For whose benefit shall they be conserved--for the benefit of
the many, or for the use and profit of the few? The great conflict now
being fought will decide. There is no other question before us that
begins to be so important, or that will be so difficult to straddle, as
the great question between special interest and equal opportunity,
between the privileges of the few and the rights of the many, between
government by men for human welfare and government by money for profit,
between the men who stand for the Roosevelt policies and the men who
stand against them. This is the heart of the conservation problem
to-day.
The conservation issue is a moral issue. When a few men get possession
of one of the necessaries of life, either through ownership of a natural
resource or through unfair business methods, and use that control to
extort undue profits, as in the recent cases of the Sugar Trust and the
beef-packers, they injure the average man without good reason, and they
are guilty of a moral wrong. It does not matter whether the undue profit
comes through stifling competition by rebates or other crooked devices,
through corruption of public officials, or through seizing and
monopolizing resources which belong to the people.
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