But should the coal and kerosene give out, the clam, I say, need not. The making of Franklin coal and Standard Oil, like the making of perfect human character, may be a process requiring all eternity,--longer than we can wait,--so that the present deposits may some time fail; whereas the clam comes to perfection within a summer or two. The coal is a dead deposit; the clam is like the herb, yielding seed, and the fruit tree, yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth. All that the clam requires for an endless and an abundant existence is planting and protection, is--conservation. Except for my doubts about a real North Pole, my wrath at the Payne-Aldrich Tariff, my dreadful fears at the vast smallness of our navy (I have a Japanese student in a class of mine!), “and one thing more that may not be” (which, probably, is the “woman question” or the roundness of the “Square Deal”)--except, I say, for a few of such things, I were wholly glad that my lines have fallen unto me in these days, when there are so many long-distant movements on foot; glad though I can only sit at the roadside and watch the show go by. I can applaud from the roadside. I can watch and dream. To this procession of Conservators, however (and to the anti-tariff crowd), I shall join myself, shall take a hand in saving things by helping to bury every high protectionist and planting a willow sapling on his grave, or by sowing a few “spats” in a garden of clams. For here in the opposite direction moves another procession, an endless, countless number that go tramping away toward the desert Future without a bag of needments at their backs, without a staff to stay them in their hands. The day of the abandoned farm is past; the time of the adopted, of the _adapted_, farm has come. We are not going to abandon anything any more, because we are not going to work anything to death any more. We shall not abandon even the empty coal mines hereafter, but turn them into mushroom cellars, or to uses yet undreamed. We have found a way to utilize the arid land of the West--a hundred and fifty thousand acres of it at a single stroke, as President Taft turns the waters of the Gunnison River from their ancient channel into a man-made tunnel, and sends them spreading out Here and there, Everywhere, Till his waters have flooded the uttermost creeks and the lowlying lanes, And the _desert_ is meshed with a million veins,-- in order that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet, saying, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”