The connection between forests and rivers is like that between father and son. No forests, no rivers. So a forester may not be wholly beyond his depth when he talks about streams. The conquest of our rivers is one of the largest commercial questions now before us.

The commercial consequences of river development are incalculable. Its results cannot be measured by the yard-stick of present commercial needs. River improvement means better conditions of transportation than we have now, but it means development too. We cannot see this problem clearly and see it whole in the light of the past alone.

The actual problems of river development are not less worthy of our best attention than their commercial results. Every river is a unit from its source to its mouth. If it is to be given its highest usefulness to all the people, and serve them for all the uses they can make of it, it must be developed with that idea clearly in mind. To develop a river for navigation alone, or power alone, or irrigation alone, is often like using a sheep for mutton, or a steer for beef, and throwing away the leather and the wool. A river is a unit, but its uses are many, and with our present knowledge there can be no excuse for sacrificing one use to another if both can be subserved.

A progressive plan for the development of our waterways is essential. Pending the completion of that plan, which should neither be weakened by excessive haste nor drowned in excessive deliberation, work should proceed at once on some of the greater projects which we know already will be essential under any plan that may be devised. First and foremost of these by unanimous consent is the improvement of the Mississippi River. A comprehensive and progressive plan of the kind we need can be made in one way only, and that is by a commission of the best men in the United States appointed directly by the President of the United States.

Such a plan must consider every use to which our rivers can be put, and every means available for their control. It must deal with such great questions as the relation of the States and the Nation in the construction and control of the work, and with terminals and the coordination of rail and river transportation. The engineering difficulties may be larger than any we have yet solved. The adjustment of opposite demands between conflicting interests and localities, and other questions of large reach and often of great legal complexity will tax the powers of the best men we have. No part of the work will require greater temperance, wisdom, and foresight than certain questions of policy and law.

I have observed in the course of some experience that difficulties originating with the law are peculiarly apt to foster misconceptions. It happens that the Forest Service has recently supplied a typical example.

Certain men and certain papers have said that the Forest Service has gone beyond the law in carrying out its work. This assertion has been repeated so persistently that there is danger that it may be believed. The friends of conservation must not be led to think that before the Forest Service can proceed legally with its present work all the hazards and compromises of new legislation must be faced.

Fortunately, the charge of illegal action is absolutely false. The Forest Service has had ample legal authority for everything it has done. Not once since it was created has any charge of illegality, despite the most searching investigation and the bitterest attack, ever led to reversal or reproof by either House of Congress or by any Congressional Committee. Since the creation of the Forest Service the expenditure of nearly $15,000,000 has passed successfully the scrutiny of the Treasury of the United States. Most significant of all, not once has the Forest Service been defeated as to any vital legal principle underlying its work in any Court or administrative tribunal of last resort. Thus those who make the law and those who interpret it seem to agree that the work has been legal.

But it is not enough to say that the Forest Service has kept within the law. Other qualifications go to make efficiency in a Government bureau. A bureau may keep within the law and yet fail to get results.

When action is needed for the public good there are two opposite points of view regarding the duty of an administrative officer in enforcing the law. One point of view asks, "Is there any express and specific law authorizing or directing such action?" and, having thus sought and found none, nothing is done. The other asks, "Is there any justification in law for doing this desirable thing?" and, having thus sought and found a legal justification, what the public good demands is done. I hold it to be the first duty of a public officer to obey the law. But I hold it to be his second duty, and a close second, to do everything the law will let him do for the public good, and not merely what the law compels or directs him to do.

It is the right as well as the duty of a public officer to be zealous in the public service. That is why the public service is worth while. To every public officer the law should be, not a goad to drive him to his duty, but a tool to help him in his work. And I maintain that it is likewise his right and duty to seek by every proper means from the legal authorities set over him such interpretations of the law as will best help him to serve his country. Let the public officer take every lawful chance to use the law for the public good. The better use he makes of it the better public servant he becomes. One man with a jack-knife will build a ladder. Another with a full tool-chest cannot make a footstool. The man with the jack-knife will often reach the higher level. I am for the man with the jack-knife. I believe in the man who does all he can and the best he can, with the means at his command. That is precisely what the Forest Service has been trying to do with the money and law Congress has placed in its hands.

Every public officer responsible for any part of the conservation of natural resources is a trustee of the public property. If conservation is vital to the welfare of this Nation now and hereafter, as President Roosevelt so wisely declared, then few positions of public trust are so important, and few opportunities for constructive work so large. Such officers are concerned with the greatest issues which have come before this Nation since the Civil War. They may hope to serve the Nation as few men ever can. Their care for our forests, waters, lands, and minerals is often the only thing that stands between the public good and the something-for-nothing men, who, like the daughters of the horse-leech, are forever crying, "Give, Give." The intelligence, initiative, and steadfastness that can withstand the unrelenting pressure of the special interests are worth having, and the Forest Service has given proof of all three. But the counter-pressure from the people in their own interest is needed far more often than it is supplied.

The public welfare cannot be subserved merely by walking blindly in the old ruts. Times change, and the public needs change with them. The man who would serve the public to the level of its needs must look ahead, and one of his most difficult problems will be to make old tools answer new uses—uses some of which, at least, were never imagined when the tools were made. That is one reason why constructive foresight is one of the great constant needs of every growing nation.

The Forest Service proposes to use the tools—obey the law—made by the representatives of the people. But the law cannot give specific directions in advance to meet every need and detail of administration. The law cannot make brains nor supply conscience. Therefore, the Forest Service proposes also to serve the people by the intelligent and purposeful use of the law and every lawful means at its command for the public good. And for that intention it makes no apology.

Fortunately for the Forest Service, the point of view which it worked out for itself under the pressure of its responsibilities was found to be that of the Supreme Court. In the case of the U.S. vs. Macdaniel (7 Pet., 13-14), involving the administrative powers of the head of a Department, the Supreme Court of the United States said:

Congress has given to the Secretary of Agriculture, acting through the Forest Service, the specific task of administering the National Forests, with full power to perform it, and has provided that he "may make such rules and regulations and establish such service as will ensure the objects of said reservations, namely, to regulate their occupancy and use and to preserve the forests thereon from destruction." Every exercise of the powers granted to the Secretary of Agriculture by statute has been in accordance with the principles laid down by Chief Justice Marshall ninety years ago in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland (4 Wheat., 421), when he said as to powers delegated by the Federal Constitution to Congress:

After the transfer of the National Forests from the Interior Department to the Forest Service in 1905, some things were done that had never been done before, such as initiating Government control over water-power monopoly in the National Forests, giving preference to the public over commercial corporations in the use of the Forests, and trying to help the small man make a living rather than the big man make a profit (but always with the effort to be just to both). Always and everywhere we have set the public welfare above the advantage of the special interests.

Because it did these things the Forest Service has made enemies, of some of whom it is justly proud. It has been easy for these enemies to raise the cry of illegality, novelty, and excess of zeal. But in every instance the Service has been fortified either by express statutes, or by decisions of the Supreme Court and other courts, of the Secretary of the Interior, of the Comptroller, or the Attorney-General, or by general principles of law which are beyond dispute. If there is novelty, it consists simply in the way these statutes, decisions, and principles have been used to protect the public. The law officers of the Forest Service have had the Nation for their client, and they are proud to work as zealously for the public as they would in private practice for a fee.

So I think the ghost of illegality in the Forest Service may fairly be laid at rest. But it is not the only one which is clouding the issues of conservation in the public mind. Another misconception is that the friends of conservation are trying to prevent the development of water power by private capital. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The friends of conservation were the first to call public attention to the enormous saving to the Nation which follows the substitution of the power of falling water, which is constantly renewed, for our coal, which can never be renewed. They favor development by private capital and not by the Government, but they also favor attaching such reasonable conditions to the right to develop as will protect the public and control water-power monopoly in the public interest, while at the same time giving to enterprising capital its just and full reward. They believe that to grant rights to water power in perpetuity is a wrongful mortgage of the welfare of our descendants, and to grant them without insisting on some return for value received is to rob ourselves.

I believe in dividends for the people as well as taxes. Fifty years is long enough for the certainty of profitable investment in water power, and to fix on the amount of return that will be fair to the public and the corporation is not impossible. What city does not regret some ill-considered franchise? And why should not the Nation profit by the experience of its citizens?

There is no reason why the water-power interests should be given the people's property freely and forever except that they would like to have it that way. I suspect that the mere wishes of the special interests, although they have been the mainspring of much public action for many years, have begun to lose their compelling power. A good way to begin to regulate corporations would be to stop them from regulating us.

The sober fact is that here is the imminent battle-ground in the endless contest for the rights of the people. Nothing that can be said or done will suffice to postpone longer the active phases of this fight; and that is why I attach so great importance to the attitude of administrative officers in protecting the public welfare in the enforcement of the law.

From time to time a few strong leaders have tried to unite the people in the fight of the many for the equal opportunities to which they are entitled. But the people have only just begun to take this fight, in earnest. They have not realized until recently the vital importance and far-reaching consequences of their own passive position.

Now that the fight is passing into an acute stage it is easily seen that the special interests have used the period of public indifference to manoeuvre themselves into a position of exceeding strength. In the first place, the Constitutional position of property in the United States is stronger than in any other nation. In the second place, it is well understood that the influence of the corporations in our law-making bodies is usually excessive, not seldom to the point of defeating the will of the people steadily and with ease. In the third place, cases are not unknown in which the special interests, not satisfied with making the laws, have assumed also to interpret them, through that worst of evils in the body politic, an unjust judge. When an interest or an enemy is entrenched in a position rendered impregnable against an expected mode of attack, there is but one remedy, to shift the ground and follow lines against which no preparation has been made. Fortunately for us, the special interests, with a blindness which naturally follows from their wholly commercialized point of view, have failed to see the essential fact in this great conflict. They do not understand that this is far more than an economic question, that in its essence and in every essential characteristic it is a moral question.

The present economic order, with its face turned away from equality of opportunity, involves a bitter moral wrong, which must be corrected for moral reasons and along moral lines. It must be corrected with justness and firmness, but not bitterly, for that would be to lower the Nation to the moral level of the evil which we have set ourselves to fight.

This is the doctrine of the Square Deal. It contains the germ of industrial liberty. Its partisans are the many, its opponents are the few. I am firm in the faith that the great majority of our people are Square Dealers.