The natural resources of the United States belong to all the people (applause), not alone to those who happen to live in the States where what is left of the public domain is principally situated today; you and I have just as much concern and interest and proprietorship in the natural resources on and in and springing from the public domain in Wyoming, in Montana, in Idaho, and in other western States, as have the people of those States themselves (applause). Gentlemen, as has been well said already during this Congress, the smaller the community the easier it is for special interests to control it; and that is the reason for this demand that the Conservation of the natural resources in the western States should be turned over to the States themselves. If you want Conservation to amount to anything--if you wish it to go forward in the fullness of development so that what is left of the public domain, of the coal lands, the phosphate lands, the oil and gas lands and the forests belonging to the United States may be preserved and conserved and utilized without present waste and handed down to our children and children's children without exhaustion, then I say the power that should lead in this movement is the mighty power of the Federal Government. (Applause)
When the distinguished and able gentleman who occupies the executive chair in the State of Montana was speaking yesterday, he claimed for his State "the earth and the fullness thereof" in respect to the Conservation of natural resources. He claimed that the movement there had antedated anything done by any other State or by the Federal Government, and to hear his eulogy of what Montana had done in this respect and his absence of expression as to what the Federal Government had done there, one might think, to use the vernacular of the day, that Montana was "the whole cheese" (laughter) in matters of conservation. And yet, when I met the gentleman today and asked him if the Federal Government had not been doing considerable work in Montana and expending large sums of money to irrigate the arid regions of that State, he admitted that it had. I asked him if the Federal Government had not expended many times more money in doing just that kind of Conservation work in his State than Montana had, and he admitted that it had. I asked him if what the Federal Government had already done in the way of irrigating the arid regions of his State and the projects now under way would not when completed yield to the farmer and the husbandman many hundreds of thousands of acres of valuable land, and he admitted it would and that the aggregate would be more than 600,000 acres (applause). That is what the Federal Government has done and is doing in one western State; and yet that same Governor, and others from the West, advocate that in the matter of Conservation the Federal Government should take a back seat, and permit the States to take the lead in Conservation.