good side of the account of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life. And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But alas there is a great deal also on the ledger's other page. For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions.
The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us.
And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources
