There are no two public questions of more vital importance to the future of this country than the problem of Conservation and the problem of the betterment of country life. Moreover, these two problems are really interdependent, for neither of them can be successfully solved save on condition that there is at least a measurable success in the effort to solve the other. In any great country the prime physical asset—the physical asset more valuable than any other—is the fertility of the soil. All our industrial and commercial welfare, all our material development of every kind, depends in the last resort upon our preserving and increasing the fertility of the soil. This, of course, means the conservation of the soil as the great natural resource; and equally, of course, it furthermore implies the development of country life, for there cannot be a permanent improvement of the soil if the life of those who live on it, and make their living out of it, is suffered to starve and languish, to become stunted and weazened and inferior to the type of life lived elsewhere. We are now trying to preserve, not for exploitation by individuals, but for the permanent benefit of the whole people, the waters and the forests, and we are doing this primarily as a means of adding to the fertility of the soil; although in each case there is a great secondary use both of the water and of the forests for commercial and industrial purposes. In the same way it is essential for the farmers themselves to try to broaden the life of the man who lives in the open country; to make it more attractive; to give it every adjunct and aid to development which has been given to the life of the man of the cities. Therefore the conservation and rural life policies are really two sides of the same policy; and down at bottom this policy rests upon the fundamental law that neither man nor nation can prosper unless, in dealing with the present, thought is steadily taken for the future. In one sense this problem with which we have to deal is very, very old. Wherever civilizations have hitherto sprung up they have always tended to go through certain stages and then to fall. No nation can develop a real civilization without cities. Up to a certain point the city movement is thoroughly healthy; yet it is a strange and lamentable fact that always hitherto after this point has been reached the city has tended to develop at the expense of the country by draining the country of what is best in it, and making an insignificant return for this best. In consequence, in the past, every civilization in its later stages has tended really to witness those conditions under which “the cities prosper and the men decay.” There are ugly signs that these tendencies are at work in this nation of ours. But very fortunately we see now what never before was seen in any civilization—an aroused and alert public interest in the problem, a recognition of its gravity and a desire to attempt its solution.