This they will do; our new and general alarm would assure us of that, even if the Massachusetts clam-diggers were not leading the way. But Rhode Island already has one thriving clam farm of her own at Rumstick Point along the Narragansett. The clam shall not perish from our tidal flats. Gone from long reaches where once it was abundant, small and scattering in its present scanty beds, the clam (the long-neck clam) shall again flourish, and all of New England shall again rejoice and be glad. We are beginning, as a nation, while still the years are fat with plenty, to be troubled lest those of the future come hungry and lean. Up to the present time our industrial ethics have been like our evangelical religion, intensely, narrowly individualistic,--_my_ salvation at all costs. “Dress-goods, yarns, and tops” has been our industrial hymn and prayer. And religiously, even yet, I sing of my own salvation:-- While in this region here below, _No other good will I pursue_: I’ll bid this world of noise and show, With all its glittering snares, adieu; A most un-Christian sentiment truly, and all too common in both religion and business, yet far from representing, to-day, the guiding spirit of either business or religion. For the growing conception of human brotherhood is mightily expanding our narrow religious selfishness; and the dawning revelation of industrial solidarity is not only making men careful for the present prosperity of the ends of the earth, but is making them concerned also for the future prosperity of the Farther-Off. Priests and prophets we have had heretofore. “Woodman, woodman, spare that tree,” they have wailed. And the flying chips were the woodman’s swift response. The woodman has not heard the poet’s prayer. But he is hearing the American public’s command to let the sapling alone; and he is beginning to heed. It is a new appeal, this for the sapling; there is sound scientific sense in it, and good business sense, too. We shall save our forests, our watersheds, and rivers; we shall conserve for time to come our ores and rich deposits; we shall reclaim the last of our western deserts, adopt the most forlorn of our eastern farms; we shall herd our whales of the Atlantic, our seals of the Pacific, number and multiply our truant schools of mackerel that range the waters of the sea; just as we shall restock with clams the waste, sandy shores of the sea, shores which in the days of Massasoit were as fruitful as Eden, but which through years of digging and no planting have become as barren as the bloodless sands of the Sahara. It is a solemn saying that one will reap, in the course of time, what one sows--even clams if one sows clams; but it is a more solemn saying that one shall cease to reap, after a time, and for all eternity, what one has not sown--even clams out of the exhausted flats of the New England coast, and the sandy shores of her rivers that run brackish to the sea.