The willingness to destroy or impair great scenery by commercializing it, whether at Niagara or in the Yosemite National Park, makes it necessary that the fight for our natural treasures should be kept up with vigilance. Happily, the good judgment of the late Secretary of the Interior, Warren L. Fisher, has blocked the attempt of the city of San Francisco to destroy the wonderful Hetch Hetchy valley by converting it into a reservoir of water for drinking and power purposes,--which confessedly can be had elsewhere in the Sierra “by paying for it,”--the Secretary wisely holding that such a diversion of the valley from the original purpose of its reservation is too important a matter to be determined by any power but Congress. Three Secretaries of the Interior--Hitchcock, Ballinger, and Fisher--are thus on record against the ruthless project of the city authorities, and we believe it will not be more successful with Secretary Lane. Should its advocates go to Congress, it must be remembered that the same principle underlies the defense of Niagara and of Hetch Hetchy--the conservation of great scenery for the ultimate benefit of mankind.
ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CLUB
No, I have not become a pessimist. If I ever was an optimist, I am certainly one still. But to my mind the only use of being an optimist about the universe is that one can the more boldly be a pessimist about the world. That you may see I can discern the good signals as well as the bad, I will tell you three recent things with which I am thoroughly delighted. With brazen audacity, I will even put first the one topic you know all about and I know nothing about. I am thoroughly delighted with the election of the American President, with the election of the French President, and with the victory in the Balkans. You may think these three things have nothing to do with one another. Wait till I have done explaining things; it will not last long or hurt much.
Don’t imagine I have any newspaper illusions about any of the three. I am a journalist and never believe the newspapers. I know there will be a lot of merely fashionable fuss about the American and the French presidents; I know we shall hear how fond Mr. Wilson is of canaries or how interested M. Poincaré is in yachting. It is truer still, of course, about the Balkan War. I have been anti-Turk through times when nearly every one else was pro-Turk. I may therefore be entitled to say that much of the turnover of sympathy is pure snobbery. Silly fashions always follow the track of any victory. After 1870 our regiments adopted Prussian spikes on their helmets, as though the Prussians had fought with their heads, like bisons. Doubtless there will be a crop of the same sort of follies after the Balkan War. We shall see the altering of inscriptions, titles, and advertisements. Turkish baths may be called Bulgarian baths. The sweetmeat called Turkish Delight may probably be called Servian Delight. A Turkey carpet, very much kicked about and discolored, may be sold again as a Montenegro carpet. These cheap changes may easily occur, and in the same way the international world (which consists of hotels instead of homes) may easily make the same mistake about the French and American presidents. Thousands of Englishmen will read the American affair as a mere question of Colonel Roosevelt. Thousands will read of the Poincaré affair as a mere echo of the Dreyfus case. Thousands have never thought of the near East except as the sultan and Constantinople. For such masses of men Roosevelt is the only American there ever was. For them the Dreyfus question was the only French question there ever was. They had never heard that the Servians had a country, let alone an army.