Page:Oklahoma Arbor and Bird Day, Friday, March Twelfth, 1909.pdf/7

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To the Children of the United States:

Arbor Day (which means simply "Tree Day") is now observed in every State of our Union, and mainly in the schools. At various times from January to December, but chiefly in the month of April, you give a day or part of a day to special exercises, and perhaps to actual tree planting, in recognition of the importance of trees to us as a nation, and of what they yield in adornment, comfort and useful products to the communities in which they live.

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your manhood and womanhood you will want what Nature once so bountifully supplied, and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.

For the nation, as for the man or woman and the boy or girl, the road to success is the right use of what we have and the improvement of present opportunity. If you neglected to prepare yourselves now for the duties and responsibilities which will fall upon you later, if you do not learn the things which you will need to know when your school days are over you will suffer the consequences. So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal, whose labor could with difficulty find him bare means of life.

A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as hopeless; forests which are so used that they cannot renew themselves will soon vanish, and with them all their benefits. A true forest is not merely a storehouse full of wood, but, as it were, a factory of wood, and at the same time a reservoir of water. When you help to preserve our forests or to plant new ones you are acting the part of good citizens. The value of forestry deserves, therefore, to be taught in schools, which aim to make citizens of you. If your Arbor Day exercises help you to realize what benefits each one of you receives from the forest and how by your assistance these benefits may continue, they will serve a great end. THEODORE ROOSEVELT.