Hence the safeguard established by a family budget, and hence also the close watch kept on public expenditures by the taxpayers. Wealth brings its own obligations and responsibilities. There is universal interest in the uses such wealthy men as John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford make of their money. There is public disapproval when the money of the wealthy is wasted, and general approbation when it is used to establish public benefits, such as hospitals, libraries, and universities.

Some men of wealth provide liberally in their wills for philanthropies in which they have become interested. But those who do it this way deprive themselves of the joy of giving their time and interest along with their money, by giving while they are in active good health.

TOPICS FOR INVESTIGATION AND DISCUSSION

1. Make a list of the articles you use or consume daily which you could not get if all exchange depended on barter. Show how the modern city would be an impossibility in an economic system dependent upon barter.

2. Look up the fate of the Continental paper currency; of the German paper mark.

3. Make a table showing your income and how you spend it each week.

4. Which would you rather own, stocks or bonds? Why?

5. Name various safeguards for your wealth established by the government.

6. Why do banks advertise?

7. Bring in an article on a government budget.

important items mentioned in it.

Name the

8. Have a committee of the class look up a local building and loan association. Report fully on the plan of saving that it offers, e. g., if you put in $5 a month when will your share mature? How much will you have put in? How much will you get back?

9. Let a committee make a report on the banks of your town. Which ones are state and which are national banks? How much money is deposited in each? What does the banker do with this money?

10. Select one member of your class to get a sample of e

minted by the United States, and one to get a sample of each kind of paper money. Read and discuss all you find on each of these.

SUGGESTED READINGS FOR COMMITTEE REPORTS

1. Man's economic development, from the viewpoint of exchanging goods, has passed through the following stages: mutual giving of gifts; truck or barter; money; credit. Trace the development of these stages, from Ely and Wicker's Economics, Book II, Chapters I and II.

2. Williamson's Introduction to Economics, Chapter I, explains utility and wealth; Chapter II, on How the Colonist Got a Living, gives an interesting account of exchange; Chapter XII describes the function of money and credit; Chapter XIII tells of the exchanging of the products of industry.

Class problem based on these reports: How have the great mechanical inventions, scientific discoveries, and modern means of communication and transportation influenced our present methods of exchange?

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

1. Haskin's American Government: Chapter III, The Treasury-an interesting account of the printing of our paper money, of the minting of coins, and of the revenues of our federal government. 2. Morehouse and Graham's American Problems.

3. Hughes' Problems of American Democracy.

4. Fairchild's Essentials of Economics.

5. Carver's Elementary Economics.

6. Van Loon's Story of Mankind- -a description of medieval trade. 7. King's Price of Milk.

CHAPTER X

CONSERVING OUR RESOURCES

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, nor to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us." -Theodore Roosevelt

A nation of many millions of homes where but a short time ago there were only great stretches of forests and of prairies! This is the romance of our country. What forces brought this about? It did not just happen.

The conquering of our forests and our prairies took courage, thrift, and hard work. It took a will to achieve. The romantic growth of our nation is due, first of all, to the sturdy, fearless, worthy people who came here to make homes in a wilderness that they might worship God as their consciences dictated. From the sons and daughters of each succeeding generation and from the stream of European settlers seeking opportunity in America have come the pioneers of the next generation. Venturous, valiant, and vigorous, westward these homeseekers fought their way. Neither hardship, fever, nor the scalping savage stopped them. The rapid growth of a few people into a great nation of twenty-five million homes is due first of all to a worthy people who willed to have homes and got them.

But equal efforts in the Sahara Desert could not have brought any results. The Sahara Desert is poor in natural resources; our land is rich. In the East were the forests; in the West the prairies; in the mountains, gold and silver; on the Pacific coast, another wilderness; and scattered from coast to coast were great deposits of coal, petroleum d natural gas. The desire for an independent living fo

opportunity in the resources of virgin soils, virgin forests, virgin mineral deposits, and a climate good for crops and men. The homes a worthy people made had their foundations in these bounteous gifts of nature.

The Need for Conservation. We were shocked a generation ago to find that we were reaching the end of our

It is estimated that one and one quarter thousand billion tons of bituminous and lignite coal underlie western North and South Dakota and eastern Montana and Wyoming.

natural resources. Men in middle life today remember well what seemed like limitless natural resources. Millions of acres of land as fertile as any in the world were inhabited only by the buffalo and a few wandering tribes of Indians. Uncounted forest tracts seemed to promise limitless, cheap, and accessible timber for ages to come. When oil was first discovered it literally flooded the streams with rich refuse that would be worth millions of dollars today. It was not

worth while then to save it. With resources so abundant, we used them with reckless waste. In an amazingly short time we found that our resources were not limitless.

Five-sixths of our native forests are gone, and those that remain are far away from our big cities and manufacturing centers where their products are most needed. For instance, Pennsylvania, not a half century ago, had a supply of lumber

more than ample for her needs. Today she must import practically all of the serviceable lumber she needs from the western and southern states. As the population of Pennsylvania has increased her timber production has decreased.

So it is with most of the other states. Today threefourths of the available timber supply of our country lies west of the Great Plains, while three-fourths of the agriculture, three-fourths of the population, and most of the