On Tuesday at the National Conservation Congress at St. Paul
Mr. Roosevelt paid a tribute to the manner in which Mr. Taft had spoken on conservation when opening the Congress on the previous day. He went, however, rather further than Mr. Taft in his argument that the Federal Government was a better medium than the various States for conserving national resources. He admitted that indus- trial corporations had enormously developed the resources of the United States, but he declared that they bad also caused waste and destruction and had achieved unfair monopolies. He remarked that in nearly every river city from St. Paul to the Gulf the water-fronts were in the hands of the railway companies, and that nearly every artificial waterway in The country was controlled by the railway companies. This of course is a repetition on a grand scale of the experience of Great Britain when the railway companies acquired control of the canals and extinguished their competition. Mr. Roose- velt apparently is driven to advocate Federal rather than State checks on the corporations because these are mostly inter-State bodies, and are not amenable to the supervision of a single State. This seems to be a valid reason, but we must remember that "State Rights" is as powerful a rallying-cry as ever it. was.
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