to be as good as we were yesterday, we have to be better. Life is
built on a sliding scale; we have to keep moving to keep up. There are
no rest stations on Life's long road!

The principle of conservation is not at enmity with the spirit of
change. It is in thorough harmony with it.

Conservation becomes a timely topic in these days of hideous waste. In
fact it will not much longer remain among the optional subjects in
Life's curriculum. Even now the Moving Finger, invisible yet to the
thoughtless, is writing after it the stern word "Compulsory." Four
hundred thousand men have been taken away from the ranks of producers
here in Canada, and have gone into the ranks of destroyers, becoming a
drain upon our resources for all that they eat, wear, and use. Many
thousand other men are making munitions, whose end is destruction and
waste. We spend more in a day now to kill and hurt our fellow men than
we ever spent in a month to educate or help them. Great new ways of
wasting and destroying our resources are going on while the old leaks
are all running wide open. More children under five years old have
died since the war than there have been men killed in battle!--and
largely from preventable "dirt-diseases" and poverty. Rats, weeds,
extravagance, general shiftlessness are still doing business at the
old stand, unmolested.

But it is working in on us that something must be done. Now is the
time to set in force certain agencies to make good these losses in so
far as they can be repaired. Now is the time, when the excitement of
the war is still on us, when the frenzy is still in our blood, for the
time of reaction is surely to be reckoned with by and by. Now we are
sustained by the blare of the bands and the flourish of flags, but in