Penalty of the prodigal

"We of an older generation can get along with what we have,

though with growing hardship;

but in your full manhood and womanhood

you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied

and man so thoughtlessly destroyed;

and because of that want

you will reproach us,

not for what we have used,

but for what we have wasted...

So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day,

reaps without sowing,

and consumes without husbanding,

must expect the penalty of the prodigal

whose labor could with difficulty

find him the bare means of life."

-- Theodore Roosevelt