And, doubtless, the idea would have occurred to us a full generation earlier if it had not been for the terrible education of our Civil War. There is a great deal to be set down on the good side of the account of the Civil War. It took the putty of our national character and burned it into stone. It ran steel fibres through our national life. And it brought us for the first time to a sense of national unity. But alas there is a great deal also on the ledger’s other page. For war is not conservation, it is destruction. It educates any people not in frugality but in wastefulness. Military supplies must be bought at once at any cost. Everything is thrown away with a negligent and wasteful hand. And so long as any people is pouring out its best possession, the precious life-blood of its sons, like water on the battle-field, you cannot expect it to be saving and careful in its material possessions. The days of waste that followed the Civil War are gone forever. The nation has begun now to count carefully the amount of its available wealth. We have seen calculations of how many millions of feet of lumber we have standing in our forests and how many millions of tons of coal we have still hid away in our treasure houses underground. And far and wide over the nation now we are learning to husband the resources we have left, mindful of our children who are to come after us. And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,” which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested. In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words,