When any such undertaking is proposed, however, it at once appears to arouse the fear that it is somehow the beginning of a malevolent policy called "conservation," and conservation has had a mean meaning to many ears. It connoted stinginess and a provincial thrift, spies in the guise of Government inspectors, hateful interferences with individual enterprise and initiative, governmental haltings and cowardices, and all the constrictions of an arrogant, narrow, and academic-minded bureaucracy which can not think largely and feels no responsibility for national progress. Needless to say this fear should not, need not be. The word should mean helpfulness, not hindrance--helpfulness to all who wish to use a resource and think in larger terms than that of the greatest immediate profit; hindrance only to those who are spendthrift. A conservation which results in a stalemate as between the forces of progress and governmental inertia is criminal, while a conservation that is based on the fuller, the more essential use of a resource is statesmanship. To know what we have and what we can do with it--and what we should not do with it, also!--is a policy of wisdom, a policy of lasting progress. And in furtherance of such a policy the first step is to know our resources--our national wealth in things and in their possibilities; the second step is to know their availability for immediate use; the third step is to guard them against waste either through ignorance or wantonness; and the fourth step is to prolong their life by invention and discovery. COAL AS A NATIONAL ASSET. Enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate how vast are the fields of coal which this country holds. It may be that any day some genius will release from nature a power that will make of little value our carboniferous deposits save for their chemical content. By the application of the sun's rays, or the use of the unceasing motion of the waves of the sea, the whole dependence of the world upon coal may be upset. That day, however, has not yet come; and until it does we may consider our coal as the surest insurance which we can have that America can meet the severest contest that any industrial rival can present. It is more than insurance--it is an asset which can bring to us the certainty of great wealth, and if we care to exercise it, a mastery over the fate and fortunes of other peoples.