Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/284

278 were framed, the sense of citizenship still lay dormant in all but a few leading minds, and in some of these soon turned sluggardly for longer slumber; then the legion prodigals were fed with the swine on husks of party welfare rather than the sound corn of public weal until a shadowy "no-man's-land" grew up between citizen and state and a "twilight zone" spread between state and nation. Yet, stirred at last by the waterway movement and a forest policy uniting in the cult of conservation, the people are at last preempting the shadowy middle ground, and thus coming into their own as citizens. Two years ago the governors—the actual sponsors for the welfare of their commonwealths—felt the stir; they responded vigorously, and now they and their people are moving together against a tyranny of regnant apathy not greatly different from that of his ease-loving and privilege-giving majesty George III.

Within a few months the congress began to respond to the popular demand by authorizing the publication of the reports of the Inland Waterways Commission and National Conservation Commission and the Proceedings of the Conference of Governors; then the senate created a strong committee on the conservation of natural resources; and within a month this committee reported favorably a bill for the establishment of a "National Commission for the Conservation of Natural Resources." The report meets the popular movement half way. Declaring that "The measure is designed to conform with various actions, both legislative and administrative, growing out of one of the strongest popular movements in the history of our country," the document outlines the movement, summarizes the nature and extent of our natural resources, indicates the leading wastes and the industrial diversions attending development of the resources, and concludes with a plan for action framed to meet the people's will. Even more significant than the body of the report is the appendix; for at last the senate has yielded to the voice of the people sufficiently to print the expressions adopted in great conventions of citizens—among others, the declaration of the Fourth Deep Waterway Convention (adopted in New Orleans November 2 last) "comprising duly appointed delegates to the number of 5,000 from 44 of the 46 states of the union, including the governors of a majority of the states," which finally turned over a new leaf by recognizing and declaring the rights of citizenhood to "demand and direct" action by their representatives—in lieu of the far lesser rights of subjecthood to "petition" or "submit" or "respectfully request" or "forever pray" with which Americans have been content for a century—and then nailed down the new leaf by the public pledge of personal honor proper to full citizenship! Surely if these 5,000 delegates mean