The public lands saved mounted to millions of acres. The long-standing practice of stealing these lands was checked and put a stop to as rapidly as possible. Individuals and private companies had bought for a song great tracts of national property, getting thereby, it might be, the title to mineral deposits worth fabulous sums; and these persons were naturally angry at being deprived of the immense fortunes which they had counted on for themselves. A company would buy up an entire watershed, and control, for its private profit, the water-supply of a region. Roosevelt insisted with indisputable logic that the States and Counties ought them selves to own such natural resources and derive an income from them. So, too, were the areas restored to man's habitation, and to agriculture, by irrigation, and by reforesting. A company, having no object but its own enrichment, would ruthlessly cut down a thousand square miles of timber in order to convert it into wood pulp for paper, or into lumber for building; and the region thus devastated, as if a German army had been over it, would be left without regard to the effect on the climate and the water supply of the surrounding country. Surely this was wrong. It seems to me as needless now to argue in behalf of Roosevelt's legislation for the conservation of national resources as to argue against cannibalism as a practice fit for civilized men. That lawyers of repute and Congressmen of reputation should have done their utmost, as late as 1906, to obstruct and defeat the passage of the Meat Inspection Bill must seem incredible to persons of average sanity and conscience. If any of those obstructionists still live, they do not boast of their performance, nor is it likely that their children will exult over this part of the paternal record. In order not to exaggerate Roosevelt's importance in these fundamental reforms, I would repeat that he did not originate the idea of many of them. He gladly took his cue for conservation from Gifford Pinchot, and for reclamation from F. H. Newell, as I have said; the need of inspecting the packing-houses which exported meat, from Senator A. J. Beveridge, and so on. The vital fact is that these projects got form and vigor and publicity, and were pushed through Congress, only after Roosevelt took them up. His opponents, the packers, the land-robbers, the mine-grabbers, the wood-pulp pirates, fought him at every point. They appealed to the old law to discredit and damn the new. They gave him no quarter, and he asked for none because he was bent on securing justice, irrespective of persons or private interests. It followed, of course, that they watched eagerly for any slip which might wreck him, and they thought they had found their chance in 1907.