the exhausting effect of planting year after year the same crop on the same land; in too many others by mere neglect to supply fertilizer and compensate the soil for what is taken from it. This is plainly proved by the returns of crop production in those places. To arrest the wasteful washing of floods is one requisite; another and more important one is a better education of the farmer. Give him a good training, and we may safely leave our future with him, and depend, as we have for countless generations depended, on his precious offices to keep the spark of life unquenched within us.

President Roosevelt, in opening his epoch-making Conference of Governors in the White House on the 13th of May, 1908, called attention to "two sharply distinguished classes" of natural resources, that respectively "are or are not capable of renewal." Those we have just been consider

ing are of the former class, "those which cannot only be used in such manner as to leave them undiminished for our children, but can be actually improved by wise use." But those which "do not and cannot renew themselves," whose "exhaustion is certain to come in time," and "all that we can do is to try to see that they are wisely used," include the whole range of minerals. The most important of these are coal and its related products, natural gas and petroleum, and the metallic ores and native metals.

With regard to coal, nothing could well be less satisfactory to estimate than the amount remaining in the earth unmined. It is calculated that the total consumed and wasted in the country, to the end of 1907, was about 16,000 million tons or about one per cent of the original total. But no conclusion could be more misleading than that our coal supply is to last 100 times as long as it has lasted. The country's demands on coal are increasing far more rapidly than its population. As much was mined, for example, in the ten years 1896 to 1905 as in the preceding seventy-five years; 1906 surpassed previous records; and "the mere increase in our consumption of coal during 1907 over 1906 exceeded the total consumption in 1897." In fact, our 1907 production, 480 million tons, was 1/17, instead of 1/87, of the total amount mined since 1820, indicating a rate of five times as rapid at the end of the period as for the average of the period. With a demand accelerating at such a rate, we dare set no indefinitely long term to the availability of the country's 327,000 square miles of coal fields.

Iron is not less necessary than coal, to the industrial civilization of the twentieth century, and the iron industry has to face a similar limitation. The 1907 figure of 51,720.000 gross tons, attained after a steady rise from less than 12,000,000 tons in 1893, is taken as showing a tendency to double every seven years. The total available amount of