We may now
fairly ask of ourselves a reasonable care for the future and a natural
interest in those who are to come after us. No patriotic citizen expects
this Nation to run its course and perish in a hundred or two hundred,
or five hundred years; but, on the contrary, we expect it to grow in
influence and power and, what is of vastly greater importance, in the
happiness and prosperity of our people. But we have as little reason to
expect that all this will happen of itself as there would have been for
the men who established this Nation to expect that a United States would
grow of itself without their efforts and sacrifices. It was their duty
to found this Nation, and they did it. It is our duty to provide for its
continuance in well-being and honor. That duty it seems as though we
might neglect--not in wilfulness, not in any lack of patriotic devotion,
when once our patriotism is aroused, but in mere thoughtlessness and
inability or unwillingness to drop the interests of the moment long
enough to realize that what we do now will decide the future of the
Nation. For, if we do not take action to conserve the Nation's natural
resources, and that soon, our descendants will suffer the penalty of
our neglect.
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