And, finally, the States are beginning to take most serious and even radical measures to encourage farmers so to till their fields as to be able to bequeath them un-impoverished to those who come after. I think it not unlikely that eventually the demos, thinking of the future, will be as paternalistic as was Louis XIV, who told the habitant of the St. Lawrence how many horses he should keep. This review of the resources of the valley of France in the midst of America, and of the forces that are now assembling to preserve for posterity its vast capital of earth, air, and water, is but an intimation of what might easily be expanded into a volume of itself. Indeed, much of my statistical material I have from a book by Doctor Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin; but, meagre as this review is, it must give you, as it has given me, a stirring sense of the mighty reach of the paths of those few pioneers of France in those regions where the spirit of conservation is strongest. While it is true that every human life, as Carlyle has said, stands at the conflux of two eternities--the one behind him, the other before--in a sense have the material preparations, extending during a length of time that to our measurement seems an eternity, converged upon and in those pioneers of Europe in that valley; and from them has diverged a civilization that now begins to look forward in the eyes of her prophets through years that seem as another eternity. Probably, says this eminent scientist of that valley, speaking of the past, "some of the deposits at present being mined are the result of agents ... a hundred million years ago"; [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 18.] and of the future: "We hope for a future ... not to be reckoned by thousands of years but by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. And, therefore, so far as our responsibility is concerned, it is immaterial whether the coal will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years or fifteen hundred years, or fifteen thousand years. Our responsibility to succeeding generations demands that we reduce its use to our absolute necessities, and therefore prolong its life to the utmost." [Footnote: Van Rise, p. 25.] Conservation has in such depth of years given a new perspective to the picture we have been painting of the life in that valley. The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people--to come back again to that best of definitions--who are the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow.