The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our National Defense, by George H. Maxwell.

RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION

WASHINGTON
Maryland Building

NEW ORLEANS
Cotton Exchange Building

1915

Copyright, 1916,

By Rural Settlements Association.

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.

TO

ALL HOMECROFTERS

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

PREFATORY NOTE

Ammunition is necessary to win a battle. Where it is a great Battle for Peace, to be fought with pen and voice, the ammunition needed is facts.

Whenever the people of the United States know the facts relating to the subject to which this book is devoted, then what it advocates will be done. Much fault has been found with Congress because of the country's unpreparedness. Congress is not at fault. "The stream cannot rise higher than the fountain." The will of the people is the law. The people of this nation are unalterably opposed to a big Standing Army. When they know that the safety of the nation can be assured without either the cost or the menace of militarism, the people will demand that it be done, and Congress will register that popular decree, gladly and willingly. It is not at all surprising that Congress does not yield to the clamor of the militarists when they know the adverse sentiment of the people on that subject.

"It would be self-deception of the grossest character if Americans made their love of peace the criterion of the military policy and preparedness of their country. It would be madness to enfeeble and imperil the United States because we believe peace the chief blessing of the nations."

All that is true. But when the problem is analyzed there is no other way that can be devised, except that proposed in this book, that will safeguard the nation against foreign attack or invasion, and do it adequately, without incurring[Pg vi] stupendous cost or creating a menace to liberty. Americans are a brave people, but they have a hereditary aversion to the clank of a saber in time of peace.

There are a few books that every one who wishes to master the subject should read. First among these is "Fields, Factories and Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. A new edition of this book has been recently issued which costs only seventy-five cents.

"The Iron in the Blood" is a chapter in "The Coming People," by Charles F. Dole, published by T. Y. Crowell & Co. of New York. A reprint of this book can be had for twenty-five cents from the Rural Settlements Association.

"The Secret of Nippon's Power" is another pertinent article, in "The First Book of the Homecrofters." A new and enlarged edition of this book will soon be issued. In the meantime copies of the first edition can be had for twenty-five cents from the Rural Settlements Association.

More has been accomplished in Duluth, Minnesota, to prove the benefits of the Homecroft Life than in any other City in the United States. A special publication, descriptive of the Homecroft Work in Duluth, and a pamphlet by George H. Maxwell entitled, "The Cost of Living," which shows the relation to that subject of the Homecroft System of Education and Life, can be obtained by sending ten cents in stamps to the Rural Settlements Association, Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.

The legislative machinery necessary to inaugurate the plans for work to be done through the Forest Service and the Reclamation Service is all provided for in the Newlands-Broussard River Regulation Bill. That bill provides for river regulation,[Pg vii] flood prevention, land reclamation and settlement, and the establishment of forest plantations in all parts of the United States. It also brings the departments of the national government into coördinating by forming the Board of River Regulation. Through that board, all necessary plans would be worked out for coördinating other departments with the War Department, and completing the organization of the National Construction Reserve and the Homecroft Reserve. When perfected, those plans would be presented to Congress with a recommendation for their enactment.

Those who favor the plan advocated in this book are urged to concentrate their influence first on the passage of that bill as the entering-wedge to the ultimate adoption of the entire plan. They are also urged to do all in their power to enlist the active interest of their friends by inducing them to study the subject and get the facts.

Copies of the Newlands-Broussard River Regulation Bill and explanatory printed matter may be had without charge by writing to the National Reclamation Association, 331 Maryland Building, Washington, D. C.

This book, Our National, Defense—The Patriotism of Peace, has been published by the Rural Settlements Association. The price of the book is $1.25, including postage, and orders for copies, with remittance for that amount, should be sent to Rural Settlements Association, Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.

George H. Maxwell, Executive Director,
Rural Settlements Association,
National Reclamation Association.

FOREWORD

Would it interest you to know that the people of the United States, having first blindfolded themselves with the self-complacence of ignorance, are walking along the crest of a ridge with a precipice on one side falling sheer into the abyss of devastation by war with an invading foreign power, while on the other side boils the seething crater of a social volcano?

If so, you will be convinced of that fact, if you will carefully and thoughtfully read this book through from cover to cover; and you will also be convinced that the only road to safety is that pointed out in this book.

Would you not feel that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" when reflecting on the ease with which any of the Great European Powers could again occupy and burn Washington, as it was burned in 1814, and capture and levy an enormous indemnity upon New York?

Would you contemplate with indifference and equanimity the annexation of the Pacific Coast of the United States to Japan?

Has it occurred to you that, unless we wake up, mend our ways and change our national policy, war is ultimately as inevitable between the United States and Japan as it has been for years between France and Germany?

Would it interest you to know that in the event[Pg x] of such a war the Japanese would be found fully prepared, while we are utterly unprepared; and that Japan would, within ten days, mobilize an army in California large enough to insure to them its military control; and that within four weeks thereafter they would land an army of 200,000 veteran soldiers on the Pacific coast?

Would it interest you to know that in such an emergency our navy would be impotent to check this occupation and invasion, and that our so-called but now confessedly misnamed coast defenses would be about as much protection as a large load of alfalfa hay; and that as part of this military occupancy by Japan of the territory lying between the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Japanese would dynamite every tunnel, destroy the Colorado River railroad bridges, and fortify the mountain passes; and that the recapture of one pass by the United States would be a more difficult military undertaking for us than was the capture of Port Arthur or Tsing-Tao by the Japanese?

Would it interest you to know that the very real danger that California, Western Oregon, and Western Washington may be annexed to Japan and a thousand miles of deserts and inaccessible mountain ranges, instead of the Pacific Ocean, separate Japan from the United States, is a danger that exists because not one in ten thousand of the people of the United States will give the slightest heed to[Pg xi] this question, which overshadows in importance every other question affecting the people of the United States?

Would it interest you to know that there is just as much, and more, danger that the desolating flames of war may sweep over and devastate Southern California as there was that they might sweep over and devastate Belgium? You doubtless will say, "That is impossible!" You would have said the same thing a year ago about Belgium, with much more of assurance and positive conviction.

Would it interest you to know that the doing of the things that would insure peace forever between the United States and Japan, as well as all European nations, would at the same time end all danger from the ravages of destructive floods, stop forest fires, perpetuate our forest resources, preserve the forest and woodland cover on our watersheds, create a great national system of inland waterways, reclaim every reclaimable acre of arid or swamp and overflow land in the United States, and reduce the cost of living by doubling the agricultural production of this country within ten years?

Would it interest you to know that the doing of the same things would end child labor, end woman labor in factories, end unemployment, end the whole multitude of evil and vicious influences that are degenerating humanity and deteriorating the race in the congested cities of this country, and safeguard the United States against the internal as well as the external[Pg xii] dangers that now menace its future welfare?

Would it interest you to know that the doing of those same things would inaugurate an era of business prosperity, based on human welfare and advancement, instead of on human exploitation, and would insure the perpetuity of that prosperity?

Would it interest you to know that the things which it is proposed shall be done by the United States have already been done, practically and successfully, by Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand; and that they can and will be done in this country whenever the people wake up and decide to do something for themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to do it for them.

If you doubt any of the foregoing statements, read the book; and you will be convinced of their absolute truth and you will be appalled at the magnitude of the preventable calamity that menaces the people of the United States solely because of their heedlessness, indifference, and refusal to face facts.[Pg xiii]

Question may be answered in the affirmative by the United States?—Facts must be made known to the people—Nationwide educational campaign is necessary—Every individual must be aroused to action—Appalling consequences of triumph of militarism—United States must lead the world in its overthrow—Cannot be dependent for peace on coöperation of other nations—Appalling losses may result from public apathy and indifference—Necessity for national policy for flood prevention—Naval is out of balance—Other things more needed than battleships—Nationalisation of manufacture of armaments and battleships—There must be an end of private profit from such manufacture—It inspires militarism and stimulates war.

Militarists believe war inevitable—Urge United States is unprepared—Peace Advocates leave to Militarists all plans for National Defense—Militarists have no adequate plan—Enormous cost of large standing army—Menace of a military despotism—No reliance can be placed on State Militia—Impracticability of a Reserve composed of men who have served in the Regular Army—War must be recognised as a possibility—Hypocrisy of opposition to war by those who profit from so-called civilized warfare—Peace Propaganda must be harmonized with national defense—All plans far world Peace have thus far proved futile—United States spends enormous sums on Army without any guarantee of national defense—The Frankenstein of War can be controlled.

Plans for national defense must primarily operate to prevent war—Reasons why War Department will never devise satisfactory system—Militarists have no sympathy with peace movement—It aims to render military profession obsolete—Standing Army is economic waste of money and men—It should be a great educational institution—Chairman Hay of Committee on Military Affairs, House of Representatives, shows enormous cost of Standing Army and impracticability of Reserve as proposed by Army Officers—Comparison of Military Expenditures and Results in United States and Japan—Increase of Standing Army to 200,000 would be futile and unwarranted—European War will not bring disarmament—Warning of Field Marshal Earl Roberts—Standing Army promotes military spirit which increases danger of war.

Enlistment of Construction Corps in government Services in time of peace—Transformation of same organization into military force in time of war—National forces must be organized for conflict to save, not destroy, life and property—Forest Service and Reclamation Service work should be done by Reservists enlisted in Construction Corps—Same system should be adopted in all government services—Construction Reserve to be so trained as to instantly become army of trained soldiers whenever needed—More than work enough in time of peace for a million Reservists—planting forests—fighting forest fires—preventing floods—irrigating deserts—draining swamps—building highways, waterways, and railways—Importance of safeguarding nation against destruction by Nature's invading forces.

Swiss Military System ideal for Switzerland—Not adapted to United States as a whole—Reserve of wage earners impracticable—Their mobilization would cripple industry and cause privation for families—City clerks and factory workers lack physical stamina—A citizen soldiery needed of hardy men like founders of this nation—Anglo-Saxon stock is deteriorating in cities—Only remedy is Homecrofts for workingmen and their families—Otherwise Industry will destroy Humanity—Greatest danger to the City of New York is from within—Racial degeneracy is most serious menace—Patrician class warned against Roman System which resulted in Proscription and Confiscation—The spirit of Switzerland should sway the world—Inadequate Standing Army a serious danger—Invites attack against which it cannot defend—United States Standing Army gives no assurance of national safety.

Japanese influx into Hawaii and Pacific Coast States—Unexpected incident like blowing up of Maine might precipitate conflict—In that event peace advocates and governments might be powerless to prevent war—Japanese merit the good will of other nations—Reasons why they come to Pacific Coast—Japan is overpopulated—30,000,000 rural people on 12,500,000 acres—Population increasing 1,000,000 annually—More Japanese in California of military age than entire Army of United States—Japanese in South America and Mexico—United States must meet economic competition of Japan—Pacific Coast must be settled with Caucasian population that will cultivate the soil as Japanese would cultivate it if it were their country—Otherwise armed conflict with Japan inevitable.[Pg xvi]

Another Japanese Empire could be created in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River—What Japanese would do with that country if it were Japanese Territory—We waste annually water containing 357,490,000 tons of fertilizing material—5,000,000 acres can be reclaimed between Needles and Mexico—Every acre would support a family—Climate makes gardening equivalent to hot house culture out of doors—Inexhaustible supplies of nitrogen, phosphates, and potash for fertilizer—Enormous possibilities of electric power development—Japan would fight the Desert and Conquest it with same thoroughness that she fought Russia—Would develop vast Commerce from Colorado River and Gulf of California—Japanese Colonization in Mexico—Spirit of Speculation retards development by United States—What should be done with the Colorado River Valley—United States must reclaim and colonize that country the same as Japanese would do if it belonged to them.

A Homecroft Reserve in Scotland of one million Soldiers would have prevented this last great war—Scotch Homecrofters make such Soldiers as the Gordon Highlanders and the Black Watch—Story of the Gordon Highlanders—The Scots were the original Homecrofters—The description in "Raiderland" of the Homecrofts in Galloway—Grasping greed of intrenched interests drove the Homecrofters from Scotland—Same interests now blocking development in United States—Homecroft System of Education and Life would breed a race of stalwart soldiers in United States—Could leave home for actual service without disturbing industrial conditions—Homecrofters would be concentrated[Pg xvii] for training and organization—Would eliminate all danger of militarism or military despotism—Comparison in value of 1,000,000 trained Homecrofters with 1,000,000 immigrants—Homecroft Reserve System will end child labor and woman labor in factories and will also end unemployment.

United States owns land, water and power—Development by national government would result in vast profit to it—Australian System of Land Reclamation and Settlement should be adopted—Action should be prompt to forestall friction between United States and Japan—Will never have war with Japan except as result of apathy and neglect—United State must create in Colorado River Valley dense population settled in self-containing Communities—Characteristics of Country particularly adapt it to requirements for Homecroft Reserve—Safety of Southern California from invasion would be insured—Military Highways to San Diego and Los Angeles—Defense of Mexican Border—Homecroft Cavalry Reserve in Nevada similar to Cossack Cavalry System—Correction of Mexican Boundary Line to include mouth of Colorado River in the United States—New State of South California to be formed.

More easily accessible from Japan by sea than from United States by land, in case of war—Mountain Ranges bound it north, east, and south—All plans for defense of California with a Navy or coast fortifications are futile and a delusion—Bombardment of English towns and comparison[Pg xviii] of English Coast and California Coast—Japan would, if war were declared, seize Alaska, Philippines, and Hawaii—Would then transport an army of 200,000 to California—Railroad tunnels and bridges being destroyed by dynamite would render relief by United States impossible—Reliance on Panama Canal too uncertain—Quickness with which occupation of California would be accomplished by Japanese—Huge military difficulties in the way of United States reconquering it—Mountain passes would be fortified by Japanese—Railroad bridges, culverts, and tunnels across deserts would be dynamited—To recapture a single mountain pass more difficult than capture of Port Arthur—Death and Desolation are Supreme in the Southwestern Deserts—Japanese would rapidly colonize all vacant lands in California—The way to make the Pacific Coast safe is for the United States to colonize it first with a dense population of intensive cultivators of the soil.

Military caste absorbs to itself undue power—Danger seen in military opposition to improved system for river regulation—Military control of inland waterways detrimental to country—Army Engineers wedded to System of "Pork Barrel," political, piecemeal appropriations—Reason why Army methods of education hamper progress in river improvement—Mississippi River requires comprehensive treatment—Necessity for Source Stream Control on all upper tributaries—Why the Calaveras Reservoir was not built—Blunder in Construction of Stockton Cutoff Canal—War may be uncertain, but necessity for fight against floods and storms is certain—Description of a great Gulf Storm—Comprehensive plan for protecting lower delta of Mississippi River by great Dikes like those in Holland Safety from floods guaranteed by construction of Atchafalaya Controlled Outlet, Wasteway, and Auxiliary flood water channels.

What this generation would bequeath to future generations—United States safeguarded against internal dangers and made impregnable against attack or invasion—No other plan will accomplish that result—Summary of reasons why Homecroft Reserve System will accomplish it—Comparison of cost of larger Standing Army and same number of Homecroft Reserve—Epitome of advantages of a Homecroft Reserve from the standpoint of Peace—Homecroft Reserve System must be evolved gradually—Rapid development would follow when system once well established—This is illustrated by growth of Rural Mail service, Electric lighting, aërial navigation, and telephone—Where the first 100,000 Homecroft Reservists should be located—50,000 Reservists in California, 50,000 in Louisiana, 80,000 in West Virginia, and 10,000 in Minnesota—Specification of apportionment to projects of the $100,000,000 that would be saved from military expenditures for increased Standing Army—Homecroft financial System proposed—Homecroft Certificates to be issued—Advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System to the Homecrofter—Economic power created for the Nation would result in Universal Peace.

OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE

THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE

CHAPTER I

Shall there be an end of war, and of all danger or possibility of war in the future, not only in this, but in all other countries, and shall we have universal peace on earth through all the coming centuries?

That is the most momentous question that has ever confronted any nation in the history of the world. The United States of America stands face to face with it to-day, and can answer the question in the affirmative, if the people of this country so determine.

On their decision depends, not only the safety and perpetuity of this nation, and the welfare of our own people, but the welfare of all the other nations and peoples of the earth as well, through all future time.

The question will have been answered in the affirmative whenever the plan proposed in this book shall have been adopted by the people of the United States.[Pg 2]

It will make the nation impregnable in case of war, if, notwithstanding all efforts to prevent it, war should come.

In the great crisis through which civilization is now passing, the United States alone has the opportunity and the power to emancipate humanity from militarism, and prevent it from ever again being drawn into the maelstrom of war. Unless that is done, liberty, the world over, will be slowly submerged by the subtle and insidious growth of military power in the affairs of government, and our present civilization will ultimately go the way of all the civilizations of the past.

If, on the other hand, this country rises to the opportunity, and provides a system of national defense which will not only safeguard the nation against foreign invasion or internal conflict, but will also at the same time promote human advancement,[Pg 3] insure all the blessings of peace to the people, and check the growth of militarism, we will establish a civilization that will endure as long as the human race can inhabit the earth.

The first thing that must be done to achieve that boon for humanity is to arouse the people of the United States to a realization of the fact that the settlement of this great question cannot be left by anyone to somebody else.

Every man and every woman, the length and breadth of the land, must enlist in a great national campaign of education to get the real facts and all the facts into the minds of the people.

This is a government, not so much by the people as by the thought of the people.

Right thought must precede right action. Knowledge must go before right thought. The people cannot think right until they know the facts, and they must study and understand and analyze those facts and face them squarely.

That can be brought about only by a[Pg 4] nation-wide campaign in which every patriotic citizen must participate. Each must first learn the facts himself and then carry the knowledge to others—drive it home to them and stir them to action.

Buckle on your own armor and helmet, lift up your own sword and shield, and go right out into your own community and make converts yourself, who are willing not only to think but to act and to do things themselves, to lift the deepening shadow of militarism from this nation, and rescue the world from the barbarism of war.

The souls of the people must be set on fire to fight a great battle for peace and to save the ideals and traditions of our forefathers from being submerged under the rising tide of militarism.

That battle must be fought with voice and pen against ignorance, indifference,[Pg 5] and every powerful interest intrenched in selfish opposition to human advancement.

Popular interest must be stirred to its depths to create an irresistible wave of public sentiment that will sweep away all opposition to the necessary expenditures and legislation.

Every man who would be willing to serve his country in time of war must be enlisted to serve it in time of peace, by fighting in advance of war to safeguard against it and ultimately end it forever.

Every woman who wants the menace of war lifted from the lives of the women of the world must show the faith that is in her by putting her whole heart and soul into the work of enlisting her own community in this great movement to do away with war, and to save the women of the future from the inhuman cruelties and heart-breaking agonies that war has brought upon them in the past.

The people of this country must stubbornly stand their ground to check the future advance of militarism in the United States. For years it has been stealthily gaining, while the people at large have[Pg 6] paid no heed. Military expenditures have grown larger and larger—they have trebled within a generation—and the people have voiced no vigorous protest. They have been "asleep at the switch."

There must be an end of this indifference of the majority of the people, who have been selfishly and self-complacently attending to their own affairs while the world has been drifting into a bloody welter of war. It is only by chance that the United States has not already been drawn into it. Complications may at any time arise which will involve this nation in war.

An interest must be awakened as tense and vivid and all-compelling as would be instantly aroused by an actual invasion of the United States by a foreign enemy, and it must be awakened far in advance of that invasion, to make sure that it never happens.

For nearly two thousand years the gentle admonition "On earth Peace, Good Will toward men" has been the ideal which the human race has been struggling to attain.

And after all these centuries we are in[Pg 7] the midst of the most bloody and destructive war the world has ever known.

Civilization has crashed backwards into the abyss of barbarism, in Europe at least, and no one can foresee the end.

In the United States the trend is in the same direction. This country will soon become a great military nation if the present tendency is not sharply checked.

Mere ignorance and indifference on the part of the people of the United States must not be allowed to stand in the way of the adoption of the national policy advocated in this book—a policy that will bring permanent and enduring universal peace to the world.

That policy must be adopted. There can be no alternative. The final triumph of militarism would be too appalling to contemplate.

Must every woman who bears a son live under the terror that she may have to dedicate him to be mangled in the service of the War God?

Must every home remain liable to be ruined and destroyed by the fires of war?[Pg 8]

Must every fair and beautiful garden-land continue to be subject to the menace of devastation by marching armies or the bloody ruin of the battlefields?

Must the flower of the world's manhood continue to be flung into the jaws of death to satiate the blood lust of militarism?

Must the wheels of industry turn, and the sweat of human labor, for all time, be given to make machinery for human slaughter?

Is there no inspiration to patriotism that will move the people to action but the death combat?

Is there no glory to be won, that will stir heart and brain to supreme effort, except by causing human agony and devastation?

Is there nothing else that will bring out the best there is in men but the stimulus of war, and its demands for sacrifice, even of life itself?

Is there no higher service to their country to which women can give their men than to die fighting to kill the men of other women?

Must this nation, as well as others, so[Pg 9] impoverish itself by war and preparation for war that nothing is left to pay for protecting itself against Nature's destroying forces, flood and fire and waste of the country's basic resources?

The intelligent and patriotic men and women of the United States would answer every one of these questions, with all the fervor of their being, in the way they must be answered to save civilization, if the questions could be put to them, face to face, by anyone who was ready to show them what to do to make good that answer and transform the desire into actual accomplishment.

We must therefore arm the multitude with the facts and burn into their minds the clear-cut definite vision of the plan that must be carried out to make certain that accomplishment.

That plan must provide that we shall first do the things which the people of this country can do by themselves alone without saying "by your leave" or "with your help" to any other nation.

The influence of the adoption of a right national policy by the United States will[Pg 10] draw the world into the current as soon as its practicability and benefits to humanity have been proved, but we must not begin with a plan that will fail unless adopted by all the great powers of the world.

We cannot allow the success of our own basic plan for peace, and for safeguarding this nation against war, to depend on the coöperation of any other nation.

That has been the difficulty with nearly every plan heretofore proposed for the permanent establishment of peace throughout the world. The agreement of all the nations could not be had, and without such agreement the plan was futile.

Disarmament or the limitation of armaments is impracticable without the consent of all the great powers.

Nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, if it is to be a world-wide influence, must have world-wide adoption.

No plan for a peace tribunal can be successfully made effective without all nations agreeing to abide by its decrees.

That power will never be vested in it[Pg 11] by the nations, not in this generation at least.

Arbitration voluntarily of any one controversy between nations is practicable, where consent is expressly given to arbitrate that particular controversy.

But a general plan based on an agreement made in advance to arbitrate all future unknown controversies would be unenforceable and would afford no assurance of peace.

The plan for an international force, either army or navy, is too remote a possibility to be depended on now for practical results.

Agitation of these projects is commendable and should be encouraged, but we cannot wait for their adoption to set our own house in order and insure its safety.

In framing a national policy of peace for the United States, we must constantly and clearly draw the line of distinction between the deep-seated original causes of war, and causes which are secondary, or merely precipitating incidents.[Pg 12]

The assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo precipitated the present war, but it was not the cause of the war.

Fundamentally, that cause was the check imposed by other nations on the expansion of the German Empire. The necessity for that expansion resulted from the rapid increase in the population, trade, and national wealth of Germany.

The same problem faces the United States with reference to Japan and we cannot evade it by any scheme for arbitration or disarmament. We must squarely face and solve the economic problems that lie at the bottom of all possible conflict between this nation and Japan.

A lighted match may be thrown into a keg of gunpowder and an explosion result. It might be said that the match caused the explosion. In one sense it did—but it was not the match that exploded.

And gunpowder must be protected against matches, if explosions are to be avoided. So with national controversies. The economic causes must be controlled, and conflict avoided by action taken[Pg 13] long in advance of a condition of actual controversy.

In our dealings with Japan, as will be shown hereafter, we are sitting on an open keg of gunpowder, lighting matches apparently without the remotest idea of the danger, or of the way to eliminate it.

But the situation on the Pacific Coast with reference to Japan is not the first instance of similar risks that have been run with most appalling losses as a consequence.

The danger of an earthquake in San Francisco was known to everybody. Likewise it must have been known, if the slightest thought had been given to it, that an earthquake might disrupt the water system of the city and make it impossible to quench a fire that might be started by an earthquake.

As San Francisco is now heedless of the need for a policy that will really settle the Japanese trouble, instead of aggravating it, so she was heedless of the earthquake danger. That heedlessness cost the city $300,000,000 in entirely unnecessary damage caused by fire. San Francisco was[Pg 14] destroyed by fire, not by the earthquake. The earthquake was unavoidable, the fire was wholly preventable.

That sort of heedlessness is typical of the American people. Busy with the present, they take no thought of the future. Every city in the United States which is liable in any year to a great flood, is equally liable to a great fire—a fire which might as completely destroy it as the San Francisco fire destroyed that city, because, owing to the flood, all the means provided for fire protection when there is no flood, would be rendered useless by the flood.

Yet every such flood-menaced city in the United States stolidly runs the risk. No general precautions are taken to prevent such destruction, though it must be recognized as being possible at any time. Great floods will rarely follow one another in the same place. For this reason, flood protection for a city which has already suffered from a disastrous flood, like Dayton, is no more important than similar protection for all other flood-menaced cities. The only way to safeguard against[Pg 15] floods, and the consequent risk of fire losses in flood-menaced cities, is that all such cities should be completely protected against floods, under a nation-wide policy for flood protection and prevention.

When appeal is made to Congress for legislation providing for such a policy and for the appropriations necessary to make it effective, we are told that so much money is required for military expenditures that none can be spared for protection against floods.

Are we to go on for the next ten years doing as we have done in the last ten, and spend another billion dollars for the army and fortifications, while floods ravage unchecked?

If we had been getting actual protection from foreign invasion for that billion dollars, there might have been some justification for its expenditure; but we are getting neither protection from foreign invasion nor protection from flood invasion.

The fact that the people of the country at large give no heed whatever to the risk of tremendous losses of life and property[Pg 16] by flood, arises from a fixed habit of apathetic indifference, and the fact that no commercial interest pushes steadily in behalf of flood protection.

There is money to be made, and large dividends may be earned, by furnishing insurance against fire. Consequently the owner of every building in every city is constantly reminded by insurance agents of the importance and necessity of fire insurance. This has been done until public education, stimulated by private profit, has created a habit of thought which instinctively recognizes the danger of fire, and insures against it. The property owner who now fails to carry fire insurance is commonly regarded as assuming an unwarranted risk.

The same conditions exist from a national point of view with reference to war. We build battleships, for example, largely because there is a huge private profit made therefrom, which warrants a nation-wide propaganda to educate and sustain a favorable public sentiment. The profit is large enough to permit of propitiating troublesome opposition by endowing peace[Pg 17] palaces. That is a gruesome and ghastly hypocrisy that must come to an end, if the world is ever to attain to universal peace.

The government should, if it needs them, build its own battleships; but the first thing it should do, before it builds any more battleships, is to provide for its other more pressing naval requirements, such as trained men, target practice, transports, coaling stations with adequate coal supplies, swift cruisers, torpedo boats, submarines, aëroplanes, and ammunition.

After all that has been done, if it is made the law of the land that dividends shall no longer be earned by private corporations from building battleships or from manufacturing armor plate, it might be found that no more battleships ought to be built. By that time naval experts may have agreed that, as against torpedoes and aëroplanes, battleships are too uncertain a defense, and may have decided that we need something else.

A battleship costs anywhere from ten to twenty million dollars, and they are too expensive to be built for experiment or ornament.[Pg 18]

The people of the United States have been relying on battleships for coast defense, but all Britain's battleships did not protect Scarborough or Hartlepool or Whitby. Neither have the battleships been able to protect themselves from torpedoes, mines, or submarines.

Congress is a mirror. It merely reflects public sentiment. So long as the need for battleships and more battleships—for bigger and still bigger battleships—is constantly dinged into the ears of the people by the profit-takers from the government, just that long will public sentiment, and the legislation and appropriations that respond to it, be warped and one sided. Our navy will continue to be top heavy with dreadnoughts, and inadequate attention will be paid to the other things necessary for a symmetrically equipped and efficient naval defense.

When private profits for building battleships shall have been eliminated, Congress will no longer skimp appropriations to man the battleships we now have, or for other naval equipment, in order to build more dreadnoughts.[Pg 19]

After this war, it ought to be possible to conduct to success a nation-wide, and possibly a world-wide propaganda to end forever the earning of dividends from human slaughter.

That is the issue, bluntly and plainly stated, and those who profit by manufacturing the machinery of war must face it squarely. The time will come,—it is to be hoped it is near at hand,—when they will be held in the same estimation as are nowadays the pirates who forced their victims to walk the plank.

Over-preparedness, as well as unpreparedness, may precipitate a war. The causes of the present European war were, however, more deeply rooted than that. It was inevitable that they would some day result in war. But the war would not have come at this time if Germany had not thought England unprepared. Nor would it have come if Germany had not been, as she supposed, invincible, because armed to the teeth by corporations like the Krupps that make war and the machinery for it the source of stupendous private profits and accumulated wealth.[Pg 20]

The growing temptation to create similar conditions in this country must be forever strangled. After the close of this war, the fields of battle in Europe must be cleared of war's devastations, and in the United States of America the field of industry must be cleared of all temptation for our merchants and manufacturers to become slaughterers by wholesale of human beings—murderers and manglers of whole battalions of their fellowmen—slayers of the fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons of millions of women. That is what they become when for money they furnish the means whereby it is done, or is to be in future done, by this or any other country.

It is far better that capital should be idle and labor unemployed than that either should be used to promote death and devastation in return for dividends or wages. All available capital and labor can find occupation in doing things that will promote human welfare. To the extent that the machinery of war may be needed by any government, it should be manufactured for its own use by that government,[Pg 21] and never by any private concern or corporation for profit. A world movement to that end is being organized and every patriotic citizen should bear a hand to promote its success. The United States has the opportunity to be the first nation to adopt this advanced and peace-promoting national policy.

Whenever we have put an end to the making of private profit from the manufacture of battleships and machinery of war for our government, we will be relieved of much of the persistent pressure to make our navy top heavy with dreadnoughts, and to steadily increase our naval and military expenditures. More than that, we will then be able to get full, fair, and unprejudiced consideration, by the people at large, of every question relating to war or peace, or to our own preparedness for war, or the extent of the necessity for such preparedness.

Now the people know only a part of the facts on which a comprehensive judgment should be based. They have been urged to do the things which, if done, would result in profit to the manufacturers[Pg 22] of battleships or machinery of war. Knowing this, many people go to the other extreme and oppose everything in the way of an adequate military or naval system. This tends to endanger the nation by unpreparedness, just as the Militarists would endanger it by over-preparedness, or a one-sided and unbalanced preparedness, like having battleships without other things even more necessary for naval defense.

The government should manufacture for itself all the machinery needed by it for war on land or sea. Its manufacture by anyone else should be prohibited by law. But it does not by any means follow that the government itself should refrain from manufacturing it, under the conditions that now prevail in the world. Neither does it follow that there will be no more wars. Nor again does it follow that the government should fail to be at all times adequately prepared for war. On the contrary, the possibility of war should be fully recognized and national defense should not be neglected.

Under the conditions that surround this[Pg 23] country to-day, no nation should more carefully than ours safeguard against the danger of unpreparedness. The United States should be, not unprepared, but fully prepared, and that can only be accomplished by carrying out the plan advocated in this book, for both immediate and ultimate national defense.

The assumption that this country will never be involved in a foreign war is one which every fact of history, every trait of human character, and every probability of the future proves to be unwarranted, unless measures are taken and things done for national protection, and for the preservation of peace, that are as yet not even contemplated by the people of this country.

The cost of those measures is so small, in comparison with the enormous losses this country would suffer if it became involved in a foreign war, that to forego them because of the cost involved would be as unwise as to fail to equip a passenger steamer with life preservers as a matter of economy.

CHAPTER II

Advocates of Peace present no plan for national defense in case of war. They leave it to the Militarists to provide for that contingency. The Militarists have proposed no adequate plan for national defense. No plan has been evolved, other than that urged in this book, which would in all emergencies safeguard the nation against war, and at the same time be in sympathy with and strengthen every movement to promote peace.

To make this clear, the various schools of thought on the subject should be classified, and their views briefly outlined.

On the one hand we have the Militarists. They constantly clamor for a bigger navy and a larger army on the ground that we are unprepared for war—unarmed, unready, undefended—and that war is liable to occur at any time.

On the other hand we have the Passivists. They have the courage of their convictions. Believing in peace, they oppose[Pg 25] war, and all the means whereby it is made. Having faith in moral influence, they oppose armaments. They are consistent, and urge that this nation should disarm and check military expenditures. In their peace propaganda before the people they have squarely and honestly contended for this national policy for which they deserve infinite credit.

Between these two extremes we have the Pacificists. They deplore war and talk for peace, but believe in building battleships. They argue for arbitration and advocate disarmament, but have not opposed steadily increasing appropriations for naval and military expenditures by the United States. They justify this position on the plea that the best guarantee against war is an army and navy. They oppose war but not appropriations for war. They hold peace conferences and pass peace resolutions, but do not go before the committees of Congress and object to expenditures for armaments and militarism. In this class belong all peace advocates[Pg 26] who are builders of battleships or manufacturers of armor plate or armaments, and their associates.

This suggests the question whether such a manufacturer is a safe pilot for a peace movement, however generously it may be subsidized, and whether an armor-plate mill and a peace palace are appropriate trace-mates. It would be unfortunate if the subtle influence of subconscious self-interest should creep into peace councils or affect the policy of a peace movement. However that may be, the theory that armaments prevent war has been pretty well exploded by recent events.

They advocate disarmament and a tribunal of peace in the nature of an international court to determine international differences and make binding decrees; and they propose the establishment of an international army and navy under the control of that court to enforce its decrees. Of course it must be conceded[Pg 27] that this plan may fail, or its success be long delayed, and that in the meantime it affords no guarantee of peace.

Finally comes the Woman's Movement for Constructive Peace, out of which has grown the organization of the Woman's Peace Party.

Much may be hoped for from this organization if it will concentrate its strength, and not try to do too many things at once.

If the women of the world will unite and put the same militant force behind the peace movement that they have put behind the suffrage movement they can end wars. There is no doubt of that. But it will require world-wide organization, good generalship, and great concentration of effort. "One thing at a time" should be their motto.

"The purpose of this organization is to enlist all American women in arousing the[Pg 28] nations to respect the sacredness of human life and to abolish war. (1) The immediate calling of a convention of neutral nations in the interest of early peace. (2) Limitations of armaments and the nationalization of their manufacture. (3) Organized opposition to militarism in our own country. (4) Education of youth in the ideals of peace. (5) Democratic control of foreign policies. (6) The further humanizing of governments by the extension of the franchise to women. (7) Concert of nations to supersede 'balance of power.' (8) Action toward the general organization of the world to substitute law for war. (9) The substitution of an international police for rival armies and navies. (10) Removal of the economic causes of war. (11) The appointment by our government of a commission of men and women, with an adequate appropriation, to promote international peace."

That platform is a well condensed outline of a very comprehensive program. It covers the whole ground. Some of the things it advocates ought to be possible of accomplishment within a few years. Others will require generations. For example, it is well to frankly face the eventual necessity for it, but democratic control[Pg 29] of the foreign policies of Germany and Russia, for instance, must be worked out by the people of those countries, possibly through bloody political revolutions.

However, faith and not skepticism was the reason for publishing this platform in full. The tenth plank, "Removal of the economic causes of war," would include many features of the plan proposed in this book. As embodied in the book, the plan is specific. The platform is a generalization, and might include many other plans.

But it will be observed that the platform does not suggest any plan as to what should be done by the Woman's Peace Party in the event of war or to safeguard the country from the dangers of actual war. They must concede that war may occur, pending the partial or entire success of their campaign to establish universal peace throughout the world. But they propose no plan covering the contingency of war.

So, although we have plans galore to promote peace, we have in case of war no plans except those of the Militarists.[Pg 30]

Third: A standing army with a reserve composed of men who have served a term of enlistment in the regular army.

None of these plans could be relied on for national defense in the event of war between the United States and any one of the great world powers. That will be fully demonstrated in the subsequent chapters of this book.

To insure the national safety as against such a contingency, a standing army of over 500,000 men would be necessary. It would cost this country $600,000,000 a year to maintain such a standing army, and the army itself would be a more dangerous menace than a foreign invasion.

The utter worthlessness of state militia as a national defense in the event of war with a first-class power is strongly set forth in the warning by George Washington quoted in a later chapter.[Pg 31]

The impracticability of a reserve force like that proposed by the Militarists is clearly shown in the article from which quotations are made in a later chapter by Honorable James Hay, Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs of the House of Representatives in the Congress of the United States.

The situation when analyzed is certainly a most extraordinary one and can only be accounted for on the theory that the people of this country are not informed as to the facts and assume that we must be prepared for war, and able to defend ourselves in case of war, by reason of the stupendous expenditures we have been making for over ten years for the military branch of the government. To the average man it would seem as though $250,000,000 a year ought to be enough to provide for the national defense.

The situation would be different if we had any assurance that the United States would never again be involved in a war. In that event we would need no plans for national defense.

The situation is illustrated by the old darkey's coon trap that would "catch 'em either comin', or gwine."

The frank belief of the Militarists that war must be regarded as inevitable is well expressed in the following quotation from a recent editorial in "The Navy," a journal published at Washington, D.C.

"Since the beginning of the war in Europe, the assertion has been repeatedly made that this is the last great war; that the peoples of the world will be so impressed with the wanton destruction of life and property, that there will be organized some form of international arbitration that will prevent future wars. Not so. The war now raging between the nations of Europe is much more probably but the first of a series of tremendous world-wide conflicts that will be fought by the inhabitants[Pg 33] of the earth for national supremacy, until the supremacy is obtained by a single people, or possibly by an amalgamated race, the ingredients of which are just now being thrown into the melting pot.

"The wars of the past will sink into comparative insignificance when future historians compile statistics of coming conflicts among the nations of the earth."

Whether all this be true or not, there is enough foundation for such beliefs to make it imperative that the comprehensive and complete plan set forth in this book should be adopted to harmonize the peace propaganda with plans for national defense in case of war.

The plan proposed in this book will tremendously strengthen the peace propaganda and there is no reason why every Militarist should not heartily approve and accept it, unless he is making a profit out of the manufacture of war machinery or dependent on it for employment.

In that event we must strongly appeal to patriotism and try to induce the surrender of personal profit or benefit in[Pg 34] order that we may preserve the nation and promote human welfare.

Sad indeed it is that it should be true, but none the less it is a staring fact that every theory that war between civilized nations had ceased to be possible has been rudely shattered by recent events.

Again and again it has been declared that kings make wars and the people fight them.

That is all very true, in the past and in[Pg 35] the present, but once more the people are doing the fighting.

While this greatest of all the world's wars was brewing, the workingmen were busy manufacturing the machinery of destruction.

Every piece of shrapnel that crashes into a human brain, or tears a human heart, or mangles a human hand on a battlefield has been laboriously and patiently made by some other human hand working for wages in some factory.

And the money to pay that profit was loaned to some Christian nation for its war chest by some sanctimonious pawn-broker of the class described in "Unseen Empire" by David Starr Jordan.

It is civilized warfare, among civilized[Pg 36] nations, in this age of civilization, sustained by civilized legislative representatives of civilized people, conducted by civilized soldiers, equipped for human destruction by civilized business men who furnish machinery of war that is manufactured by civilized workingmen.

And the workingman makes wages, the business man earns his good dividends, the banker gets his snug profit, and the man at the top, "the man on horseback," who started the bloody orgy gets dividends, honors, special privileges, and greater power as his share in this twentieth-century massacre of humanity by the so-called humane methods of modern civilized warfare.

And if it were not that so many are making wages or salaries or profits or dividends out of the whole organized scheme of modern warfare, it would be much easier to put an end to it. That is the vital point where the women of the world should strike first if they are to end war.[Pg 37]

It is the private profit made from war by a few that makes it so hard to stop the ruin by war of the many.

The awful waste of war has been made clear, and yet the most monstrously wasteful war of history is now being fought.

It has been urged that the huge debts owing for old wars made new wars impossible, but stupendous new war loans are now being made.

The people of Europe were said to have reached the limit of endurance of war burdens, but they are bending their backs for a heavier load.

America has expressed deep sympathy in the past for the war-ridden and burden-bearing nations of Europe, overlooking apparently, at least in recent years, some important facts.

Germany makes no hypocritical pretenses to being a nation of peace. She is avowedly a nation of warriors and believes in war.

While she has been perfecting the most[Pg 38] stupendous and perfectly organized war machine that has ever existed in the world, she has perfected just as gigantic and splendidly effective machinery for conducting the affairs of peace.

Her people may well smile in their sleeves at us when we condole with them about the heavy war burdens that have been loaded upon them. They have at least got something effective and efficient for their money. We have got practically nothing.

Germany has, it is true, spent huge sums for armament, but at the same time she has developed her internal resources, constructed vast public improvements, planted great forests, and built a system of waterways that is the marvel of the world.

Why not? Because we are told by the guardians of Uncle Sam's exchequer that we cannot afford it. We spend so much money on our army and navy,—a quarter of a billion dollars a year—for which we get nothing in return,—not even national defense,—that we are told we cannot afford[Pg 39] to enter upon any great plans for internal improvements, or stop floods, or regulate rivers, or build a genuine waterway system.

And the people stand for it, and allow themselves to be "led by the nose as asses are."

This, of course, is very gratifying to the speculators and exploiters who are gathering into their own capacious grab-bags what is left of the natural resources of the country.

When this reason is added to their interest in armor-plate factories, it may account for some of their zeal for militarism. And of course they realize the necessity for a good large standing army that will keep the people from being troublesome when they discover that their heritage has been stolen from them. Any little incident like the French Revolution would be excessively annoying to the intrenched interests in this country. An army looks good to them, and the latch-string is always out, socially, to the members of the military caste who greatly enjoy the hospitality of the gilded caste.[Pg 40]

Every one who looks at all four corners of the situation in this country understands why every pretext is seized upon to get bigger and bigger appropriations for the army and navy. A navy provides a big profit in armor plate and an army provides protection for that profit.

They see a long way ahead. The people never see very far. They are easily scared by a hue and cry about unpreparedness when naval or military appropriations are wanted.

They readily swallow the bait of economy, when the interests desire to defeat an appropriation that is needed to develop natural resources belonging to the people that are coveted by the Water Power Syndicates, or an appropriation that is needed to build waterways which would make competition for railroads.

Water Power Syndicates and Railroads and Armor-Plate Mills are all controlled by the same coterie of intrenched interests. They understand each other and work together perfectly without even the necessity for a gentleman's agreement.[Pg 41]

For years the Gospel of Peace has been proclaimed to the world from the United States. During that period we have been busy building battleships and piling up great private fortunes from making armor plate. We have been urging disarmament while spending millions to increase our own armaments. We have been advocating arbitration while constantly increasing our military expenditures.

Since the day when Congress in a frenzy of patriotic outburst voted fifty millions in fifteen minutes to start our war with Spain, the peace propaganda has been vigorously prosecuted and in that period we have had war after war: the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War; war in the Philippines, war in Greece, war in the Balkans, war in South Africa, war in Algeria, war in Morocco, war in Tripoli, war in Mexico, war again in the Balkans, and now nearly all of Europe is ablaze with war and its flames are reddening Asia and Africa.

It gives one an unpleasant, gruesome[Pg 42] feeling to think about it. The substance seems always to have been on the side of war, the shadow only on the side of peace.

That is no reason why the movement for peace should be abandoned, but is it not a reason for completely changing the ideals and methods of the peace movement, and adopting a plan such as is embodied in this book for a constructive peace propaganda, that will strengthen the peace movement, and at the same time solve our most difficult internal social and economic problems and make sure that if war ever does befall us we will be found not unprepared, not unarmed, not unready, not undefended?

If everything were done that the most extreme Militarist advocates, we would still be undefended, and we will remain so until our whole military system is constructed anew, and a real system of national defense organized as outlined in this book.

But it can only be controlled by organizing a system of national defense[Pg 43] against Nature's destroying forces, which can, by touching a button, be instantly transformed, if need be, into a force for national defense against a foreign invasion or to uphold the rights or honor of the nation.

CHAPTER III

The Militarists will never initiate an adequate system for national defense in the United States, because such a system necessitates an organization under civil control in time of peace. It must be an organization that will at all times act as a self-operating and self-perpetuating influence to promote peace and prevent war. It must also automatically and instantly become an impregnable defense against foreign attack or invasion if, in spite of all precautions and efforts to prevent it, war should actually occur at any time in the future.

Whatever we do for national defense should be done primarily to prevent and safeguard against the breaking out of war. Every plan for national defense should, like the plan proposed in this book, be formulated with that end in view. That should be its clearly defined objective. There should be no possibility of any mistake about that. It should be made so[Pg 45] plain that there never could be any misunderstanding as to that being the primary purpose of the plan.

A national force should be organized primarily for civil duty in time of peace. It should be organized in such a way that it could at a moment's notice be converted into a military machine for national defense in case of war. But that conversion should be a secondary object. The necessity for such a conversion should be regarded as a remote possibility, to prevent which every human power would be exerted, but which might occur, notwithstanding all that could be done to prevent it.

An illustration of this situation might be drawn from the case of an aëroplane constructed for aërial service. It would be needed and built for work in the air. But if it were possible that it might be needed for use over water, then it might be so constructed that in the event of falling on the water it could still keep afloat and propel itself. Aërial navigation would be the primary purpose of its construction. Water navigation would be secondary, and[Pg 46] not intended to be resorted to except in case of accident. It would serve as a safeguard against death which might otherwise be caused by an event only remotely possible.

If the necessity for making our system for national defense primarily an instrument of peace is constantly borne in mind, it will make progress easier and more rapid and certain. It will eliminate many complications that would result if we should undertake to look to the military establishment to formulate plans for a system of national defense that would be operative for peace as well as for war. In the past the whole matter of national defense has been left to the Army and Navy. That is the reason why no satisfactory system has been evolved. Naturally the Army and the Navy can see nothing in any plan which does not involve simply a greater army and a greater navy.

If it is now left to the War Department to make plans for a military system that will be adequate for national defense, there are many reasons why a satisfactory[Pg 47] system will never be devised. The idea would be incomprehensible to a Regular Army man that a national organization, available for civil duties in time of peace, could in time of war be automatically expanded into a military machine strong enough for the national defense.

Men educated and trained in the military profession do not comprehend conditions outside of the purely military environment in which they live. They do not understand humanity or the temper of the people in civil life. They have been trained in an atmosphere of social exclusiveness and educated to believe that they belong to a superior caste. They live in a world of their own, separate and apart from their fellowmen. This is every whit as true in America as it is in Germany. The only difference is in the relative size of the armies.

The Militarists have no real sympathy with any peace movement. They say that we always have had war and that we always will have war. They look forward with enthusiastic anticipation to the next[Pg 48] war as an opportunity for activity and promotion. War is their trade, their profession. They regard with patronizing pity all who have risen to the higher level that regards war as an anarchistic anachronism, and are willing to make any sacrifice to end it forever. They have never read the chapter entitled "The Iron in the Blood" in "The Coming People," by Charles F. Dole.

They are devoted to their duty, as they understand it, and are as brave and loyal soldiers as ever existed on the earth. But really it is unreasonable to expect a soldier to be anything but a Militarist. He is bred if not born to war, trained to fight and to study the war game, the war maneuvers, to fortify, to attack, to repel, to figure out a masterly retreat if it becomes necessary. You cannot expect him to be a peace advocate or to work out plans which will prevent or abolish war. It is no part of his duty as he sees it to undertake to devise plans for peace that would render the professional soldier obsolete and relegate him and his brother soldiers to a place by the side of the[Pg 49] chivalrous Knights of the Middle Ages, or the Crusaders who fought the Saracens to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the infidels—picturesque and romantic but expensive and useless.

Moreover, Army officers are hampered in all planning for constructive work by their rigid adherence to precedent. They have a medieval contempt for everything non-military, and for all civil duties and affairs. All this results from the existence of a military caste in this country which is as supercilious, self-opinionated, and autocratic as the military aristocracy of the most military ridden nation of Europe.

They lack initiative and originality because their whole education has operated to drill it out of them, and to make men who are mere machines, doing what they are told to do, and doing it well, but doing nothing else. That is the exact opposite of the type of mind demanded in an emergency requiring initiative and the genius to originate and carry out new and better ways of doing things than those that have prevailed in the past.

Men with the military training appear to[Pg 50] entirely lack the analytical mind that seeks for causes, and comprehends that by removing the cause, the evil itself may be safeguarded against, or may in that way be prevented from ever coming into existence.

This fact is well illustrated by the stupendous losses the country has suffered from floods because the Army Engineers have for years so stubbornly refused to consider plans for controlling floods at their sources.

Solid arrays of facts presented to them have contributed nothing to breaking down their stolid egotism.

They will not originate, or approve, any plan that does not center everything that is proposed to be done in the War Department and thereby enlarge its influence and prestige. They oppose every plan to coördinate the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same plane with the others in working out plans for constructive coöperation.

The members of the military caste do not seem to be able to comprehend that the stamp of an inferior caste which they[Pg 51] put upon enlisted men, and the menial services exacted from private soldiers by their officers, create conditions that are revolting to every instinct of a man with the right American spirit of self-respect. They are a relic of the barbaric period when the private soldier was an ignorant brute. Those conditions alone are sufficient to render impracticable any plan for a reserve composed of soldiers who have served out their term of enlistment.

"All institutions must sooner or later be transformed so as to accord with the principles of democracy—or they must be abolished. The great objection to standing armies is their conflict with democracy. They are essentially aristocratic in their traditions. The officers must always be 'Gentlemen' and the privates merely men. The social superiority of officer over man is something enormous. Every day's service tends to make the man in the ranks a servile creature, and the man with epaulettes a snob and a tyrant."

The standing army to-day represents an economic waste of labor of the[Pg 52] entire body of enlisted men. Many soldiers are demoralized by the inactivity or idleness of the life of the camp or the barracks.

The whole conception of the military caste as to what the Army ought to be is medieval and monstrously wrong. The United States Army should be a training school for the very highest type of self-respecting, independent, and self-sustaining citizenship that this country can produce. It should be a great educational institution, training every enlisted man to be an officer in the Reserve, or to be a Homecrofter after he returns to private life. Daily manual constructive labor should be a part of every soldier's duty. The relation between officer and enlisted men should be that of instructor and student. Such a relation is entirely consistent with the absolute authority that would be vested in the instructor.

The Army System should be such that an opportunity to serve a term as an enlisted man would be coveted as much as an appointment to West Point is now coveted. The Army should train men for civil life[Pg 53] and citizenship, not ruin them for it as it now so often does.

The many wrong conditions above referred to result from the unfortunate attitude of mind of those who compose the military caste. They would make it impracticable to ever successfully carry out any plan for useful constructive labor by enlisted men in the military service. If such a Reserve were made subject to the control of the War Department, it would be impossible to ever enlist as a Reserve a construction force composed of men who believe in the dignity of labor and refuse to recognize the superiority of any caste in American life or citizenship.

If this statement is not a fact, why is it that no useful, constructive work is accomplished by the fifty odd thousand able-bodied enlisted men of our Regular Army? The same men would accomplish superhuman manual labor in case of war. And the same conditions would obtain if our army was 100,000 or 200,000 or 500,000 strong.

This wasteful situation taken as a whole makes it impracticable to work out any[Pg 54] plans which might otherwise be initiated or formulated by the War Department for creating a great reserve force that would be entirely under the control of the civil departments of the national government in time of peace. It is imperative that such civil control should prevail. Were it otherwise, the same danger of military domination in government affairs would arise that would result from the maintenance of a standing army in this country large enough to serve as a national defense in time of war with any first-class power.

And the establishment of a National Construction Service as a Reserve force, enlisted for work to be done under civil control in time of peace, but available for military service in time of war, constitutes one of the most practicable plans for creating a Reserve from which an army for national defense could be instantly mobilized in time of war.

The plan proposed by the War Department, of a short term of service in the regular army, followed by liability to service in a reserve made up of men discharged after this short-service term, could never be worked out effectively.[Pg 55]

The impracticability of that plan has been clearly shown by Representative James Hay, Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs of the House of Representatives, in a recent magazine article in which he says:

"Military authorities, backed by the opinions of many persons high in civil life, insist that we should be provided with an adequate reserve of men, so that we may in any time of trouble have men who will be prepared to enter the army fully trained for war. In this I concur; but in a country where military service is not compulsory the method of providing a reserve is an extremely complex problem, one that has not yet been satisfactorily solved by anybody. It is proposed, among other things, to have short enlistments, and thus turn out each year a large number of men who will be trained soldiers. Let us examine this for a moment and see where it will lead, and whether any good will come out of it, either for the army or for the country.

"After giving this question of a reserve for the army the most careful thought, after having heard the opinion of many officers of our army,—and those too best qualified to give opinions on a matter of this sort,—I am convinced that, under our system of military enlistment, it is impracticable to[Pg 56] accumulate, with either a long-term or a short-term enlistment period, a dependable reserve force of fairly well trained men. To use our army as a training school would destroy the army as such, and fail utterly to create any reserve that could be depended upon as a large body of troops.

"The proposal of the General Staff of the army has been that the men should enlist for two years and then spend five years in the reserve. The five years in the reserve is impossible in this country, because we have no compulsory military service and because it is intended by the authors of the plan not to pay the reserve men. And it is an open-and-shut proposition that men cannot be expected to enter the reserve voluntarily, without pay, when the regulations would require them to submit to such inconveniences as applying to the department for leave to go from one State to another or into a foreign country, and when they would be compelled to attend maneuvers, often at distant points, at least twice a year."

The Militarists, the professional military men, and those who draw their inspiration from that source, present no plan for enlarging our army in time of war except:

(1) The proposed Reserve system so clearly shown in the above quotation to[Pg 57] be impracticable; (2) Reliance upon State Militia to reënforce the regular army—a plan rejected by all who are willing to learn by experience; and (3) The increase of the standing army, to bring it up to a point where it could at any time cope with the standing armies of other powers, and its maintenance there.

Another quotation from the same article by Representative Hay will give the facts that show the impracticability of the plan for increasing the standing army:

"But, in order to make more evident what Congress has given to the army and the consequent results that must have been obtained therefrom, let me call attention to the fact that during the last ten years the appropriations for the support of the military establishments of this country have amounted to the grand total of $1,007,410,270.48, almost as much as is required to pay all the other expenses of the government, all the salaries, all the executive machinery, all the judiciary, everything, for an entire year.

"Thus, during this period, the army appropriations have annually been from $70,000,000 to $101,000,000; the Military Academy appropriations, from $673,000 to $2,500,000 a year; for fortifications, from $4,000,000 to[Pg 58] $9,300,000; for armories and arsenals, from $330,000 to $860,000; for military posts, from $320,000 to $4,380,000; by deficiency acts, military establishment, from $657,000 to $5,300,000; and for Pacific railroads transportation and the enlisted men's deposit fund, a total for the ten years of $11,999,271.

"The totals for the ten fiscal years 1905 to 1915 have been as follows:

Permanent appropriations (including Pacific railroads transportation and enlisted men's deposit fund)	$11,999,271.00
Fortification acts, armories and arsenals, and military posts in sundry civil acts, and deficiencies for military establishments in deficiency acts	113,071,133.17
Army appropriation acts	868,536,993.31
Military Academy acts	13,802,873.00
	——————
Total	$1,007,410,270.48

"However, in spite of this showing of the great expense of maintaining a small army, the Militarists keep up their clamor—particularly at such a time as this, and again whenever a military appropriation bill is up for consideration in the House—that this country be saddled with a great standing army. There is not the slightest need of such an establishment. But, if there were some slight indication of trouble with a fully equipped great power, would the people of this country be ready to embark on a policy that would[Pg 59] mean the permanent maintenance of a regular standing army of 500,000 men? It would cost this country, at a conservative estimate, $600,000,000 a year to go through with such an undertaking."

Now after fully weighing that situation in the mind, as set forth by Representative Hay, put beside it the following facts as given by Homer Lea, in "The Valor of Ignorance":

"European nations in time of peace maintain armies from three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand men and officers, together with reserves of regulars varying from two to five million, with a proportionate number of horses and guns, for the same money that the United States is obliged to expend to maintain fifty thousand troops with no reserve of regulars.

"Japan could support a standing peace army exceeding one million men for the same amount of money this Republic now spends on fifty thousand.

"This proportion, which exists in time of peace, becomes even more excessive in time of war; for whenever war involves a country there exists in all preparation an extravagance that is also proportionate to the wealth of the nation.[Pg 60]

"During the last few years of peace, from 1901 to 1907, the United States Government has expended on the army and navy over fourteen hundred million dollars: a sum exceeding the combined cost to Japan of the Chinese War and the Russian War, as well as the entire maintenance of her forces during the intervening years of peace."

"A vast population and great numbers of civilian marksmen can be counted as assets in the combative potentiality of a nation as are coal and iron ore in the depths of its mountains, but they are, per se, worthless until put to effective use. This Republic, drunk only with the vanity of its resources, will not differentiate between them and actual power.

"Japan, with infinitely less resources, is militarily forty times more powerful.

"Germany, France, or Japan can each mobilize in one month more troops, scientifically trained by educated officers, than this Republic could gather together in three years. In the Franco-Prussian War, Germany mobilized in the field, ready for battle, over half a million soldiers, more than one hundred and fifty thousand horses and twelve hundred pieces of artillery in five days. The United States could not mobilize for active service a similar force in three years. A[Pg 61] modern war will seldom endure longer than this.

"Not only has this nation no army, but it has no military system."

We have in the United States a military establishment adequate to suppressing riots, controlling mobs, preventing local anarchy, and protecting property from destruction by internal disturbance or uprisings in our own country. As a national police force, our army is an entirely adequate and satisfactory organization. But policing a mining camp and fighting an invading army, are two widely different propositions. So would fighting a Japanese army be from fighting a few Spaniards or Filipinos.

When it comes to a "military system" adapted to the needs of a foreign war with a first-class nation, we have none; and thus far none has been proposed. A system that depends on creating the machinery for national defense by any plan to be undertaken after hostilities have begun, is no system at all, and cannot be classed as a system for national defense. It is a system for national delusion. A Volunteer[Pg 62] Army belongs in this class, and so in fact does the State Militia.

Second, the defense of the nation and of its social, civil, and political institutions from internal disturbance and civil conflict.

It may safely be assumed that there will never again be a civil conflict between any two different sections of this country. That there will inevitably be such a conflict between contending forces within the body politic itself, no sane man will deny, if congested cities and tenement life are to be allowed to continue to degenerate humanity and breed poverty and misery. They will ultimately undermine and destroy the mental and physical racial strength of the people. We will then have a population without intelligence or reasoning powers. Such a proletariat will constitute a social volcano, an ever present menace to internal peace.[Pg 63]

Conflicts such as that which so recently existed in Colorado, approach very closely to civil war. They have occurred before. They will occur again. They may occur at any time. Whenever they do occur, it may be necessary to invoke the power of the nation, acting through the army as a police force, to preserve the peace and protect life and property.

For that work it must be conceded that we need an army. As it has been well expressed, we need "a good army but not a large army." It may be conceded that we need for that purpose, and for Insular and Isthmian Service, and for garrison duty, an army as large as that now authorized by Congress when enlisted to the full strength of 100,000 men, but no more. Set the limit there and keep it there, and fight any plan for an increase.

The question whether we should have an army of 50,000 men or 100,000 men is of comparatively small importance. As to that question there need be no controversy on any ground except that of comparative wisdom of expenditure. There are other things this country should do,[Pg 64] that it is not doing, of more importance than to maintain an army of 100,000 instead of 50,000, or than to build more battleships at this time.

An army needed as a national police force to safeguard against any sort of domestic disturbance is a very different proposition from the army we would need in the event of a war with any of the great world powers. An army of 100,000 is as large as we will ever need to safeguard against domestic disturbance. An army any larger than that, for that purpose, should be opposed as a menace to the people's liberties, and a waste of the nation's revenues.

It is conceded on all sides, however, that if it ever did happen, however remote the possibility may be, that the United States became involved in a war with a foreign nation of our own class, an army of 100,000 men would be impotent and powerless for national defense. So would an army of 200,000 men. An army of 200,000 is twice as large as we should have in time of peace. In the event of war with any first-class power we would[Pg 65] have to have an army five or ten times 200,000.

It would therefore be utterly unwarranted and unwise to increase our standing army from 100,000 to 200,000. There is no reasonable ground or hypothesis on which it can be justified. Any proposition for such an increase should meet with instant and just condemnation and determined opposition.

A war between the United States and some other great power is either possible or it is impossible. If it is impossible, then we need do nothing to safeguard against it. If it is possible, either in the near or distant future, then we should safeguard against it adequately and completely; we should do everything that may be necessary to prevent war or to defend ourselves in the event of war.

To say that war is impossible is contrary to all common sense and reason, and runs counter to conclusions forced by a careful study of probabilities and of the compelling original causes for war that may in their evolution involve this nation.

Field Marshal Earl Roberts told the[Pg 66] English people, over and over again, that they were in imminent danger of a war with Germany. No one believed him—at least not enough of them to make any impression on public sentiment—and England was caught unprepared by the present war.

Therefore, let full weight be given to Lord Roberts' declaration and warning as to the future, as recently published:

"I would ask them not to be led away by those who say that the end of this great struggle is to be the end of war, and that it is bound to lead to a great reduction of armament. There is nothing in the history of the world to justify any such conclusion. Nor is it consonant with ordinary common sense."

Such a statement as this, from such a man, cannot be whistled down the wind. This country must inevitably face the condition that in all probability the present war will increase rather than reduce the danger that the United States may become involved in war.

It may be argued that Germany, once a possible antagonist, will be so weakened by this great conflict as not to desire another war. The contrary will prove true.[Pg 67] If Germany should prevail, the ambition of her War Lords would know no limit, until Germany dominated the world.

If Germany should not prevail, no matter how much she may be humbled by defeat, she will start over again, with all the latent strength of her people, to rebuild from the ruins a more powerful military nation than she has ever been. With the record before us of what Germany has accomplished since the close of the Thirty Years' War, can anyone deny that a great Teutonic military power might again be developed from the ashes of a ruined nation?

If we look across the Pacific at Japan, we see a nation strengthened and proudly conscious of victory as a result of the present war. Whatever other nations may suffer, Japan gets nothing from this war but national advancement and national glory. The latter is a mighty asset for her, because of the inspiration and stimulus it affords to her people in all their national efforts and ambitions for advancement and expansion.

Russia, England, and France, however[Pg 68] great their losses may be, will come out of this war with enormously enlarged national strength, and with their national forces solidified and concentrated behind the military power in those governments. In none of them will this new accretion and concentration of military governmental power be thereafter voluntarily limited or surrendered.

Let us then not deceive ourselves by any visions of world peace which exist only in dreams, or follow shadows into the quicksands in which we would find ourselves mired down if this nation were caught unprepared in a war with any of the great nations above named.

The question of national defense, in the event of such a war, is not one of battleships, so on that point we need not trouble ourselves much with the controversy about how many battleships this country should build in a year. If we had as many battleships as England has to-day, they might prove a broken reed when tested as a means of national defense in case of a war with either England, France, or Japan.[Pg 69]

A standing army of 100,000 men, or even of 200,000 men, would prove utterly inadequate for our national defense in such a war. Worse than that, our whole military system is fatally defective. It entirely lacks the capacity of instant automatic expansion necessary to quickly put an army of a million men in the field. It would be imperative and unavoidable that we should do so, the moment we became involved in war with a first-class power. A million men would be the minimum size of the army we would need the instant war started with any great nation like Japan. As a system for national defense in such a war our standing army is a dangerous delusion. Its existence, and the false reliance placed on it, delays the adoption of a system that would prove adequate to any emergency.

The militia system of the United States is another delusion, and in case of war would be little better than useless. Washington had his own bitter experiences to guide him, and he warned the people of this country against militia in the following vigorous terms:[Pg 70]

"Regular troops alone are equal to the exigencies of modern war, as well for defense as offense, and when a substitute is attempted, it must prove illusory and ruinous.

"No Militia will ever acquire the habits necessary to resist a regular force. The firmness requisite for the real business of fighting is only to be attained by constant course of discipline and service.

"I have never yet been a witness to a single instance that can justify a different opinion, and it is most earnestly to be wished that the liberties of America may no longer be trusted, in a material degree, to so precarious a defense."

In the face of all these facts, the people of the United States are groping in the dark. They may have a vague and glimmering idea of their danger, but as yet no definite and practicable plan for national defense in case of war has been suggested, except that proposed in this book.

The beautiful iridescent dream and vision of an army of a million patriotic souls hurrying to the colors in the event of national danger brings only counter visions of Bull Run and Cuba, of confusion, waste, death, and devastation, before we could possibly get these men officered,[Pg 71] trained, equipped, and organized to fight any first-class power according to the methods of modern warfare.

As an illustration, what would our pitifully small army, and our almost raw and untrained levies of militia, do in a grim conflict with the 200,000 trained and seasoned and perfectly armed and equipped soldiers which Japan could land on our shores within four weeks, or the 500,000 she could land in four months, or the 1,000,000 she could land in ten months? We could not by any possibility get a military force of equal strength into action on the Pacific coast in that length of time or in anywhere near it.

That is where our danger lies, and therein exists the startling menace of our unpreparedness for war. It is not that we lack men or money. No nation in the world has better soldiers than those now serving under our flag. We no doubt have the raw material for a larger army than any nation or any two nations could utilize for the invasion of our territory, but any one of three or four nations could humble and defeat us several times over[Pg 72] before we could whip this raw material into shape for a fighting force and get it armed and equipped for actual warfare.

The conclusion from this would on the surface naturally seem to be that we must have a larger standing army. The strange and apparently contradictory but undeniable fact is that a larger standing army, organized in accordance with our present military system, would merely increase our danger, and might precipitate a war that would otherwise have been avoided.

A great standing army in this country would ultimately create the same national psychological condition that existed in Germany before this last war. There were many who averred when this war broke out that it was the war of the Kaiser and his War Lords, and contrary to the spirit and wishes of the German people. The exact opposite has been thoroughly established. Strange as it may seem, we must accept the fact that the German people, as the result of generations of education from childhood to manhood, look upon war as a necessary element of German expansion[Pg 73] and the growth of the empire to which they are all patriotically devoted.

More than this, ringed about as they have been for centuries with a circle of armed adversaries, it was inevitable that a spirit should be developed in the minds of the people that their only safety as a nation lay in Militarism, however much they might deplore its necessity as individuals, groan under its burdens, or personally dread military service.

The moment the people of the United States accepted as a fact the belief that a standing army large enough for national protection is the only way for this country to safeguard against an armed adversary, that moment would the attitude of mind of our people towards war become the same as that of Germany and France. After this war it will be the attitude of mind of the people of Great Britain. England has been shaken to her core, and never again will she be found unprepared for war at any moment that it may come.

CHAPTER IV

The system for national defense in the United States must embrace a National Construction Reserve, organized primarily to fight Nature's forces instead of to fight the people of another nation. It must be so organized that it will furnish a substitute for the supreme inspiration to patriotism, and the tremendous stimulus to energy and organized effort that war has furnished to the human race through all the past centuries of the existence of the race.

This National Construction Reserve must be an organized force of men regularly enlisted for a term in the service of the national government. The men in the Reserve must be under civil control when engaged in construction service, and under military control when in military service in time of war. Those enlisted in the Reserve would labor for their country in construction service in time of peace, building great works of internal improvement[Pg 75] and constructive national development, with exactly the same spirit of patriotic service that they would fight under the flag and dig trenches or build fortifications in time of war.

We must organize this National Construction Reserve for a conflict to conquer, subjugate, and hold in strong control the forces of Nature. We must organize our national forces and expend our national revenues for that conflict, instead of organizing them for devastation and human slaughter. We must organize a national system that will create, not destroy; that will conserve, not waste, human life, and homes, and the country's resources.

We must plan to enlist our national forces in a great conflict with Nature, to save life and property, instead of enlisting them in conflicts with other nations to destroy life and property. We must develop a patriotism that will be as active in constructive work in time of peace as in destructive work in time of war. We must enlist a National Construction Reserve that will put forth in time of peace for constructive human advancement the[Pg 76] same extraordinary energy and invincible determination that war arouses.

The construction work of the Forest Service should be done by a Construction Corps enlisted in that Service. Every forester should be a reservist. A regularly enlisted force of fire-fighters and tree-planters should be organized—tens of thousands of them—to fight forest fires and to fight deserts and floods by planting forests. The planting and care of new forests should be done by regularly organized companies of enlisted men, detailed for that work, exactly as they would be detailed for a soldier's duties in time of war.

The work of the Reclamation Service should be done, not by hired contractors, but by a Construction Corps of men enlisted in that Service. They should be set to work building all the works necessary to reclaim every acre of desert land and every acre of swamp or overflow land that can be reclaimed in the United States.

The cost of all reclamation work done by the national government should be charged against the land and repaid[Pg 77] with interest from the date of the investment. The interest charge should be no more than the government would have to pay on the capital invested, with an additional annual charge sufficient to form a sinking fund that would repay the principal in fifty years.

The work of the Forest Service as well as that of the Reclamation Service should be put on a business basis. New forests should be planted where their value when matured will equal the investment in their creation, with interest and cost of maintenance.

The same system of enlisting a Construction Corps to do all construction work should be adopted in every department of the national government which is doing or should be doing the vast volume of construction work which stands waiting at every hand. Each branch should have its regularly enlisted Construction Corps.

All the different branches of the government dealing in any way with forestry or with the conservation, use, or control of water, in the War Department, Interior Department, Agricultural Department, or[Pg 78] Commerce Department, should be coördinated and brought together in a Board of River Regulation. The coördination of their work should be made mandatory by law through that organization. All the details of perfecting the formation of the Construction Reserve and its organization for constructive service in time of peace and for military service in time of war should be worked out through this coördinating Board of River Regulation.

The duty of the men enlisted in the National Construction Reserve would be not only to do the work allotted to them, but to do it in such a way as to dignify labor in all the works of peace. It should show the patriotic spirit with which work in the public service can be done to protect the country from Nature's devastations. It should demonstrate that such work can be done in time of peace, with the same energy and enthusiasm that prevail in time of war.

But in case of war, the National Construction Reserve must be so organized that it can be instantly transformed into an army of trained and seasoned soldiers—soldiers[Pg 79] that can beat their plowshares into swords at a day's notice, and as quickly beat the swords back into plowshares when weapons are no longer needed.

In the development of this idea lies the assured safety of this nation against the dangers of unpreparedness in the event of war. There will be more than work enough for such a Construction Reserve to do in time of peace for generations yet to come.

Such floods as those which swept through the Mississippi Valley in 1912 and 1913 are an invasion by Nature's forces. They bring ruin to thousands and devastate vast areas. They overwhelm whole communities with losses as great as the destruction which would be caused by the invasion of an armed force.

Floods of that character are national catastrophes, as are likewise such floods as that which devastated the Ohio Valley in 1913, and the more recent floods in Southern California and Texas. Floods should be safeguarded against by an organized national system for flood protection. That National System for River[Pg 80] Regulation and Flood Control should be brought into being and impelled to action by an overwhelming mental force, generated in the minds of the whole people. It should be a power as irresistible as that which projected us into the war with Spain, after the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor.

The ungoverned floods which for years have periodically devastated the Great Central Valley of the United States can never be wholly safeguarded against by any sort of local defense. They must be controlled at their sources. The problem is interstate and national. Works to prevent floods in the Lower Mississippi Valley from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico, must be constructed, maintained, and operated on every tributary of the Ohio, the Upper Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers—a stupendous project but entirely practicable.

The water must be conserved and controlled where it originally falls. It must be held back on the watershed of every source stream. If this were done, the floods of the Ohio River Valley could be[Pg 81] so reduced, and the flow of the river so regulated, as never in the future to cause damage or destruction.

The same is true of the Missouri and the Upper Mississippi Rivers. If the floods were controlled on the source streams and upper tributaries, the floods of the Lower Mississippi could be protected against by levees, supplemented by controlled outlets and spillways as additional safeguards. Millions of garden homes could in that way be made as safe in the delta of the Mississippi River now annually menaced by overflow as anywhere on the high bench lands or plateaus of the Missouri Valley.

To do this work would be to defend a territory twice as large as the entire cultivated area of the Empire of Japan against the annual menace of destruction by Nature's forces.

Is not that a national work that is worth doing? Is not that the right sort of national defense? Is it not an undertaking large enough to arouse and inspire the whole people of this great nation to demand its accomplishment?[Pg 82]

To do it right, and to do it thoroughly and effectively, necessitates the systematic organization of a Construction Corps under national direction for that work. It would require that we should put forth national energy as powerful, and mental and physical effort as vigorously effective, as that demanded by war.

Why then should not a National Construction Reserve be organized to do that work as efficiently in time of peace as it could be done by a military organization in time of war, if the doing of it were a war necessity instead of a peace measure?

If we ever succeed in safeguarding this and other nations against war, it will be because we have learned to do the work of peace with the same energy, efficiency, patriotism, and individual self-sacrifice that is now given to the work of war. It is because Germany learned this lesson three centuries ago with reference to her forests and her waterways that she now has a system of forests and waterways built by the hand of man and built better than those of any other nation of the world.

This great work of safeguarding and[Pg 83] defending the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the Missouri Valley from flood invasion, if done by the United States for those valleys, must, in the same way and to the same extent, be done by the nation for all other flood-menaced valleys throughout the country.

It necessitates working out, in coöperation with the States and local municipalities and districts, a comprehensive and complete plan for water conservation, and its highest possible utilization for all the beneficial purposes to which water can be devoted.

It necessitates the preservation of the forests and woodland cover on the watersheds, the reforestation of denuded areas, and the planting of new forests on a thousand hillsides and mountains and on treeless plains where none exist to-day.

It necessitates the building of model communities on irrigated lands intensively cultivated, as object lessons, in a multitude of localities, to demonstrate the value, for many beneficial uses, of the water which now runs to waste in floods.

It necessitates the establishment and[Pg 84] maintenance of a great system of education to train the people in the intensive cultivation of land and the use of water to produce food for mankind, and thereby transform an agency of destruction into an agency of production on a stupendous scale.

It necessitates building and operating great reservoir systems, main line canals, and engineering works, large and small, of every description that have ever been built anywhere in the world for the control of water for beneficial use, and to prevent floods and feed waterways.

To have an inland waterway system in the United States, in fact as well as in name, necessitates building on all the rivers of this country such works as have been built on every river in Germany, such works as the Grand Canal of China, and such works as the English government has built or supervised in India and Egypt, and is now planning to build to reclaim again for human habitation the once populous but now desert and uninhabited plains of Mesopotamia.

No argument ought to be needed to convince[Pg 85] the people of the United States that this great work of national defense against Nature's forces should arouse the same patriotic inspiration and stimulate us to the same superhuman effort and energy that we would put forth to prevent any section of our country from being devastated by war. But if such an argument were needed it is found in the condition of Mesopotamia to-day, as compared with the days of Babylon's wealth and prosperity.

The people who dwelt on the Babylonian plains, and who made that empire great and populous, sustained themselves by the irrigation of the desert. The same processes of slow destruction which are now so evidently at work over a large portion of our own country, gradually overcame and destroyed the people of Mesopotamia. The floods finally destroyed the irrigation systems. The desert triumphed over man. One of the most densely populated regions of the earth became again a barren wilderness.

At the end of the Thirty Years' War Germany was a land wasted and destroyed[Pg 86] by war, but war had not destroyed the fertility of the soil. Crops could still be raised in the fields, and trees could be planted on the mountains that would grow into forests. All this was done, and modern Germany rose out of the ruins of the Germany of three hundred years ago. War had destroyed only the surface, leaving the latent fertility of the land to be revived by indomitable human labor.

In Mesopotamia it was different. There the forces of Nature destroyed the only means of getting food from the desert. Therefore the desert prevailed and humanity migrated or became extinct. Will anyone question that the defense of Mesopotamia against the desert should have aroused the same intensity of patriotism among her people that has been aroused in past wars for the defense of Germany, or as has been aroused for the defense of Belgium and France and England in the present war?

Nature's processes of destruction work slowly but surely. In Mesopotamia they have gone forward to the ultimate end. An entire people who once constituted one[Pg 87] of the greatest empires of the world have succumbed to and been annihilated by the Desert.

Nature's forces have worked the same complete destruction in many other places in Persia and Asia Minor, and on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

Northern Africa was once a fertile and populous country. Its wooded hillsides and timbered mountains gave birth to the streams by which it was watered. It is another region of the earth that has been conquered by the destroying forces of nature. The resources of vast areas of that country, its power to sustain mankind, have been finally destroyed by those blighting forces as completely as the city of Carthage was obliterated by the Romans.

If the fertility of the lands of Northern Africa had been as indestructible by Nature's forces as the fertility of the lands of Central Europe, a new nation would have arisen in Northern Africa, nursed into being by that indestructible fertility. Wherever the natural resources are destroyed the human race becomes extinct.[Pg 88]

A battle with an invading army may lead to temporary devastation. A battle with the Desert, if the Desert triumphs, means the perpetual death of the defeated nation.

Which conflict should call for the greatest patriotic effort for national defense?

Patriotism exerted for the intelligent protection of any country from the destruction of its basic natural resources, is aimed at a more enduring achievement when it fights the destroying powers of Nature than when it fights against a temporary devastation by an invading army.

The complete deforestation and denudation of the mountains of China and the floods caused thereby resulted from the intensive individualism of her people, and from their utter lack of any systematic organization of governmental machinery to protect the resources of the country.

An organized system of forest preservation and flood protection, based upon and springing from a spirit of patriotic service to the nation as a whole, would have saved China from the destruction of resources of incalculable value to her[Pg 89] people, and it would have saved millions from death by famine.

The chief original causes of the great famines of China have been floods which were preventable. In some of her largest valleys the floods have resulted primarily from the denudation of the mountains and the destruction of the woodland and forest cover on the watersheds of the rivers.

In "The Changing Chinese" by Prof. Edward A. Ross some vivid descriptions will be found of the havoc wrought by deforestation and flood. Here is one of the pictures he has drawn for us of Chinese conditions:

"On the Nowloon hills opposite Hong Kong there are frightful evidences of erosion due to deforestation several hundred years ago. The loose soil has been washed away till the country is knobbed or blistered with great granite boulders. North of the Gulf of Tonkin I am told that not a tree is to be seen and the surviving balks between the fields show that land once cultivated has become waste. Erosion stripped the soil down to the clay and the[Pg 90] farmers had to abandon the land. The denuded hill-slopes facing the West River have been torn and gullied till the red earth glows through the vegetation like blood. The coast hills of Fokien have lost most of their soil and show little but rocks. Fuel-gatherers constantly climb about them grubbing up shrubs and pulling up the grass. No one tries to grow trees unless he can live in their midst and so prevent their being stolen. The higher ranges further back have been stripped of their trees but not of their soil for, owing to the greater rainfall they receive, a verdant growth quickly springs up and protects their flanks.

"Deep-gullied plateaus of the loess, guttered hillsides, choked water-courses, silted-up bridges, sterilized bottom lands, bankless wandering rivers, dyked torrents that have built up their beds till they meander at the level of the tree-tops, mountain brooks as thick as pea soup, testify to the changes wrought once the reckless ax has let loose the force of running water to resculpture the landscape. No river could drain the friable loess of Northwest China without bringing down great quantities of soil that would raise its bed and make it a menace in its lower, sluggish course. But if the Yellow River is more and more 'China's Sorrow' as the centuries tick off, it is because the rains run off the[Pg 91] deforested slopes of its drainage basin like water off the roof of a house and in the wet season roll down terrible floods which burst the immense and costly embankments, spread like a lake over the plain, and drown whole populations."

We are following faithfully in the footsteps of China in our national policy of non-action or grossly inadequate action. It is only a question of time when we will suffer as they have suffered, unless we mend our ways, and arouse our people to the spirit of patriotic service necessary, over vast areas in the United States, to protect our mountains, forests, valleys, and rivers from the fate of those in China.

The Chinese people, lacking in national patriotism, were overcome by the invasion of barbaric hordes from the North, and were also overwhelmed by the destroying powers of Nature. A national spirit of patriotism, bearing fruit in national organization, would have protected them from both disasters, as it actually did protect the Japanese. The Japanese have not only successfully defended themselves against the aggressions of Russia. In the[Pg 92] same spirit of energetic and purposeful patriotism, they have preserved and utilized to the highest possible extent the resources of their country. They have defended Japan against the destructive forces of Nature which have devastated China.

The hillsides and mountains of many sections of China are bared to the bone of every vestige of forest or woodland cover. The floods have eroded the mountains and filled the valleys with the débris. Torrential floods now rage and destroy where perennial streams once flowed. In Japan, those perennial streams still flow from every hillside and mountain, feeding the myriad of canals with which her fertile fields are laced and interlaced. The result is that on only 12,500,000 acres of intensively cultivated soil Japan sustains a rural population of 30,000,000 people.

The power of Japan as a nation lies in the racial strength of her people. That comes largely from the physical vigor and endurance developed by the daily labor of the gardeners who till the soil. They have the land to cultivate because the[Pg 93] devotion of the people to the good of all has led them to preserve their forests and water supplies. Where would they be to-day if the same spirit of selfish individualism, and apathy and indifference to the national welfare, and to the preservation of the nation's resources, had dominated Japan, that has dominated China for centuries, and that now dominates the United States of America?

"No national ideals could be more antithetic than are the ethical and civic ideals of Japan to those existent in this Republic. One nation is a militant paternalism, where aught that belongs to man is first for the use of the State, the other an individualistic emporium where aught that belongs to man is for sale. In one is the complete subordination of the individual, in the other his supremacy."

The author might with equal truth have added that from the standpoint of the intrenched interests which control capital in the United States, and undertake to control legislation, Humanity and Mother Earth exist only for exploitation for private[Pg 94] profit, and that the campaign to preserve and perpetuate our natural resources and regulate our rivers and build waterways and stop the ravages of Nature's devastating forces has not as yet succeeded only because it proposes to put the general welfare above speculation and exploitation.

This condition will continue until the mass of the people of the United States have a great patriotic awakening and take hold of the duty of perpetuating the country's natural resources, with the same patriotic enthusiasm that they would fight a foreign invader.

Let us not deceive ourselves. The majority of the people of the United States are as apathetic and indifferent to the great national questions involved in the preservation of our forests and water supplies, and of the fertility of our fields,—in the protection of our river valleys from floods,—in the defense of the whole Western half of the United States against the inroads of the desert,—in the protection of the mountain ridges of the Eastern half of the United States from[Pg 95] deforestation,—and in the protection of our valleys from the fate which has befallen the valleys of China, as were the Chinese through the long centuries during which the grinding, destructive forces of Nature were devastating their country and bringing famine and ruin to millions of the people.

Let us heed the lesson of China, and before it is too late enlist the National Construction Reserve to combat this menace which threatens the welfare of our people—grapple with floods in the lower valleys and with floods in the mountain valleys; with forest fires and with forest denudation; with blighting drouth and with desert sands.

Let us recognize that our first duty to ourselves and to our country is to preserve the nation by preserving the resources within the nation, without which the human race must perish from the surface of the earth.

Once this great fundamental need is recognized for protecting the nation's resources and protecting the people by preserving the means whereby the people live,[Pg 96] a national system for bringing into action concerted human effort and constructive energy will be organized.

It will be a system that will substitute for the patriotism, the inspiration, and the victories of war a higher patriotism, a more splendid inspiration, and a more glorious victory. That victory of peace which the people of the United States will finally win will be a greater achievement than anything which ever has or ever can be accomplished by warfare.

This nation can readily manufacture for itself, and store away in its arsenals and warehouses, all the arms and equipment, all the munitions of war that we would need to conduct a victorious war against any nation of the world. It could train sufficient officers, without any increase of our military expenditures, to lead an army large enough to successfully repel any invasion that might ever be attempted in any part of the United States. In the event of a foreign invasion, what would we need that we would not have, and could not get, at least, not quick enough to save ourselves from a stupendous disaster?[Pg 97]

We would need and could not get men,—trained men,—men hardened and inured to the demands of military service in the field. That is the one and only thing we would lack. All the rest of the problem would be easy of solution.

To undertake to enlist a militia of a million men in the United States would not supply this need. The most vital of all the many elements of weakness in militia, especially in this country to-day, would be the total lack of physical stamina and hardihood in the men themselves. Of what use are soldiers who can shoot, in these days of modern warfare, unless they can also dig trenches and endure hardships which are to the ordinary man impossible and inconceivable of being borne?

This necessity for men, trained and hardened men, men inured to the hardships of military service, would be even greater in this country in the event of a war than in any European country, because of the more primitive condition of the country. Vast areas of the United States are uninhabited and waterless. The climate varies[Pg 98] from the intolerable heat, to those not accustomed to it, of the southwestern deserts, to the freezing blizzards of the North.

How are we to supply this need for men trained and toughened to every hardship that must be borne by a soldier fighting under our flag in time of war? The answer is, by enlisting them under the same flag to do the arduous work of peace, which will harden them for the work of war, if they are ever needed in that field of action.

How many of our people are there who realize the work that is being done for Uncle Sam, every day in the year, by the few men who are giving themselves, in a spirit of patriotism equal to that of any soldier, to the field work of the Forest Service, to building forest fire trails, to fighting forest fires. They give warning nowadays of a forest fire, as the people of the Scottish border gave warning of an invasion in the Olden days. When an invading force was coming up from the South a warning was flashed across Scotland from the Solway to the Tweed with[Pg 99] a line of balefires that flamed into the night from the turrets of their castles. It was a call to conflict. It put men on their mettle. So a call to fight a forest fire is a call to conflict and puts men on their mettle for a combat with the oncoming sweep of the devouring fire.

Would not the men who are inured to the work of making surveys across rugged mountains, and to quarrying the rock, laying the stone, digging the canals, and doing all the hard physical work that must be done by the men who have built the great reservoirs and canals constructed by the Reclamation Service, be toughened and hardened by it and fitted to dig trenches in actual warfare, as they have been digging them in Belgium, France, Prussia, and Poland?

For the hard and trying physical work of war there could be no better training than to do the labor for which the Reclamation Service has paid out millions of dollars in the last ten years.

The surveyors of the Land Department, the topographers of the Geological Survey, the men in the field in every branch[Pg 100] of Uncle Sam's service, who are winning for this nation its greatest victories, the victories of peace, are by that work physically developed into the very best and most efficient type of strong and rugged manhood—the stuff of which soldiers must be made.

As a nation we must recognize this all important fact, and avail ourselves of it. We must build at least one branch of a Reserve that would constitute an adequate organized system of national defense on this foundation:

That every dollar that is paid out by Uncle Sam for the doing of constructive government work, which could be temporarily suspended in time of war, shall be paid to a man who had been regularly enlisted in a Construction Reserve for the purpose of doing this work. That those men shall be trained to do that work, and paid for doing it, exactly as though no other object existed. And that every man so enlisted shall be liable instantly to military service if the need should arise, by[Pg 101] reason of our country being involved in war with any other nation.

Every man employed in that service should be enlisted for a term of from three to five years and trained in every way necessary to fit him to perform the duties of a soldier and to endure the hardships of a soldier's life in the event of war.

The Forest Service is now absurdly and pitifully inadequate to the needs of the country. With the exception of small areas recently acquired in the White Mountain and Appalachian regions, its work is chiefly in the western half of the United States.

The work of the Forest Service should be enlarged to meet the needs of the entire country. They should reforest every denuded mountain side, and plant millions upon millions of acres of forests in every State in the United States. That work should go on until in every State the matured forests are ample to provide for all its needs for wood or timber.

The work of the Reclamation Service, instead of being confined to the West only, should be extended to the entire[Pg 102] United States. It should be made to include reclamation by drainage and by protection from overflow just as it now includes reclamation by irrigation. Irrigation systems should be constructed and maintained for the purpose of demonstrating the value of water to increase plant growth, not only in the arid regions, but in every State, East as well as West.

Every acre reclaimed should bear the burden of the benefit it received from the work of the national government and pay its proportion of the cost of reclamation. The entire investment of the government should be repaid with interest. The annual charge should include interest and a sinking fund that would return the capital invested, with interest, within fifty years. The original plan of the National Reclamation Act for a repayment in ten years without interest was wrong. It placed an immediate burden on the settler that was too heavy to be practicable. The Extension Amendment was likewise wrong, because no provision was made for interest. The indebtedness should have[Pg 103] been capitalized at a very low rate of interest under some plan similar to the British System in India. The future success of reclamation work by the national government requires that the investment shall be returned with interest.

In every State the works should be built, in coöperation with the States, municipalities, and local districts, that are necessary to extend to the people of every valley, from Maine to California, from Washington to Florida, and from Montana to Texas, complete assurance of protection from the flood menace in all years. The floods which have in the past brought such appalling catastrophes upon whole valleys and communities, at a cost of millions if not billions of dollars, should be harnessed and controlled and turned from demons of destruction into food-producers and commerce-carriers.

If Japan should land an army on the Pacific Coast would we leave it to future generations to defend us against that invasion? It is equally monstrous and wrong for this generation to leave to future generations the building of the[Pg 104] great works of defense necessary to check the invasion of our valleys by disastrous floods, or the destruction of our forests by the ravages of fire.

Whenever a forest fire breaks out anywhere, there should be an adequate force of men enlisted in Uncle Sam's service for that purpose, to promptly extinguish it. It is as wrong to leave such work wholly to local initiative or action as it would be wrong to leave to the States the question of national defense from possible attack by other nations. Coöperation with the States there should always be, and this the States will willingly extend. Of that we need have no fear. But the initiative must be taken, and the basic plans made and furnished, by the national government. Otherwise the work will never be done that is necessary to defend the nation against Nature's invasions—against forest fires and floods, against drouth and overflow, against denudation and erosion, and against the slow but inexorable encroachments of the Desert in the arid region. The States will not and cannot do it. It requires the overshadowing[Pg 105] authority, initiative and financial resources of the national government.

The Office of Public Roads of the national government should be made a Service for Construction, like the Forest Service and the Reclamation Service. Whatever the national government does to aid in the construction of highways it should do by building them itself, whether they be built as models, to stimulate local interest, or as object lessons to the States through which they run, or as great national highways of travel, linking the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Great Lakes to the Gulf in a continuous system of roads as magnificent as those of ancient Rome. In time of war they would be military highways. In time of peace they would be national highways that would be traveled by multitudes of our people.

A Waterway Service for Construction should be created, wholly separate and apart from the War Department or any of its engineers or employees, to build for this country as complete a system of waterways as now exists in any of the[Pg 106] countries of Europe—real waterways, waterways built to float boats on and to carry inland commerce. Waterways must be built for commerce and to constitute a national waterway system. The false pretense must stop of spending money on waterways merely as a club to lower railroad rates. That policy of indirection and sham has prompted the waste of too many millions of dollars of the people's money in this country.

In this one great interrelated and interdependent work of forest and water conservation, of reclaiming land by irrigation, drainage, and protection from overflow, of regulating and developing the flow of rivers for power development and navigation, and doing everything necessary for the protection of every flood-menaced community and valley, enough men should be enlisted in the different services through which the work is to be done, to do this work with all the expedition required by the welfare of the people at large of this generation.

This would necessitate the employment of an ultimate total of a million men,[Pg 107] scattered throughout every State of the Union. Every dollar paid to them in wages, and every dollar expended in connection with their work, would prevent devastation or create values for the nation immensely larger than the total expenditure. The values created and benefits assured in time of peace would alone justify the expenditure. The value to the nation of such a great Reserve Force of trained and hardened men in time of war would again justify the expenditure. But in the initial expenditure both ends would be attained.

What we pay out from year to year for the support of our Standing Army and our Navy, after each year has passed, is wasted and gone. It is too high a rate to pay for insurance, which in fact is no insurance at all against a possible war. If such a war should come, the Standing Army and the Navy would be hopelessly inadequate for our protection.

The system must be changed. The Standing Army, without any increased expenditure, must be made a training school for all the officers needed for a Reserve of[Pg 108] at least a million men. This should be done immediately! The day is at hand when the nation must take time by the forelock and in time of peace prepare for war, in a sane, intelligent, adequate, and effective way. If it is not done we run the grave risk, with the possibility of war always facing us, of being subjected by our national indifference to the fearful cost of such a conflict if we were forced into it unprepared.

Shall we do this, and get back the full value of every dollar expended, or shall we face the ever growing possibility of a war of one or two or three years duration, costing us in cash outlay two or three billion dollars a year?

It will be argued against this plan for an enlisted National Construction Reserve that the men would have no military training in the event that the need should instantly arise for utilizing them as soldiers. That objection should be removed, by applying to the entire Construction Service, the Swiss system of military training for a fixed period during each year, long enough to train a man for the work[Pg 109] of a soldier, but not long enough to demoralize or ruin him as a man or as a citizen by the life of the barracks or the camp.

The men enlisted in the Construction Service, and entirely under civil control in all the work they would do for ten months of the year, could be given military instruction during the remaining two months. That would not bring upon the people of this country any of the evils that would result from maintaining a standing army large enough to serve as an army of defense in the event of a foreign invasion. And yet, with such a trained Reserve Force already enlisted, the United States would be prepared to instantly put into the field an army of trained and hardened soldiers. Its Reserve Force would be so large that the mere existence of that force would make this nation one of the strongest nations of the world in any military contest. We might then rest assured that other nations would hesitate to attack us or invade our territory. That possibility of danger would be absolutely removed if the plan which will be later[Pg 110] outlined for the creation of a National Homecroft Reserve were adopted as an additional means of national defense.

It will again be argued that we have no system of training officers for an army of any such magnitude. This is quite true. It is an objection that must be met and overcome. The War Department should be required to train and provide these officers. The military posts on which such great sums have been spent for political reasons, and so few of which are located where they should be for real military reasons, should be turned into military training schools for officers.

The rank and file of the regular army should be drawn from a class of men who could be trained in those schools in all the necessary knowledge of military science to qualify them to be officers. They might be private soldiers in the regular army, and at the same time commissioned or non-commissioned officers in the Reserve. A regular army of 50,000, if established on a proper basis, would be able to supply officers for a Reserve of 1,000,000 men.

Every private soldier in the regular[Pg 111] army should be a man fit to become an officer, and in process of training with that object in view. And when that training had been completed, he should be assigned to his detail or his command in the Reserve. A private soldier in time of peace in the regular army, he would instantly become an officer in the Reserve in time of war.

The system should contemplate the retention in the government service, in some constructive capacity, of every man once trained as an officer and capable of rendering service as such in case of war. It is wrong to expect such men to return to private life with a military string tied to them, and take up the complicated duties of a commercial career, with the family obligations that they ought to assume resting upon them, without providing for the contingencies that a call for an immediate return to active service would create.

Every soldier trained as an officer should be retained in the government service, either civil or military, under conditions which would make it possible for him to[Pg 112] establish a family and a home, and at the same time be certain that his family would suffer no privation if he were called to active service in the event of war. This is not the place to work out the details of such a plan, but it is entirely practicable. The details should be worked out by the War Department.

If the people will provide a Reserve of enlisted men under civil control, doing the work of peace in time of peace, and ready for the work of war in time of war, it would be a confession of incompetence for the War Department to question their capacity to train officers for this reserve. Doubtless, however, some of the present regular army idols would have to be shattered.

One of the most serious aspects of our unpreparedness for any military conflict lies in the incompleteness of the present system. As the author of "The Valor of Ignorance" well says, we have no military system. We have no means of training an adequate number of officers or holding them in readiness for service during a long period of peace. Provision should be made[Pg 113] immediately for the War Department to train these officers.

The plan outlined would eliminate the element of weakness that would result from an effort to utilize for national defense officers having no training except that acquired in the State militia. In the plan advocated, every officer needed for an army of a million men in the field would be ready at any moment to step into the service and would have been trained in the work by the military machine of which he would by that act become a part.

The army should be cut away entirely from all participation in the civil affairs of the country, and should devote itself to its legitimate field of getting ready for a possible war and fighting it for us if it should ever come. Instead of blocking the way for the adoption of a comprehensive plan for river regulation and flood protection throughout the country for fear of interference with their existing privileges and authority, their work should be concentrated on the field they are created to fill. That field is the protection of the country from internal disturbance[Pg 114] or external invasion. The civil affairs of the country should be conducted through organized machinery created for civil purposes, and not complicated with the red tape and rule of thumb methods of the War Department. For this work, initiative, constructive imagination and scientific genius must be evoked, and these the Army has not. So long as they cling to this field of work, just that long will progress be delayed, and the legitimate work of the Army be neglected.

CHAPTER V

The system of national defense for every nation must be adapted to the conditions and needs of that nation. All nations are not alike. Each has its distinct problems. The solution, in each case, must be fitted to the nation and its people. There is no system now in operation in any other country that could be fitted as a whole to the United States. A system must be devised that will be applicable to the needs and conditions of this country.

The Swiss system is ideal for Switzerland. A mountaineer is a soldier by nature. Switzerland has a soldierly citizenry and can mobilize it instantly as a citizen soldiery. The Swiss system would have fitted Belgium in spots, but not as a whole. It is adapted to a rural people, who are individually independent and self-sustaining, but not to a manufacturing community, where the people cannot exist without the factory, or the factory without the people.[Pg 116]

It would be impracticable to adopt the Swiss system as a whole in the United States. It would fit some communities but not others. Military training would be beneficial to all boys, but our public school system is controlled by the States, counties, and local districts, and not by the nation. To adapt it to the Swiss system of universal military training in the public schools will require a propaganda to educate public sentiment that will necessitate years of patient work. A generation will pass before we will be able to mobilize a force for national defense from Reservists who will have received their military training in the public schools.

A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled the industries of the country by depriving them of the labor necessary to their operation. In the United States, one of the most urgent reasons for having an automatically acting system of national defense perfectly organized in advance and ready in case of emergency, is to insure the continuance of the industries of the country without interruption, and to prevent any industrial[Pg 117] depression or interference with the prosperity of the country. A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled industries by drawing away their labor.

It would cause serious industrial derangement to mobilize an army of citizen soldiers from men already enlisted in the ranks of labor in mill, shop, factory, or mine. Besides that, the majority of them have families, and live from hand to mouth with nothing between them and starvation but the pay envelope Saturday night. The impracticability of recruiting soldiers or mobilizing a reserve force from wage earners or clerical employees with families dependent on their earnings for their living, must always be borne in mind.

In Switzerland, the active, out-of-door life of the people makes the majority of them rugged and vigorous. They have sturdy legs and strong arms. They are sound, "wind, limb, and body." They are already inured to the work of a soldier's life and its duties, any moment they may be called to the colors.

In this country the life of the apartments,[Pg 118] flats, and tenements, and the frivolous, immoral, and deteriorating influences and evil environments of congested cities, are sapping the vitality of our people, and rapidly transforming them into a race of mental and physical weaklings and degenerates. Even now the great majority of them utterly lack the physical hardihood and vigor without which a soldier would not be worth the cost of his arms and equipment.

It would overtax most city clerks and factory workers to walk to and from the football or baseball games that constitute our chief national pastime. About the only thing to which they are really inured is to sit on benches, for hours at a time, and to yell, loud and long, to add zest to games that are being played by others. It has been most truly said that "We are not a nation of athletes, we are a nation of Rooters." Many of our devotees of commercialized sport would perhaps be able to yell loud enough to scare the enemy off in case of war, but they would not be able to march to the battlefields where this soldierly aid might be required. A[Pg 119] special automobile service would have to be provided for their transportation.

Think of this the next time you see a howling mob of fans or rooters at a baseball or football game, and "Lest we forget," think also of England's lesson when she undertook to enlist soldiers from such a citizenry. Then consider very seriously whether you don't think we had better in this country create some communities of real men, like the Homecrofters of Scotland. There are many rural neighborhoods in Scotland from which every man of military age enlisted when the call came for soldiers to fight to sustain Britain's Empire power in this last great war.

Do we want a citizen soldiery composed of such men as those who, since 1794, have served in the ranks of the Gordon Highlanders, or composed of such men as the Gardeners of Japan, who wrested Port Arthur from the Russians, or do we want to depend on a national militia of citizen soldiers enrolled from among the pink-cheeked dudelets and mush-faced weaklings from the apartments, flats, and[Pg 120] tenements of our congested cities or factory towns, whose highest ambition is to smoke cigarettes, ape a fashion plate, or stand and gape at a baseball score on a bulletin board? They like that sort of sport, because they can enjoy it standing still. It necessitates no physical exertion. If they could ever be induced to enlist as soldiers, their feet would be too sore to walk any farther, before they had marched forty miles. A day's work with a shovel, digging a trench, would send most of them to the hospital with strained muscles and lame backs. And yet, trench-digging seems to be the most important part of a soldier's duty in these days of civilized warfare, when the machinery for murder by wholesale has been so splendidly perfected.

If we are going to have a citizen soldiery in this country, the first thing we had better set about is to produce a soldierly citizenry—a race of men with the physical vigor of the Swiss Mountaineers, or of the men who founded our own nation, who fought the battles of the Revolution, who dyed with their red blood the white[Pg 121] snows of Valley Forge, who marched through floods and floating ice up to their armpits to the capture of Fort Vincennes, who floated down the Ohio River on rafts or walked down the Wilderness Road with Boone, who fought Indians, broke prairie, traversed the waterless deserts, and conquered the wilderness from the crest of the Alleghenies to the shores of the Pacific, sustained by the strong women who stood by their sides and shared their hardships.

The weakness of the United States as a nation to-day, a weakness much more deeply rooted than mere military unpreparedness, lies in the fact that as a nation we have no national ideals that rise above commercialism, no national ambitions beyond making or controlling money, which the devotees of Mammon delight to call "Practicing the Arts of Peace."

Manhood and womanhood are being utterly sacrificed to mere money-making. National wealth is calculated in units of dollars, and not in units of citizenship. To accumulate wealth is the controlling ambition of our people, and not to perpetuate[Pg 122] the strong racial type from which we are all descended.

Not only is the original sturdy American Anglo-Saxon stock being degenerated, but we are bringing to our shores millions of the strong and vigorous races from Southern and Eastern Europe, and crowding them into tenements and slums to rot, both physically and mentally. That cancer is eating away the heart and corrupting the very lifeblood of this nation. Those conditions would soon be changed if the mass of our people, and particularly Organized Capital and Organized Labor, would place Humanity above Money.

Capital thinks only of Dividends. Labor thinks only of Wages. Neither gives the slightest heed to making this a nation of Rural Homes and thereby perpetuating the racial strength and virility of the people of the nation. That can only be done by providing a right life environment for all wageworkers and their families, particularly the children. A home for a family is not entitled to be called a home, unless it is both an individual[Pg 123] home and a garden home. It must be a Homecroft—a home with an abundance of sunshine and fresh air, in decent, sanitary surroundings—a home with a piece of ground about it from which in time of stress or unemployment the family can get its living by its labor, and thereby enjoy economic independence.

Industry will destroy humanity unless a national system of life is universally adopted that will prevent racial deterioration. The only way that can be done is by a nation-wide abandonment of the artificial and degenerate life of the congested cities. The people must be educated and trained so that they will desert the flats and tenements as rats would abandon a sinking ship.

Our first great national undertaking should be the creation of a national system of life that will realize the ideals of the Homecroft Slogan:

Unless the united power of the people as a whole is soon put forth to check the physical and racial deterioration now going on at such an appalling rate among the masses of our wageworkers,—the result of the wrong conditions that surround their lives,—nothing can prevent the eventual ruin of this nation. We are already on the downward course along which Rome swept to the abyss of human degeneracy in which she was at last destroyed by the same causes that are so widely at work in this country to-day.

Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions. They cannot shirk that responsibility. They cannot evade the fact that the menace against which we most need national defense arises from the degeneracy that we are breeding in our midst. If we cannot do both, we had far better spend our national energies and revenues in fighting the evils that are rotting our citizenship, than in building forts and fortifications or maintaining a navy and an army for defense against the remote possibility of attacks by other nations.[Pg 125]

We hear much of the danger to New York from such an attack. New York is in far greater danger from the criminal, immoral, evil, and degenerating forces that she is nursing in her own bosom than she is from any military force that might be landed on our shores by a foreign invader. The enemies she has most to fear are her own Gunmen and Bomb-throwers; Black-handers and White-Slavers; Apaches, Dope Fiends, Gamblers, and Gangsters; Tenement House Landlords; Out-of-Works, and all the breeders of poverty, crime, insanity, disease, and human misery that are rampant in her midst,—the direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has herself created and for which she alone is responsible.

This is no overdrawn picture. It is only the briefest possible outline of the evil conditions which less than a century of the Service of Mammon has bred in that mighty metropolis. Everyone who reads the newspapers which reflect the daily events of New York City will appreciate how impossible it is to portray in[Pg 126] words the depth of degradation to which a great mass of humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon—rich as well as poor.

The invasion that New York City should most fear, that of Vice and Crime and Degeneracy, has been accomplished. They have captured the outer fortifications and are intrenched within the citadel. The Goths are not at the gates,—they are within the gates.

Uncle Sam has transformed the wild Apaches of the Southwest into steady and industrious laborers who have done yeoman work with the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service in Arizona. New York is now breeding, in her modern canyons and cliff dwellings, a more bloodthirsty, cruel, and treacherous race of Apaches than were ever bred amid the mountain fastnesses and forbidding deserts of the Southwest.

Do not these domestic enemies constitute a more immediate danger than any foreign enemy?

The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow our imaginations, is still in the remote distance—a[Pg 127] future possibility, not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast.

The greatest merit of the plan for national defense advocated in this book is that it will safeguard against danger from these domestic enemies, who are already in our midst, at the same time that it will safeguard, in the only adequate way yet proposed, against war or any possibility of a foreign invasion.

Many see the danger of a social or political cataclysm resulting from the saturnalia of degeneracy, disease, and crime that is being bred by tenement life and congested cities. Unfortunately they see no remedy for it but a stronger central government and a bigger standing army.

This desire for a standing army to protect against internal social or industrial disturbance leads to enthusiastic advocacy, on any pretext whatever, for a bigger army and navy whenever opportunity is presented. If the truth were known, the majority of those who so vigorously advocate a bigger and still bigger army and navy, are prompted by fear of an enemy in our midst, arising from human degeneracy[Pg 128] in cities or from social or labor conflicts, more than by any danger of conflict with another nation.

The men who have built our great congested cities have undermined the pillars of the temple of our national strength and safety. Now they want protection from the consequences of their own work, which they so justly fear. They want this nation to adopt the Roman System, which finally worked Rome's destruction. They want soldiers hired to protect them because they fear the consequences of the things they have done, just to make money, and they cannot protect themselves from the dangers their own greed for wealth, at any cost to humanity, has created.

The inevitable result of the establishment of such a system of national defense as they advocate would be a military oligarchy. Combined with our present money oligarchy, it would be politically invincible. In some great internal crisis or social and political disturbance, all power would be centralized and our government would be transformed into a military[Pg 129] autocracy. From that time on we would follow in the footsteps of Rome to our certain doom as a people and a nation.

It is a curious fact that this desire for protection from internal disturbance by a hired standing army comes from the very class in the United States which was, at the last, in Rome, ground between the upper and the nether millstones—between the army above and the proletariat below—in the final working out of the Roman System. The proscriptions of the Roman Emperors, to propitiate their armies, are forgotten by the modern patricians who clamor for a large standing army.

The patrician class in this country, who are now in their hearts praying for a strong centralized military government,—patiently and persistently planning for it, and making steady progress, too,—are the very class whose estates were confiscated, and their owners proscribed and executed by thousands to enable the Roman Emperors to appropriate their wealth and from that source satisfy the[Pg 130] demands of the Army. The Army had to be rewarded for their services in conferring the purple on the Emperor, which they did by virtue of their military control of the government. It was the Army who made and unmade Emperors. The Emperors bought the Army with money and bribed the populace with feasts and games. The money to do both was obtained by the proscription and plunder of the wealthy patricians, the same class which in our time is now trying so hard to establish a gilded caste in New York and other great centers of wealth and a strong military government for this nation.

Whatever system of national defense is to be adopted in the United States, it must be a system in which the people themselves, as citizens and not as professional soldiers, furnish the human material for national defense. The people must control our army of citizen soldiery so absolutely that it can never be turned against their personal liberties or property rights. Let us heed the warning of Rome. It is none too soon. Let us beware of either confiscation or proscription as an evolution[Pg 131] from a military government to a military despotism.

Switzerland alone, of all the civilized nations, and the smallest of them all, stands to-day a living demonstration of the National Spirit and the National System of Universal Service to their Country that should be adopted by all the nations of the world, to the fullest extent that it can be made applicable to their conditions. The Swiss System provides adequate national defense by the entire citizenship of the nation. Any subversion of the people's liberties through the power of the Army is impossible because the people themselves constitute the Army.

Australia has already adopted the Swiss System, substantially, and in consequence will escape the danger of military domination which will fasten itself on this country if our system of national defense is to consist only of a steadily increasing standing army. If we are to escape that danger we must never lose sight of the chief merit of the Swiss System, which is that every citizen participates in it and is affected by it, and we must as nearly as[Pg 132] possible adapt it to the conditions existing in this country. There are many lessons that we might learn from the Swiss to our great national advantage.

If the Spirit of Switzerland, the self-reliant independence of her people, and their physical and mental vigor, individually and collectively, her national motto "All for each and each for all," dominated a nation of 100,000,000 people, like the United States, with an area of 2,973,890 square miles, exclusive of Alaska, as it does a nation of something less than 4,000,000 people, with an area of only 15,976 square miles, that Spirit and that System of national defense would soon become the universal system of the world.

The most dangerous military system for any nation, large or small, is a standing army large enough to invite attack, but not strong enough to repel it. That was the system of Belgium, and to that fact is due the destruction of Belgium. It is the present system of the United States. The most striking feature of our unpreparedness for war is the fact that it would be hopelessly impossible to defend[Pg 133] ourselves against invasion without an army so huge as to dwarf our present army into insignificance.

The Swiss System is the best for Switzerland and is no doubt the best for Australia, but when adapting it, so far as may be practicable, to the conditions existing in the United States, we must not fall into the error of assuming that numerical strength is the only thing necessary in calculating the strength of an army. Soldiers alone are not all that a nation needs for defense, no matter how well they may be trained and equipped, or drilled and officered, or supplemented by naval strength or fortifications. The foundations on which national defense must be built are social, economic, and human. The question involves every element of the problem of preserving and perpetuating even-handed justice to all, social stability, economic strength and independence, a patriotic citizenship, and a rugged, stalwart, and virile race.

The population of Switzerland is less than that of the city of London, but if London were a nation by itself, with its[Pg 134] congested population, human degeneration, artificial life, moral decay, and economic dependence, it would be impossible of defense from a military point of view.

Just exactly in the proportion that the United States gathers its population into great cities, does it court the same elements of weakness, but with this practical difference. London, being a part of the British Empire, is safeguarded by the whole civil and military power of that nation. Our great seaboard cities, being a part of the United States, are practically defenseless, because our people have no system or policy of national defense. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in the event of an attack by the invading military forces of any of the Great Powers, would be surrendered just as Brussels and Antwerp were surrendered, to save them from destruction, if for no other reason.

CHAPTER VI

The most serious menace to the future peace of this country arises not so much from the possibility of a sudden invasion in time of war by some foreign nation, as from the danger of racial conflict resulting from the slow, steadily increasing invasion of an Asiatic people in time of peace. Year after year they are coming in thousands to make their homes within the territory of the United States.

No one who has watched the steady increase of Japanese population in Hawaii and in our Pacific Coast States can fail to realize this danger. It is a danger that is already threatening us. It exists to-day, and will continue to exist every day in the future. It cannot be pushed aside. We cannot remove it by ignoring it.

Some unexpected incident may at any time start excitement and cause an explosion that would precipitate a national conflict. In such an event either Japan or[Pg 136] the United States might be forced into war by an irresistible upheaval of public sentiment. We had that experience in the case of the blowing up of the Maine. We must not ignore the possibility that some such moving cause for war might again occur, and start a flame against which the governments and the Peace Advocates of both nations would be powerless.

It is unfortunate that the people of the United States generally have no appreciation of these facts, and give no thought to safeguarding against them. Their consideration should be approached with the most perfect friendliness and good feeling, nationally and individually, so far as the Japanese are concerned. Instead of antagonizing the Japanese, we should cultivate their good will. There is no nation on the earth—no other race of people—who more richly deserve and merit the good will of other nations.

Those of the Japanese who come among us should be conceded to have come with the most pacific intentions. They come from an overcrowded country to one that[Pg 137] is sparsely inhabited—a country that is to them a Land of Promise—a Land flowing with milk and honey—another Garden of Eden. All the majority of them want is so much of it as they can cultivate with their own labor. To their minds that means both comfort and a competence. They are poor and they long to be rich. Do they differ from us in that?

They come to the Pacific Coast for the same reasons that the early settlers went into the great West and endured so many hardships to get homes on the land. They are impelled by the same desire to find the Golden Fleece that started the migration of the Pioneers of Forty-Nine. But the Japanese are coming to dig the gold out of gardens and orchards and vineyards, instead of from the placer mines.

The average American who has much land on the Pacific Coast wants a tenant. The average Japanese wants only a hoe with which to till the land. Give him the land and the hoe and he will do the rest. He does not want to hire somebody to do the work for him or to find somebody who will pay him for the privilege of doing it.[Pg 138]

The Caucasian cultivators of the soil, where there are such, cannot stand against the competition of either the Chinese or the Japanese. The danger of racial controversy results from this economic competition. It is a struggle for the survival of the fittest. The Japanese is the strongest in that struggle. The Caucasian must succumb or fall back on his government for protection. In the case of the Chinese this controversy bred bitter strife. In the case of the Japanese it is liable at any moment to cause serious international controversy.

That danger will continue until we put a population on every acre of the rich and fertile land on the Pacific Coast. On every such acre there must be an occupant who will till the land himself—not a mere owner looking for a tenant.

The Japanese know the value of water as well as the value of land. Every cultivated acre in Japan is an irrigated acre. If we are to safeguard against the menace of conflict with Japan we must not only ourselves populate and cultivate the land that the Japanese covet, but we must conserve[Pg 139] and use the water as well. We must do with the country what the Japanese people would do with it if it were theirs. So long as it remains, from their point of view, unoccupied and unused, they will covet it, and in the end they will possess it, unless we use and possess it ourselves in advance of them.

In the great central valley of that State, including the foothill country, there are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world. The water with which to irrigate every unirrigated acre of it runs to waste year after year. Every acre of it could be irrigated. Every acre of it would support a family. It is so sparsely settled that to the Japanese mind it is vacant and unoccupied. The greater part of it is to-day unreclaimed. Some of it is producing grain or hay. The rest is pasture—grazing ground for herds of live stock where there should be gardens intensively cultivated and homes forming closely settled communities.

In Japan, on 12,500,000 acres, the same[Pg 140] area as in California and no better land, they have evolved a population of expert gardeners and their families of 30,000,000 rural people. There is not land enough in Japan to give back a comfortable living as the reward for their labor. The great mass of the farming people—really they are not farmers—they are gardeners—are very poor. California holds out to them a chance for every family to become rich from their point of view. Should we wonder that they come to California?

The constant pressure of the population in Japan to overflow will make a corresponding inflowing pressure upon California. It is like the pressure of air upon a vacuum. The way to relieve the pressure is to fill the vacuum. California is the vacuum. Fill it with people of the Caucasian race who will till the soil they own with their own hands, and the pressure upon this California vacuum from Asiatic peoples will cease.

If California's garden lands were as densely populated as Belgium was before the war, there would be no Japanese[Pg 141] danger-zone, provided the California cultivators of the soil tilled their own acres, or acre, as the Japanese do in their own country and want to do in California.

It would be necessary, in order to settle the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California in that way, to use for the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley, all the flood water now wasted in the Sacramento Valley. That can be done. There is no question about it whatever. The first recommendation to do it was made by a Commission of eminent engineers appointed by General Grant, when President, to report on the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley.

It would require large and comprehensive planning, and the coöperation of the State and the nation. But had not the nation better spend millions to populate the country the Japanese covet, than to spend millions to fight a war with them to keep them out of it. Is it not better to settle the country, and in that way settle the controversy, than to run the risk of losing all the precious lives and treasure[Pg 142] that a war would cost, and the risk of having California devastated by that war in the same way that Belgium has been destroyed?

Ought not that awful possibility to be enough to awaken the people of the United States to the necessity of doing something, and doing it quick, to populate the Pacific Coast?

If anyone doubts that the Japanese are gaining a firm foothold in our territory, and a foothold that is steadily growing stronger year by year, they will be convinced by the mere statement of the facts as to the Japanese influx into the United States.

The facts relating to that influx and the menace it holds for this country in the event of a war with Japan, are dispassionately set forth in "The Valor of Ignorance," by Homer Lea, published in 1909. The author was a Californian, but had lived many years in the Orient. He had studied it deeply and thoroughly understood his subject.

In his book he calls attention to the fact that the Japanese population in Hawaii[Pg 143] increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in 1896 to 61,115 in 1909.

"Japanese immigration into the Hawaiian Islands, from 1900 to 1908, has been 65,708. The departures during this period were 42,313. The military unfit have in this manner been supplanted by the veterans of a great war, and the military occupation of Hawaii tentatively accomplished.

"In these islands at the present time the number of Japanese who have completed their active term of service in the Imperial armies, a part of whom are veterans of the Russian War, exceeds the entire field army of the United States."

Of more startling importance are the facts with reference to Japanese immigration to the mainland territory of the United States, which are given in the same volume as follows:

Immigration by political periods:

During the last six years there have come to the United States (Report of Bureau of Immigration) 90,123 Japanese male adults.

In California the Japanese constitute more than one-seventh of the male adults of military age:

In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth of the male population of military age:

The foregoing rapidly increasing tide of Asiatic immigration forced attention to the subject, and in 1908 the Japanese government agreed voluntarily with the United States that in future passports should not be issued by the Japanese government to laborers desiring to emigrate from Japan to the United States. This temporarily checked this class of immigration and in the year ending June 30, 1908, the total immigration fell to 16,418; the year ending June 30, 1909, to 3,275; the year ending June 30, 1910, to 2,798.

But note the steady increase since then! Year ending June 30, 1911, 4,575; year ending June 30, 1912, 6,172; year ending June 30, 1913, 8,302; year ending June 30, 1914, 8,941.[Pg 145]

These figures, however, give no adequate conception of the actual facts, as they have developed in California during the last ten years in such a way as to stimulate racial controversy. Some of the most beautiful and productive sections of the fruit-growing regions of California have been entirely absorbed by Japanese. Caucasian communities have become Japanese communities. Such a transformation is certainly not one that is calculated to allay racial controversy.

The alien land law of California will not allay racial controversy—it will intensify it. Japan has protested against it, as she protested against our acquisition of Hawaii, and there has been no withdrawal of her protests.

The Japanese government has shown a disposition to mitigate the danger of controversy by limiting the emigration of Japanese to this country, but that government can not control her people after they come to this country. If they cannot buy land they will lease it. That leads to all the trouble indicated in the following newspaper item:[Pg 146]

"Tacoma, Wash., Jan. 5 (1915).—The Tacoma delegation to the legislature, which will meet on January 11, has been notified that a bill will be introduced for a State referendum on a law to prevent leasing of Washington land to Asiatics. Many members of the legislature are pledged to support the measure.

"Japanese gardeners, it is contended, are increasing in numbers, getting the best land about the cities under lease, and some of them lease land for 99 years or have a trustee buy it for them. Many Japanese marry 'picture brides' and later have their leases of titles transferred to their infant sons and daughters born here.

"An amendment submitted in November permitting aliens to own land in cities was overwhelmingly defeated."

There is very little doubt that the majority of the Japanese on the Pacific Coast are soldiers, veterans of the Japanese wars, and that in case of war Japan could mobilize on our territory between the Pacific Ocean and the inaccessible mountains constituting the Cascade and Sierra Nevada Ranges, more Japanese soldiers who are right now in that territory than we have United States troops in the[Pg 147] whole mainland territory of the United States, or will have when our army is enlisted up to its full strength of 100,000 men.

The figures given in "The Valor of Ignorance" show that in 1907 there were 62,725 Japanese of military age in the States of Washington and California. Since then, up to June 30, 1914, the Japanese immigration has been 50,481, and nearly all of those who come are men of military age. So that now we have no doubt more trained Japanese soldiers in California, Oregon and Washington, than our entire standing army if it were enlisted to its full quota of 100,000 men, including every soldier we have, wherever he may be stationed.

And at the rate they are now coming, in ten years we will have more than our entire standing army would then be if we increased it to 200,000, as the Militarists urge should be done.

That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States straight in the face.[Pg 148]

It may be that all cannot be brought to agree as to what ought to be done, but certainly all must agree that something should be done, and it is equally certain that neither an Exclusion Law, nor an Alien Land Law, nor an Alien Leasing Law, will settle the question, or relieve the strain of racial competition that is certain, unless obviated, to eventually breed an armed conflict with Japan.

The same author who has been previously quoted, referring to the Philippine Islands, says:

"The conquest of these islands by Japan will be less of a military undertaking than was the seizure of Cuba by the United States; for while Santiago de Cuba did not fall until nearly three months after the declaration of war, Manila will be forced to surrender in less than three weeks. Otherwise the occupation of Cuba portrays with reasonable exactitude the manner in which the Philippines will be taken over by Japan."

Since this was written the events of the present war have still further strengthened the Japanese power in the Pacific. First China, then Russia, and now Germany[Pg 149] have been eliminated. To complacently assume that Japan will never have occasion to cross swords with the United States, is surely a most mistaken attitude for the people of this country to delude themselves with. It is contrary to every dictate of common sense and reason, when the people of the Pacific Coast are forced for their own protection to enact legislation which Japan interprets as a violation of her treaty rights. The average run of people in other States give no thought to the matter. They say, "Yes, California has her problem with the Japs." It is not California's problem. It is the problem of the United States.

And in calling attention to the practical impossibility of defending the Pacific Coast against Japanese invasion and occupation in the event of war, the author heretofore quoted from calls attention to the following facts, among others, showing our unpreparedness and the complete inadequacy of our defenses:

"The short period of time within which Japan is able to transport her armies to this continent—200,000 men in four weeks, a[Pg 150] half million in four months, and more than a million in ten months—necessitates in this Republic a corresponding degree of preparedness and rapidity of mobilization.

"Within one month after the declaration of war this Republic must place, in each of the three defensive spheres of the Pacific Coast, armies that are capable of giving battle to the maximum number of troops that Japan can transport in a single voyage. This is known to be in excess of 200,000 men.... We have called attention to the brevity of modern wars in general and naval movements in particular; how within a few weeks after war is declared, concurrent with the seizure of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Alaska, will the conquest of Washington and Oregon be consummated. In the same manner within three months after hostilities have been begun there, armies will land upon the seaboard of Southern California.... No force can be placed on the seaboard of Southern California either within three months or nine months that would delay the advance of the Japanese armies a single day.

"The maximum force that can be mobilized in the Republic immediately following a declaration of war is less than 100,000 men, of whom two-thirds are militia. This force, made up of more than forty miniature armies, is scattered, each under separate military[Pg 151] and civil jurisdiction, over the entire nation. By the time these heterogeneous elements are gathered together, organized into proper military units, and made ready for transportation to the front, the States of Washington and Oregon will have been invaded and their conquest made complete by a vastly superior force.... So long as the existent military system continues in the Republic there can be no adequate defense of any single portion of the Pacific Coast within a year after a declaration of war, nor the three spheres within as many years."

Apparently neither the Militarists, nor the Passivists, nor the Pacificists, nor the Pacificators, ever give any thought or heed to the fact of danger from within as the result of a steadily growing alien population, permanently settled in the United States, and which would in the event of war constitute a force larger than any army we would have available for defense.

The chief danger of an armed conflict with Japan arises from the existence in our midst of this alien population, and the danger that the pressure of their competition may breed strife similar to that which preceded the Chinese Exclusion[Pg 152] Act, a situation which can never be applied to Japan without creating a certainty of war immediately or in the future.

In this respect we are like a people living on the slopes below the crater of a volcano. We can never know when an eruption may take place or what its extent or consequences may be. All we do know is that the danger exists; and it is folly beyond the possibility of expression or description to ignore that fact, and perpetuate our national indifference and unpreparedness. It is this situation on the Pacific Coast, more than any other one thing, which makes the advocacy of disarmament for this nation so inconceivably dangerous unless Japan and China should also disarm, which we may rest assured they will never do. China is just entering upon a new era of militarism under a Military Dictator whose policy will be for arms and armament.

If the disarmament of the United States were to be agreed to and carried out because other nations agreed to disarm, and Japan and China were willing to disarm,[Pg 153] then the disarmament of Asiatic nations would have to be coupled with the further safeguard of an agreement stopping emigration from Asia to America—not only to North America, but to South America as well. It is not proposed by any of the advocates of disarmament to stop such immigration, nor will it be stopped. The fact that it will continue indefinitely through the years of the future is a fact which must be recognized as fundamental in dealing with the question of national defense for the United States of America.

The economic conditions created by the Asiatic in America are more dangerous and difficult of adjustment than any problem resulting from the military or naval strength of any Asiatic nation so long as their people in times of peace will stay in Asia. But they will not stay in Asia of their own accord, and they will not be forced to do so. We must face not only the problems that will arise from a large Asiatic population on the Pacific Coast of the United States, but in South America, Central America, and Mexico.[Pg 154]

In a few generations the Japanese will control the northern Pacific shores of South America. Peru will come to be in reality a Japanese country. The Japanese will control because they will be in a majority, just as they now constitute a majority of the population of Hawaii. They will dominate the Indian population and will absorb or supplant the Spanish just as we have done in California. In the course of time the Japanese will control Mexico in the same way, unless we control it ourselves.

It does not follow that we could not live at peace with the Japanese, if they controlled South America and Mexico, as we now live at peace with them when they only control Japan, Formosa, Sakhalin, Korea, and their sphere of influence in Manchuria, as well as Tsing Tau and their Pacific Islands.

But if we are to do so, it can only be done by meeting their economic competition and establishing within our own territory a system of physical and mental development, a social and economic system, and a system of military defense,[Pg 155] that will not only be equal but superior to theirs.

The conflict between the races of Asia and the races of America is the age-old competition to test which is the stronger race. The fittest will survive. We cannot defend ourselves by temporary exclusion, as we have tried to do with the Chinese. It is only a question of time when China will emerge from the slumber of the centuries and provide herself with all the implements of modern warfare necessary to insist upon the same treatment for her people that we accord to other nations.

It may be a long time before an armed conflict between the United States and Japan is precipitated, but it is inevitable, unless the national policy advocated in this book is adopted. War between this country and Japan within the next forty years, unless the present trend is checked, is as inevitable as it has been at all times during the last forty years between France and Germany, with this difference:

The present European war is the result of primary causes that were so deeply[Pg 156] rooted in wrong and injustice, that no human power could eradicate them. It is different with Japan. We have no long standing or deeply rooted controversy with Japan and we need never have if we meet the economic problem involved in this great racial competition between Asia and America. It is coming upon us, however, with the slow moving certainty of a glacier, and meet it we must. We must prevail or be overwhelmed, and unless we can face the economic conflicts involved and triumph in them, it is useless for us to undertake to hold our ground by militarism alone.

The fact undoubtedly is that of all three of the plans now before the people of the United States for national defense or for preserving peace, the most dangerous and deceptive is that of the militarists, for a bigger standing army and a bigger navy. It would create a false and misleading feeling of security from danger which would becloud the real problems involved and make their solution more difficult, if not impossible.

Japan to-day has the most efficient[Pg 157] military system of any nation of the world. This statement refers to the system. Other nations may have larger armies, but Japan's military system, like that of Switzerland, is fitted into and matches with her whole social, commercial, and economic system. It is a part of the very fiber of her national being, and not an excrescence, as is our standing army.

And behind this she has the most adaptable, industrious, and physically and mentally efficient and vigorous people of the world. The danger of war between the United States and Japan is not so much a present as a future danger. Whether it is in the near future or the far future depends largely on accident.

The danger could be removed entirely if the American people would substitute intelligent study of the problem for bumptious conceit, and concerted action on right lines for aimless talk. Unless we do that our ultimate fate is as inevitable as that of Rome when she vainly strove by militarism alone to protect a decadent nation against the onslaughts of virile[Pg 158] races. Our fate will not be so long delayed because we are now crowding into a decade the events that once evolved slowly through a century. We may reach in forty years a condition of relative weakness as against opposing forces which Rome reached only after four hundred years.

There will never be a war between Japan and the United States if the people of this country will do unto the Japanese in all things as we would desire the Japanese to do unto us, if our situations were reversed, and they occupied this country and we theirs, provided always, that we at the same time recognize that the Japanese are the stronger rather than the weaker race, and cannot be exploited or their labor permanently appropriated for our profit rather than theirs; and provided further, that we recognize that Japan is enormously overpopulated; that her population, which has grown from only four or five million in the tenth century to over fifty million in the twentieth, is increasing at the rate of over 1,000,000 a year, and that the hive must swarm.[Pg 159]

This necessity sets forces in motion that are as irresistible in their workings as the laws that control the universe and direct the stars in their courses. Whenever race meets race in such a fundamental struggle for existence, the law of the survival of the fittest is inexorable. As Japan increases her population, she becomes stronger, because wherever her people go they root themselves to the soil. As we increase our population, we become weaker, because we steadily enlarge the proportion of our population that we crowd into congested cities where it rots.

The poison of an Industrial System resting upon a system of life that destroys Humanity is filtering into the Japanese body politic, but before it seriously degenerates their racial strength the Japanese will see its evil effects on the State, and remove the cause.

We see its evil effects on the State, but seem unable to shake off the grip of Commercialism which is responsible for it. We will never shake off that grip until we can rise to the higher level of patriotism[Pg 160] which will subordinate Commerce and Industry to the welfare of Humanity.

Unless we are willing to accept, as the inevitable end of our civilization, the fate of all the Ancient Civilizations, we must remember that no nation can endure in which one class is exploited for the benefit of another. The same rule applies inexorably to any attempt by the people of one country to exploit the people of another and live on their labor.

If an armed conflict should be precipitated in the near future between this country and Japan it will grow out of racial controversies resulting from an effort to exploit the Japanese in the United States in the same way that we are exploiting the immigrants from European countries. The difficulty that now faces the people of the United States with reference to the Japanese problem arises from the fact that we can neither exploit, nor exclude, nor assimilate the Japanese, nor can we, under present conditions, survive their economic competition within our own territory.

Let the question of exploitation be first[Pg 161] considered. There is a strong contingent of Americans on the Pacific Coast who openly advocate Japanese immigration. They argue that our proud and superior race will not condescend to do the "squat labor," as they term it, that is necessary to get the gold from the gardens of California—and from her vast plantations of potatoes, vegetables, and other food products that are grown on the marvelously fertile soil of that State. So they want the Japanese to come and do the "squat labor" while the Aristocratic Anglo-Saxon reaps the lion's share of the profits as the owner of the land.

That the docile and subservient Chinese were the best field laborers that were ever found by any body of plantation-owners, and for a time the Caucasian owners of the orchards and vineyards and lordly demesnes of California prospered mightily from the profits earned for them by the labor of the lowly Chinese.

The Chinese were not only faithful and[Pg 162] industrious, they were frugal as well. They saved their money. Soon they were not only laborers, but also capitalists, in a small way. Then they began to buy land and work in their own fields, gardens, and orchards. The industries that produced food from land as the result of intensive cultivation with human labor were rapidly passing into the hands of the Chinese. They were rapidly buying the lands which were the basis of those industries. They were ceasing to work for the benefit of another race. They worked for themselves and their own benefit.

And that was not all. One after another every manufacturing industry in California in which human labor was a large element of production was being absorbed by the Chinese. First they worked for American Manufacturers. Then they became their own employers and the American Manufacturer was forced out of business by the economic competition of a stronger race. In the end, it came to be seen of all men that the Caucasian Manufacturer, the Caucasian Wageworker, and the Caucasian Landowner,[Pg 163] and food producer, were gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition of the Chinese.

If we had not done so, in less than a generation the Pacific Coast would have been a Chinese Country, and no oppression or mistreatment to which they could have been subjected would have prevented it, if they had been allowed to continue the process of commercial and agricultural absorption that had progressed so far before we finally excluded them.

Now the Japanese are repeating the same process of absorption. We cannot exclude them, and if we undertook to do so, it would only be postponing the evil day, when such a policy would breed an armed conflict. The Japanese regard the law that prohibits their acquisition of land as a violation of our treaty with them. They look to our own Courts to finally decide it to be unconstitutional. It may be a long time coming, but the final result of the law preventing them from acquiring land in California will be war with Japan[Pg 164] unless other measures are adopted to supplement one that will ultimately prove so futile.

The exclusion of the Japanese from the right to acquire land, but still permitting them to lease land, makes the situation more dangerous than it was before. It adds to all the dangers of the purely economic struggle which resulted from Chinese Competition, the additional danger of all the bad blood that a tenantry system inevitably develops. Every lease-hold will develop into a breeding place for friction and conflict between individual landlords and tenants, as well as conflicts between them as opposing classes, and will result finally in the same racial controversies that led up to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Already the Japanese tenantry in the Delta of the San Joaquin River have formed a protective association to enable them to oppose the organized power of the mass against any objectionable conditions imposed by their landlords, as well as to fix the rental they are willing to pay. Does anyone doubt that such a tenantry system will in time breed as much controversy[Pg 165] as the Nonresident Landlord System has caused in Ireland?

The Japanese Tenantry System in California must in the very nature of things be a Nonresident Landlord System. It can be nothing else. The community will be Japanese. The landlord will seek a home elsewhere, in a Caucasian community. His only thought will be to get all he can from those whose labor produces his income. Their only thought will be to make that amount as small as possible. We have created another "Irrepressible Conflict." Whether we will adjust it without a resort to arms is a very grave question.

One of the most dangerous elements in this complicated problem is the self-complacent ignorance and refusal to face facts which characterizes the attitude of the people not only of the western half, but more particularly those of the eastern half of the United States. Not long ago a paroxysm of protest resulted from a rumor that a few hundred Japanese were about to settle in Michigan. But not the slightest heed is paid to the fact that a sister State[Pg 166] has this problem already within her body politic eating like a cancer at her very vitals; that she is powerless to effectively settle the question by herself alone; and that no national disposition exists to settle it in the only way it can possibly be settled. The way to settle it is not by building more battleships, or enlarging our standing army, or in any way increasing our naval or military burdens, or doing anything that will now or hereafter tend to put the neck of the American people under the heel of militarism. There can be no settlement of this question other than the one urged in this book. The question is economic, and the settlement must be economic.

Japan wants no war with us now. Of that we may rest assured. But any such treatment of the Japanese as we extended to the Chinese would bring war instantly. Whether the racial animosity that Japanese competition within our own territory will inevitably create can be controlled, and conflict caused by it averted, may well be doubted, unless the people of the entire United States will recognize the problem[Pg 167] as vital and national, and forthwith apply the only possible practicable solution.

We must recognize both the necessity and the right of Japanese expansion into new territories. That expansion means the upbuilding of enormous populations of Japanese in those countries. If ten millions of the most vigorous of Japan's teeming population could be transplanted from their native country to garden homes in other countries bordering the Pacific, where their allegiance to Japan would be unaffected, and colonies developed that would bear the same relation to the mother country that Canada bears to Great Britain, it would vastly benefit those who remained in Japan as well as those who emigrated. There must be such an emigration. It cannot be prevented. The United States should not oppose it.

There you project a controversy even by discussion. Of course Japan will not colonize the Philippines while we control them. Aside from that, the climate is undesirable. The Japanese want to colonize[Pg 168] where they can reproduce their racial strength. The climate of the Philippines would destroy it. Generations will elapse before the Japanese will covet the Philippines in order to colonize them, though she might want them for other reasons.

Yes, to some extent, but the great body of the overflowing population of Japan will not go to Manchuria.

It is a bleak, cold, dreary, and inhospitable country, already to a large extent cultivated and populated.

They are an Island people and the smell of the sea is in their nostrils. They already control the commerce of the Pacific and their ambition is to increase that commerce by every means in their power.

The colonies they will found in the future, the countries that the swarming millions from Japan will covet and occupy will border the Pacific Ocean, where the ships that fly the Japanese flag will come and go as the couriers of a great commerce[Pg 169] binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.

Yes, to its northern shores bordering the Pacific, to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, more particularly to Peru. In a very few years, as history runs, there will be an immense Japanese population on these Northern Pacific shores of South America. It is not at all unlikely that in less than a century there will be a larger population in South America of the Japanese race than now exists in all of Japan. It will be recruited not only from the surplus population of the mother country, but from a rapid reproduction of the Japanese among the transplanted population. There will be no race suicide among the Japanese. They will stick to the land in these new countries and breed a race as sturdy as its progenitors. They will never adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of City Congestion and consequent Racial Extinction.

Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the[Pg 170] Pacific Coast region of Mexico will be another breeding ground for this hardy and virile race, where likewise they will be tillers of the soil and a people hardened and strengthened by constant contact with Mother Earth.

More than that, the Mexicans will speedily be taught, if they require the lesson, that if they harm a hair in the head of a Japanese, punishment and retribution will be sure, swift, and severe. They will live at peace with the Japanese for that reason. It is the only way to have peace in Mexico, and Japan is strong enough to enforce peace and the security of the lives and property of all her people that way.

And because they will do that, they will eventually control and dominate Mexico, in a good deal the same way that England dominates India. Whenever they do that, they will protect not only their own people and their property, but that of all other peoples as well, and everybody will be as safe in Mexico as in Japan. But the waters that now run to waste in the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of[Pg 171] Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian race will possess Mexico.

For the very simple reason that the Japanese will occupy Mexico because they want to reclaim and cultivate its waste lands, and not speculate in them or exploit somebody else who will cultivate them.

Already the Japanese are as laborers cultivating large areas owned by American Capitalists in the delta of the Colorado River. That will not last. The Japanese will before very long organize associations among themselves and acquire and own the land or some other land which they can own and cultivate for themselves. There is no alien land law in Mexico that will prevent that and there will be none. The Japanese will see to that. Neither will there ever be any long continued peace or security for life or property in Mexico until either Japan or the United States enforces it. If we do not, they will. That is as certain as fate.[Pg 172]

And when they undertake the task, dragged into it by some outrage on their own people, shall we stay their hand, and say to them that the Monroe Doctrine applies to Asiatic as well as to European nations?

It is only a matter of time when we will have to face that question with Japan. Japan will no more permit the Mexicans to commit outrages on the Japanese than she will permit us to do it. Some idea of the conflicts that race hatred may breed in Mexico will be gained by reading the quotation that follows from "In Mexico the Land of Unrest," by Henry Baerlin.

In the preface of that book we find this description of a "gentle and joyous passage at arms" of the Mexicans with the Chinese.

"I fancy that a number of the miscreants who, owing to a mere misunderstanding, massacred three hundred Chinamen in Torreon not long since—some were cut into small pieces, some beheaded, some were tied to horses by their queues and dragged along the streets, while others had their arms or[Pg 173] legs attached to different horses and were torn asunder, some were stood up naked in the market gardens of the neighborhood and given over as so many targets to the drunken marksmen, thirteen Chinese employees of Yu Hop's General Store were haled into the street and killed with knives, two hundred Chinamen were sheltered in the city gaol, but all their money was appropriated and such articles of clothing as the warders fancied. One brave girl had nine of them concealed, and calmly she denied their presence even when her father had gone out to argue with the mob and had been shot for being on the Chinese side—a number of these miscreants, I fancy, are on other days delightful citizens."[1]

Think you that the Japanese would submit to that without war? The account of this racial outrage may be overdrawn, but judging from what happened in our own country when the Chinese were being persecuted prior to the Exclusion Act, there is nothing inherently[Pg 174] improbable in this account. It is no worse than the Turkish outrages that have often been committed on Christians in Asia Minor or in Europe.

China has submitted to all such outrages because for centuries she has been a nation of peace, but the time is not far distant when she will do so no longer.

With the United States, a nation with a government, in case of race conflict, leading to insult or injury to Japanese, we could make amends, or fight, as we chose, and we would probably make amends.

In Mexico, likely at any time to be without a government, as she is now, a conflict with Japan would be very apt to result like the recent differences between the Turks and the English in Egypt. The Land of the Montezumas would become a Protectorate of the Land of Nippon and a part of its Empire Power.

The Japanese problem would then be transferred from across the Pacific to across the Rio Grande, and Japanese cotton mills at Guaymas would get their cotton from the cotton fields of the Colorado[Pg 175] River Valley. They would transport it by water down the Colorado River and across the Gulf of California and develop a great ocean commerce from the territory that is tributary to the Gulf of California. That includes the whole valley of the Colorado River if its transportation facilities were adequately and comprehensively developed, as the Japanese would develop it, by lines of Japanese steamers running up the Colorado River at least as far as Yuma. The American Railroads could not strangle Japanese competition.

CHAPTER VII

The potential economic strength and creative power of the people of Japan may be illustrated by what they would do with the Colorado River Valley and watershed if it were to become Japanese territory, and what we must do with it if we are to hold our ground against their economic competition in the eternal racial struggle for the survival of the fittest.

The Colorado River has been aptly called the Nile of America. There is a most remarkable resemblance. In the valley of this American Nile another Egypt could be created. All the fertility, wealth, population, products, art, and romance of the Land of the Pharaohs could be reproduced in the valley of this great American river. A city as large as Alexandria at Yuma, and another as large as Cairo at Parker, are quite within reasonable expectations whenever the resources of the Colorado River country are comprehensively developed.[Pg 177]

But even that comparison of possibilities gives no adequate conception of what might be accomplished by the Japanese in the way of creative development in the drainage basin of the Colorado River.

Another Japanese Empire could be made there, with all the vast productive power, population, and national wealth of the present Land of Nippon. That is what the Japanese would do with it if they had the country to develop according to Japanese economic ideals and their methods of soil cultivation and production. They know full well the possibilities of the Colorado River country. Already the Japanese cultivators of the soil are at the Gateway to this great valley, just below the international boundary line in Mexico. They are now doing there the manual labor necessary to develop and produce crops from Mexican lands owned by Americans in the lower delta of the Colorado River.

The Japanese, if they had the opportunity, would give the same careful study to every minute detail of conquesting[Pg 178] the Colorado River Valley from the Desert that they gave to defeating Russia in the war they fought to save their national existence against the sea power and land power of the Russian Empire.

They would measure the water that runs to waste, as we have done. They would select and plat the land it should be used to irrigate, which we have not done. They would survey every reservoir site in the Colorado Canyon and test the foundations, which we have not done. They would calculate the aggregate volume of electric power that could be generated by a series of reservoirs in the Colorado Canyon, which we have not done.

They would estimate, as we have done, the total amount of sediment carried by the river every year into the Gulf of California and wasted. They would find that the Colorado River discharges during an average year into the Gulf of California 338,000,000 tons of mud and silt as suspended matter, and in addition to this 19,490,000 tons of gypsum, lime, sodium chloride and other salts,—in all a total of[Pg 179] 357,490,000 tons each year of fertilizing material. It is enough to give to 3,574,900 acres an annual fertilization of one hundred tons of this marvelously rich material that would be annually carried by the water to the land if proper scientific methods were adopted for the reclamation of the irrigable land located between Needles and Yuma, which is over three and a half million acres. The fertilization thus given to the land would be of value equal to that with which the Nile has fertilized Egypt every year since before the dawn of history.

They would find that the total run-off from the Colorado River watershed that now runs to waste is enough to irrigate 5,000,000 acres of land located in the main valley of the river between the mouth of the Colorado Canyon and the Mexican boundary line. They would find that the area of land so located that can be irrigated by gravity canals is 2,000,000 acres; that 1,500,000 more acres can be irrigated by pumping with electric power generated in the river, and, from the best information now[Pg 180] obtainable, that the area irrigated by pumping can eventually be enlarged another 1,500,000 acres, making a total in all of 5,000,000 irrigable acres in the main Colorado River Valley, including the Imperial Valley and the valley above Yuma. Including the entire watershed or drainage basin of the Colorado River, and all lands irrigable from underground supplies, and enlarging the irrigable area to the fullest extent that it would ultimately be enlarged by return seepage, they would find that they could eventually irrigate more than 12,500,000 acres, which is as much land as is now irrigated and cultivated in Japan.

They would figure on acreculture rather than agriculture, and would investigate to the minutest detail the problem of fertilization. They would figure on handling the silt of the Colorado River just as the silt of the Nile is handled in Egypt, fertilizing as large an area as possible with it. The Colorado River carries silt that is very fine and enough of it could be brought in the water every year to practically every irrigated field, to maintain[Pg 181] the incredible fertility and productiveness of the bottom lands and increase that of the mesa lands.

They would look for phosphate, potash, and nitrogen for fertilizers. They would find that an inexhaustible supply of potash could be manufactured from the giant kelp beds of the Pacific Coast. They would learn that there are in the territory included in the drainage basin of the Colorado River unlimited deposits of phosphate rock from which all needed phosphate could be mined. Nitrogen, they would ascertain, could be produced from the air in immense quantities by the use of the electric power which could be developed without limit in the canyon of the Colorado River.

They would utilize for that purpose all the vast surplus of electric power from the Colorado River as it whirls and plunges down the most stupendous river gorge in the world. In addition to producing all they needed to fertilize their own lands they would produce enough nitrogen, potash and phosphates to supply the markets of the world.[Pg 182]

The land, the water, and the fertilizer being thus assured, they would find the climate such that even the intensive methods of gardening now customary in Japan, would give no idea of the possibilities of acreage production in the Colorado River Valley. In that valley acreculture would be hothouse culture out-of-doors. The hot climate of the country would be found, when this economic survey of it was made, to be its greatest asset.

They would find that every product of the tropical and semi-tropical countries of the world could be here produced to perfection. They would find that by actual experience extending over many years, an acre of land in such a climate, closely cultivated and abundantly fertilized, and cropped several times a year, would produce from $1000 to $2000 net profit annually and even more, depending on the skill of the cultivator.

They would find that the skilled soil-cultivators of Japan could by this system of hothouse culture out-of-doors, provide all the food for an average family[Pg 183] for a year, and produce over and above that an average of $1000 net profit per acre every year. This would include every product now successfully grown in Southern California.

They would find that the Colorado River could be canalized from Yuma to the Needles, and the Gila and Salt Rivers canalized from Yuma to Phoenix and Florence, and a ship canal built from Yuma to the Gulf of California. Then the products from this wonderfully prolific country could be shipped from Yuma to every seaport of the world. Through the Panama Canal they could reach every seaport on the Atlantic Coast. By trans-shipment at New Orleans to canal or river steamers or barges they would connect with a river system 20,000 miles in extent for the distribution of their products to inland territory.

They would calculate the cost of reclamation and the value of the reclaimed land, measured by its productive power. They would figure that they could afford to spend on the reclamation of the land at least an amount equal to the value of[Pg 184] one year's production from the land. That would be $1000 per acre. Figuring only on the 5,000,000 acres that could be reclaimed in the main lower valley of the Colorado River below the canyon, they would find that it would justify a total expenditure of five billion dollars.

Some enterprising American Congressional Economist would then tell them that they surely could not contemplate spending that much on anything but a war. They would tell him that they were going into a war with the Desert and they proposed to triumph in it, just as they triumphed in the war with Russia. There would be this difference: all they spent on the Russian War was gone past recovery. They had to spend it or cease to exist as a nation. In this war with the Desert they would spend five billion dollars, and for it they would create a country that would produce food worth five billion dollars a year every year through all future time.

Then the American Speculator would come on the scene with his accumulated wisdom gained through many failures of[Pg 185] colonization schemes because there were no colonists or not enough to keep up with the interest on the bonds issued. The American Speculator would warn the Japanese against such a gigantic blunder as they were about to make in undertaking such a stupendous colonization scheme.

And the Japanese Statesmen and Financiers would point out to him not only that they had all the colonists they needed right at home in Japan, but that instead of its being necessary to spend a large sum of money to induce those colonists to emigrate to the new lands, they were having much trouble now to keep the colonists from going to the Pacific Coast where they are not wanted. They would explain that they are overcrowded in Japan; that their surplus population must go somewhere; that they are the most skilled gardeners and orchardists in the world; that the same men who would build the irrigation works, and the power plants, would settle right down on the reclaimed lands, glad to get an acre apiece, and live on it and cultivate it with their families.

So the Japanese in this thorough way[Pg 186] would go at this great work of wresting a new Japanese Empire from the Desert. They would not do any construction work until they had made a complete comprehensive plan of every detail of this new empire they were starting to build. Then they would go to the Colorado Canyon and begin by building a great diversion dam as far down the canyon as might be practicable to lift the water high enough to carry it in high line canal systems along both sides of the valley, and to bring it out on the mesa lands and use it where the land most needs the silt for a fertilizer. They would figure on first reclaiming all the mesa land on which the water could in this way be used, and then they would build pumping plants with which to irrigate the more elevated lands.

They would reclaim the mesa land first because every acre of mesa land that was reclaimed would serve as a sponge to soak up the flood water. By carrying out that plan they would eventually relieve the lowlands in the floor of the valley from all danger of overflow. They would not have to spend anything to control the[Pg 187] floods of the Colorado River. There would be no floods. The Japanese would begin at the right end of the problem, and build big enough at the start to solve it as a whole, comprehensively. Their plan would be to use up every drop of the flood water by irrigating land with it. There would never at any time of the year be any water running to waste in the lower river. There would never be in the main river more than enough water to supply the canals that irrigated the lowlands of the lower delta. The ship canal from Yuma to the Gulf, and the canals from Yuma to the Needles, Phoenix, and Florence would be not irrigating canals, but drainage canals.

The Japanese would control and utilize all the water that now runs to waste in the Colorado River. They would save and use, not a part of it, but every drop of it. They would, as they have done in Japan, preserve the sources of the water supplies from destruction by overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion. They would build the Charleston Reservoir, on the San Pedro. They would stop the floods that[Pg 188] now devastate that valley and wash away and destroy its farm lands. They would build the Verde Reservoir, the Agua Fria Reservoir, the San Carlos Reservoir, and every other reservoir on every tributary of the Colorado required to control for use the immense volume of water that we now waste.

They would go into Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and do the same thing in those States. They would build great dams and reservoirs in the Canyon of the Colorado River, and would produce therefrom electric power enough to furnish power for every farm and mine and city in the whole basin of the Colorado River, and power to pump back onto the mesas water which had once done duty by irrigating the lower lands.

They would reclaim in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River as much land as is now cultivated in all of Japan. They would subdivide it into Garden Homes for their industrious tillers of the soil. They would eventually put on such Garden Homes as many of their land-cultivators and gardener-soldiers with[Pg 189] their families as they now have in Japan. They would be more prosperous because the land is more fertile and the crops would be more valuable.

Their system of land cultivation would not be farming, as we understand it. It would be gardening, of the closest and most intensive kind. Such a system of land cultivation in the Colorado River Valley, under their system of development, would produce as much per acre as hothouse culture under glass in a cold climate. Everything that can be raised in Japan they would produce. Everything that can be raised in Egypt or Arabia, or anywhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, they would produce.

They would make of the Colorado River Valley the greatest date-producing country of the world. Oranges, lemons, grape-fruit, and every known tropical and semi-tropical fruit of commerce would be raised by them in this American Valley of the Nile. They would establish a system of land tillage by their intensive methods which would support in comfort and plenty a family on every acre. They would[Pg 190] eventually, in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and on the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, put 12,500,000 acres under such cultivation and settle it with as dense a population as they now have in Japan, where they sustain 30,000,000 rural people on 12,500,000 acres.

That would leave them many millions of acres—of the higher, colder, and less fertile lands on the watersheds of the tributary streams in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, for grazing and timber growing. The population sustained by these industries, added to that which would be sustained by mining, and electrical power, and the multitude of manufacturing industries which they would establish, would bring the total population of the basin of the Colorado River and its tributaries, under this Japanese development, up to fifty million people. That is a population as large as that which now bears on its shoulders all the burdens of the Japanese Empire, including its army and navy.

The Japanese would pump from underground with electric power the last possible drop of available water to promote surface[Pg 191] production. The great torrential downpours that come occasionally in that country would be controlled by systems of embankments and soaked into the ground to replenish the underground supplies instead of being allowed to run to waste, carrying destruction in their path. They would from their dams in the Colorado River Canyon develop power that would pump water high enough to reach such vast areas of rich and fertile land as the Hualpi Valley—at least enough to turn such lands into forest plantations where water enough for agriculture could not be provided for the land.

Add to the wealth they would produce from their garden farms the wealth they would dig from the mines, develop from the water power, and produce in their factories, and they would create more annual wealth from this now desolate and uninhabited region in the Colorado River Valley than is to-day annually produced in the Japanese Empire. And more than that, they would be producing a strong and virile people. Every man would be a soldier in time of need and a Japanese[Pg 192] army of more than five million men would be able to take the field at a moment's warning, leaving the youths who were too young and the men who were too old for military service, with the aid of the women and children, to cultivate the acre garden homes.

Why is not all this done by the Caucasian race who now control this great valley of the American Nile—the people whose flag flies over it?

Why, with all this incredible wealth lying undeveloped under our feet, do we not seize the necessary tools and develop it ourselves?

Why indeed? The facts stated are facts, physical facts not to be denied. Why do we leave this empire untouched?

Because thus far our only system of development has been speculation and human exploitation.

Because we seem to have known no way of settling a new country except to permit a generation of speculators to skim the cream before the actual tillers of the soil get a chance to cultivate it.

Because the agricultural immigrants[Pg 193] from Italy—the ideal settlers for the Colorado River Valley—are being herded in Concentration Camps in the tenements of the congested cities. Their skill as gardeners is wasted, their knowledge of art and handicraft lost, their children morally and physically degenerated, and their racial strength diminished. Gunmen and black-handers are evolved from that evil environment. We are rotting a race of virile rural people, instead of directing the vast human power inherent in them to creating a new Valley of the Nile, and building a new Alexandria at Yuma and a new Cairo at Parker, and planting every family that was located on a Garden Home in that marvelously rich country in another Garden of Eden.

Because the railroads and the water power syndicates, with their allies the War Department engineers, seem to have the power to perpetuate this system of Speculation and Human Exploitation, and in consequence to dedicate the Colorado River Valley to desolation. They apparently have the power to inject some deadly poison into the arteries and veins of conventions[Pg 194] and congresses and legislative bodies that makes action impossible along any line of constructive effort that would free the people from the thralldom of corporate opposition to government construction.

Australia and New Zealand,—Japan, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland have escaped from this thralldom and are a free and independent people, capable of directing the development of their resources, and they are doing it. The people of the United States have abolished human slavery, but they have been unable as yet to free themselves from the domination of organized capital or the influence of the aggregated appetite of an army of speculators and exploiters of our national resources. As a nation we are shackled by the Spirit of Speculation which insidiously opposes any legislation that would save our resources from speculative exploitation or directly develop them by government construction for the benefit of the people.

Those who comprise this speculative class, which opposes all such constructive[Pg 195] legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army hired to defend the nation and their property from attack. They constantly advocate increasing the $250,000,000 a year we now spend on our army and navy. Then they cry economy when it is proposed to spend less than half that amount every year throughout the whole United States to defend the country against the devastating forces of Nature. As a result the people are unable to safeguard against the recurrence of such appalling catastrophies as the Ohio Valley floods of 1913 or the Mississippi Valley floods of 1912 and 1913.

The creation of a new empire, more populous, and with a people living in greater comfort and producing more wealth each year in the Colorado River Drainage Basin than in the Japanese Empire of to-day, cannot be permitted to be done by the Japanese because the territory belongs to the United States. And this country cannot be allowed to do it from the viewpoint of the speculators,[Pg 196] unless it can be accomplished for the benefit of private speculation. The speculators insist they must be free from any restrictions that would prevent them from exploiting generations yet unborn who will till the soil and use the water power in their industries.

Already the inconceivable fertility of this region is known to the Japanese. Already they are quietly absorbing the opportunities to cultivate its land, either as laborers for American Landowners below the line in Mexico, or as tenants in the great Imperial Valley in California. They are as familiar as we are with the Orange Groves of Sonora. They know that on the Pacific Coast below Guaymas there are millions of acres of country just as beautiful as Southern California, but which is now unreclaimed, where the sparkling streams from the Sierra Madres course uselessly through thickets of wild lemon trees on their way to the ocean.

If we wait for the speculators to do it, long before the time comes when they can[Pg 197] get the aid from the national government necessary to enable them to reclaim and settle the desert lands, and develop the water power of the Colorado River, there will be a Japanese population of many millions in the Colorado River Delta below the line and on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. They will go to Mexico to cultivate the soil and live on it. The Caucasian as a rule goes to Mexico to get land away from the Mexicans and speculate on it or monopolize it. So long as that is our system of development, we cannot complain if the industrious Japanese go there and live on the land and produce food from it to help feed the people of all the earth. The American goes to Mexico in the hope of making enough money to be able to live without work. The Japanese goes there to get an opportunity to work and to dig his living from Mother Earth by his own labor. Which will prevail, think you, in the struggle to possess the unoccupied and untilled lands of the Pacific shores of Mexico?

We are told we must employ more soldiers to protect us. The Japanese colonists,[Pg 198] wherever they go, will go with both a hoe and a gun, and will protect themselves.

If the Colorado River Valley is to remain dedicated to speculation and exploitation, we could not maintain upon its deserts a standing army large enough, if we should have a war with Japan, to make even a pretense of protecting it from invasion from the south by the Japanese after they have settled those Mexican lands. They would not stop with taking the Philippines and Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They would sweep up from the south with an army of a million men from Mexico and extend their dominion over all the arid region. From the Cascade and the Sierra Nevada Ranges to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian line to Mexico would become Japanese territory.

But that is too long a time in the future, the average self-complacent American says, to be of any immediate interest. It would take the Japanese more than a generation to put a million colonists in Mexico. Perhaps it would. It will take[Pg 199] the Japanese a generation to double the Japanese population on the shores of the Pacific in Asia and America. Now they have only fifty million people. In one generation more they will have a hundred million and a goodly portion of them will be in America. Is it any too soon for this nation to begin right now to build the safeguards against that danger? Bear in mind that there are men and women now living who remember Chicago when there was nothing there but Old Fort Dearborn and a few log houses. Bear in mind that in less than ten years, from 1900 to 1908, more than 65,000 Japanese emigrated to Hawaii, and that in a single year, 1907, 30,226 Japanese came to the United States, and that in 1909 the number of trained and seasoned Japanese soldiers in Hawaii exceeded the entire field army of the United States. How long would it take Japan to put a million colonists—men of military age—on the Pacific Coast of Mexico?

In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because it does not pay. Would that argument[Pg 200] apply in case of a war between the United States and Japan, with reference to the Colorado River Country and the rest of the territory now lying in the United States between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west?

In the Colorado River Valley alone the Japanese would get 5,000,000 acres capable of being made to produce by their system of cultivation a net profit of $1,000 an acre, over and above a living for its cultivators. That would make a total of five billion dollars a year.

In addition they would get 12,500,000 acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California which if they produced from it only a net profit of $500 an acre every year—would yield a total of two and a half billion dollars annually. Oregon, Washington and Idaho would add as much more land, making another two and a half billion dollars a year.

That is a total annual production to which the Japanese would develop this land within a generation of Ten billion dollars a year—and very little of the[Pg 201] land is to-day cultivated. Most of it is unreclaimed desert.

In addition to this the mineral output of the states lying entirely within that territory for 1913 was as follows:

In addition, a considerable portion of the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming lies within the territory under consideration. The mineral output of these states for 1913 was as follows:

The total mineral production of all the above named States, and including Montana, for the ten years ending with 1913 was $3,322,003,895.

The lands in the delta of the Colorado River where the Japanese are now settling comprise more than a million acres of the[Pg 202] most marvelously fertile land in all the world.

The Japanese who are now going into the delta country of the Colorado River are not going where they are unwelcome. The American who wants to use their labor to cultivate his land, in order that he may get a profit from it without working the land himself, is busy starting the Asiatic invasion that will eventually sweep over that Land of Promise. It is an invasion that will ultimately transfer that country from American to Asiatic control, unless the American people wake up and decide without delay to do the one and only thing that can possibly prevent this from happening.

What is that "one and only thing" that they must do to save the Colorado River Valley for our own people?

Why it is to occupy, cultivate, use, and possess it ourselves, and do with it exactly what the Japanese would do with it if they possessed it as a part of the territory of the Empire of Japan.

By thrusting to one side the speculators and exploiters and demanding from Congress the necessary legislative machinery and money to conquest the Colorado River Valley from the desert, with exactly the same inexorable insistence with which the money would be demanded if it were needed for defense against an invading German force that had landed in New England and was marching on New York; with exactly the same irresistible popular cyclone that will roar about the ears of Congress in the future, if their supine neglect now does some day actually lead to a Japanese invasion of the United States.

If the people of the United States can get their feet out of the quicksands of land-speculation, water-speculation, power-speculation, and the operations of water-power syndicates, they can create a country as populous and powerful as the Japanese Empire in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River. If we will eliminate that one great obstacle, we can do it ourselves, just as well as the Japanese could do it. Our subserviency to the[Pg 204] Spirit of Speculation is the only thing that stands in the way of it.

Every problem involved has been solved by some other country and partly solved by our own. There is no reason why the United States cannot adopt the Australian and New Zealand Systems for the acquisition, reclamation, subdivision, and settlement of land.

There is no reason why the United States should not control its water power resources on such a stream as the Colorado River; and, when advisable, build, own, and operate power plants and distribute power.

Shall we admit that we cannot do what Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland have done?

Under the United States Reclamation Act we have already undertaken to reclaim land for settlement, and to build power plants, but we have failed to safeguard the land or the power against speculative acquisition. However, what we have already accomplished has made for progress, and makes it easier to do what remains to be done.[Pg 205]

When we come to the qualifications of colonists, and the necessity that they should be Homecrofters, the question becomes more difficult, because the majority of the people of the United States have no conception of the possibilities of acreproduction or acreculture by a skilled and scientifically trained truck-gardener and fruit-grower and poultry-raiser. There are innumerable instances where truck gardens along the Atlantic Coast, on Long Island, and in New Jersey, Virginia, and Florida, are producing more than a thousand dollars worth of vegetables every year. It is a most common thing for berry-growers to realize that acreage product from an acre of berries in Louisiana or Washington. Celery, asparagus, lettuce, onions, and many other crops will yield as much when properly fertilized and cultivated. Anyone who doubts this can find ample proof of it at Duluth, Minnesota, or in California or Texas. Another thing should be borne in mind. One acre of land in the Colorado River Valley is the equivalent of five acres in a cold climate. Crops may be[Pg 206] planted and matured so rapidly in that hot climate that plant growth more resembles hothouse forcing than ordinary out-of-door truck gardening. Another important fact is that all the tropical and semi-tropical fruits grow to perfection in that valley.

This whole subject is exhaustively elucidated in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons of New York. No one will form an opinion adverse to the possibilities of acreculture after reading that book.

Successful acreculture requires, however, a man who knows how. The Japanese know how. The Chinese know how. The Belgians know how. Many of the French, Germans, and Italians know how. The Americans, with few exceptions, do not know how, but they can be taught. They will seize the opportunity to learn as soon as it is open to them as part of a large national plan. Every Homecroft Settlement created in the Colorado River Valley should be a great educational institution, a training school to teach[Pg 207] men and women how to raise fruit, vegetables, and poultry, and how to prepare their products for market, and how to market them, and how to get their own food from their own acre by their own labor.

Thousands of the immigrants now coming to the United States from Southern Europe already know how to do all this and would make ideal colonists for the Colorado River Valley.

Thousands are out of work who, if healthy and physically fit, could be trained to garden in a year; to be good gardeners in three years; and to be scientific experts in gardening in five years.

In the event of a war under existing conditions we would have to train a million recruits to be soldiers. It is equally certain that men can be trained to be gardeners and Homecrofters. It takes longer to train a Homecrofter than to train a soldier, but it is only a question of time.

It can be done and it will be done by the United States as a measure of national defense as soon as the people can be[Pg 208] brought to realize the great fundamental fact that the only way they can provide as many soldiers as they might need in some great national emergency is to begin in time of peace—and that means now—and train them to be both Homecrofters and soldiers, as the Japanese are trained. The Japanese are a nation of Homecrofters. The Homecroft Reservists who should be trained for national defense by the United States, will get their living as gardeners and Homecrofters when they are not needed as soldiers, or until they are needed as soldiers, as is the case in Japan with their organized reserve of 1,170,000 men and the great majority of their unorganized reserve of 7,021,780 men.

The Drainage Basin of the Colorado River has an area of 265,000 square miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles, less than the area of the drainage basin of the Colorado River in Arizona and New Mexico. Arizona alone contains 143,956 square miles, and has a population of only 204,354. Japan has a population of 52,200,200. She now sustains[Pg 209] in the Home Country a standing army at peace strength of 217,032, with Reserves of 1,170,000, making a total war strength of about 1,400,000 and she has available for duty but unorganized a total of 7,021,780.

The same Japanese System with the same Japanese population in the Colorado River Drainage Basin would sustain an army of the same strength. And they can do it on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, or on the Pacific Coast of South America, or anywhere else in as good a climate where they can get a territory of 147,000 square miles, of which 12,500,000 acres can be irrigated and intensively cultivated.

Is it not evident that it is the economic potentialities of the Japanese race that we must meet?

We can do it in the Colorado River Country. In the main valley below the mouth of the Colorado Canyon we can maintain a permanent reserve of 5,000,000 men, Homecrofters and gardeners in time of peace, soldiers in time of war, and all organized, trained, and equipped—instantly ready for any emergency. All[Pg 210] we would have to do to accomplish that, would be to reclaim and colonize the land, and train the colonists to be Homecrofters, and then apply the entire Military System of Switzerland or Australia to this one small tract of five million acres of land in the Colorado River Valley, with conveniently adjacent territory in Arizona and California in the drainage basin of the Colorado River.

It would be entirely practicable to do that, because the National Government would control the School System, and would control the System of Life of the community and adapt it to the Homecroft Reserve System. Every one of 5,000,000 Homecrofters could leave his acre without hindrance to any organized industry and without jeopardizing the welfare of his family. The objections to a Reserve of Citizen Soldiery in the ordinary communities of the United States would have no application in these communities that had been created for the purpose of furnishing soldiers trained when needed in time of war, as well as to develop the highest type of citizenship in time of peace.[Pg 211]

A start could be made with 100,000 acres; 100,000 gardeners; 100,000 soldiers. The land and water required for that could be located to-morrow and construction work begun in a month. This number should be increased as rapidly as the land could be reclaimed and colonized with Homecrofters in acre homes and the organization of new communities perfected. The Reserve composed of Homecrofters occupying these acre homes should be known as the Homecroft Reserve.

If no extension of this proposed Homecroft Reserve System were made into any other section of the country there would be soldiers enough in the Colorado River Valley to defend the Mexican Border, the Pacific Coast, and the Canadian Border from North Dakota to Seattle, at any time when the necessity arose for such defense.

The establishment of this large Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley, fully trained and equipped for military service at a moment's notice, exactly as the Reserves of Switzerland are trained and equipped, would be a complete defense against any danger of[Pg 212] Japanese invasion, which can be safeguarded against in no other way.

Is it not better to begin now and spend the money in conquering the Desert than to wait and spend it conquering Japan, or Japan and China combined?

CHAPTER VIII

The value of the proposed Homecroft Reserve System as a force for national defense would have been demonstrated in the present European War if England had, years ago, established such a reserve in Scotland, instead of driving thousands of Homecrofters to other lands to make way for deer parks and hunting grounds. The Scotch Homecrofters, if that system for a Military Reserve had been established, would have been just such soldiers as those who have made the glorious record of the Black Watch and the Gordon Highlanders and other famous Scotch regiments. There might just as well as not have been a million of them in Scotland, trained and hardy soldiers, organized and equipped as the Reserves of Switzerland are completely organized to-day and ready for instant mobilization. The Scotch Homecrofters would have been getting their living in time of peace by cultivating their little crofts, and as fishermen, and would have been always ready to fight for their country in time of war.[Pg 214]

Had there been such a Homecroft Reserve in Scotland, with a million men enlisted in it and fully organized, officered, and equipped for instant service in the field, Germany would have pondered long before starting this war. Would not the German people, as well as the English, be glad now if the war had never been started? But if, notwithstanding all this, the war had been started, an army of a million brave and hardy Scots would have been on the firing line before the German columns had got past Louvain. Belgium would have been protected from devastation. There would have been no invasion of France.

But the English people stubbornly refused to heed warnings of the danger of war with Germany.

The English with stolid, self-satisfied complacency pinned their faith entirely on their navy as a national defense.[Pg 215]

And now the English have been awakened by an appalling national catastrophe which was preventable.

A Scotch Homecroft Reserve of a million men would have been an almost certain guarantee that no war would have broken out; and if it had, such a Homecroft Reserve would have been worth to England the billions of dollars she is now spending in a paroxysm of haste to train a million soldiers for service on the continent and to conduct the war. The Scotch Homecroft Reserve would have had the added value of being thoroughly trained and hardened troops as compared with the new levies they are now training to be soldiers. Those raw levies of volunteers, many from clerical employments, lack the qualities that would have been furnished by the Scotch Highlanders, or the descendants of forty generations of border-raiders, or the hardy fishermen of the Sea Coast and Islands of Scotland. Some idea of the sort of men who would have composed[Pg 216] this Scotch Homecroft Reserve that England might have had, may be gained from the following very brief story of the Gordon Highlanders which appeared in the "Kansas City Times" of October 27, 1914:

"One hundred and thirty years ago the bagpipes of the 'Gay Gordons' first swirled the pibroch. Since then they have played it in every clime and nearly every land where British troops have fought.

"The Duke of Gordon was granted a 'Letter of Service' in 1794 to organize a Highland infantry regiment among his clansmen. Lady Gordon, 'The Darling Duchess,' took charge of the enlisting. Their son, the Marquis of Huntley, was the first colonel.

"The Gordons first saw service against the French in Holland in 1799. Outnumbered six to one, they received their baptism of fire in a wild charge at Egmont-op-Zee that made[Pg 217] all Great Britain ring with their praises. Their first laurels, won at a bloody cost, have never been dimmed.

"From Holland they went to Egypt, and with the Black Watch, the Cameronians and the Perthshire Greybreeks stormed up the shore of Aboukir Bay and later the height of Mandora. The name of every battle of Napoleon's futile attempt to master Egypt appears on their battle flags.

"They came home from there to line the streets of London at Nelson's funeral, a post of honor coveted by every British regiment. Next they appeared in Denmark and were at the fall of Copenhagen. Without a visit to Scotland the Gordons went to Spain and went through the glorious campaign of Sir John Moore. The French long remembered them for their fight at Corunna.

"When the British were retreating, the Gordons were the rear guard. At Elvania Sir John galloped along their line. Ammunition was low and no supplies available.

"'My brave Highlanders! You still have your bayonets! Remember Egypt!' the commander shouted.

"The pipers took up 'The Cock o' the North,' the sobriquet of the Duke of Gordon, and routed the pursuing French. The Gordons went to Portugal. Almarez is on their flags. They followed the Duke of Wellington back[Pg 218] into Spain and were in the fights that sent Joseph Bonaparte's army reeling home.

"The Gordons stood with the Black Watch at Quatre Bras, and two days later were at Waterloo. It was the Duchess of Richmond, a daughter of the Duchess of Gordon who recruited the Gordons, who gave the famous ball in Brussels the night before Waterloo. The officers of the Gay Gordons hurried from that levee, which Lord Byron, another Gordon, has commemorated in a poem, to the field of battle.

"The feat of the Gordons that day, in grabbing the stirrups of the charging Scots Greys, is one of history's most stirring pages. It is a striking coincidence that in the present war, just ninety-nine years later, the Gordons swung to the Greys' stirrups in another wild charge, this time against the Germans.

"The Gordons went to the Afghan War in 1878. In 1881 they campaigned across the veldts against the Boers. The next year they stood at El-Teb and Tel-el-Kebir with their old friends the Black Watch. They marched to Khartum when their namesake, Gordon, was trapped. That over, they went back to India for another Afghan war. They marched by the scenes of their bloody fights when going to the relief of Lucknow.

"In 1897 the Gordons were the heroes of all Britain. They, and a regiment of Gurkhas,[Pg 219] charged a hill at Dargai in the face of almost superhuman difficulties. Two years later the regiment went to South Africa and fought valiantly through that war. At Eldanslaagte they were part of the column of General French, their present commander.

"The red uniform coat of the Gordons is lavishly trimmed in yellow, which brought them the sobriquet of 'Gay Gordons.' Of all the Scotch regiments it has tried the hardest to keep its ranks filled with Scotsmen, 'limbs bred in the purple heather.'

"Officially the Gordons are the Ninety-second Highland Infantry."

England's original expeditionary force to the continent in 1914 was less than 200,000 men. Suppose it had been 1,200,000. It might just as well have been 1,200,000, if a Scotch Homecroft Reserve had been long ago established, as should have been done, and gradually increased until a million men were enlisted in it. Would any one question the fact, if there had been another million men in England's expeditionary army when it was first sent to the continent, that it would have completely changed the whole current of events in this war? It would have checked[Pg 220] the German advance into France and Belgium. Not a foot of Belgium's territory would have been wrested from her. Neither Brussels nor Antwerp would have been surrendered.

That conclusion is so self-evident and conservative, and the opportunity that England had to have such a force in reserve is so plain that it seems hard to believe that the United States will ignore its lesson and fail to establish a Homecroft Reserve in this country.

England had the original stock from which to breed such a brave and hardy race of soldiers, and they were the original Homecrofters. There were not a million of them, but there were many thousands of them two centuries ago. There were so many that to-day there might easily have been a million such Homecrofters in England's army in Europe if the Homecroft Reserve System had been established when the trouble first began between the Homecrofters and the Great Landlords who finally succeeded in riveting the curse of land monopoly around Scotland's neck.

It may be argued that this suggestion[Pg 221] is an afterthought, and that, as the Arab saying puts it, "The ditches are full of bright afterthoughts." That may be true as to England. But it is not true as to the United States. If we knew that it would be two hundred years before the great final struggle would be fought to determine whether the Pacific Coast of the United States should be dominated by the Asiatic or Caucasian race, right now is the time when we should begin to breed and train our millions of men who will have to fight that battle for us whenever the time does come that it has to be fought. It is as inevitable as fate that the conflict will come unless we safeguard against it by peopling America with a race as hardy and virile as the races on the Pacific shores of Asia are to-day.

The rugged physical manhood, rough daring and bravery, hardihood and endurance, self-reliance and resourcefulness, readiness for any emergency on land or sea, that characterized the type of men from whom the Homecroft Reserves would have been bred, and the rough rural environment in which they would have[Pg 222] been reared, is strikingly described by S. R. Crockett in his novel "The Raiders."

And in "The Dark o' the Moon," the sequel to "The Raiders," he tells of the first of the struggles that were begun two centuries ago by the Homecrofters of Scotland to preserve their immemorial privileges of elbow-room and pasturage, as against the selfishness of the Landlord System that finally prevailed. That system decimated Scotland of her bravest men and left in their places hunting grounds and great estates to be sold or rented to American Snobocrats, who are not fighting any of England's battles in this war.

The early conflicts between the Landlords and the Homecrofters are referred to, and the scene of one of these conflicts is so interestingly told by the same author in his Book called "Raiderland," that the following quotation is made from it:

"The water-meadows, rich with long deep grass that one could hide in standing erect, bog-myrtle bushes, hazelnuts, and brambles big as prize gooseberries and black as—well, as our mouths when we had done eating them. Woods of tall Scotch firs stood up[Pg 223] on one hand, oak and ash on the other. Out in the wimpling fairway of the Black Lane, the Hollan Isle lay anchored. Such a place for nuts! You could get back-loads and back-loads of them to break your teeth upon in the winter forenights. You could ferry across a raft laden with them. Also, and most likely, you could fall off the raft yourself and be well-nigh drowned. You might play hide-and-seek about the Camp, which (though marked 'probably Roman' in the Survey Map) is not a Roman Camp at all, instead only the last fortification of the Levellers in Galloway—those brave but benighted cottiers and crofters who rose in belated rebellion because the lairds shut them out from their poor moorland pasturages and peat-mosses.

"Their story is told in that more recent supplement to 'The Raiders' entitled 'The Dark o' the Moon.' There the record of their deliberations and exploits is in the main truthfully enough given, and the fact is undoubted that they finished their course within their entrenched camp upon the Duchrae bank, defying the king's troops with their home-made pikes and rusty old Covenanting swords.

"There is a ford (says this chronicle) over the Lane of Grennoch, near where the clear brown stream detaches itself from the narrows of the loch, and a full mile before it[Pg 224] unites its slow-moving lily-fringed stream with the Black Water o' Dee rushing down from its granite moorlands.

"The Lane of Grennoch seemed to that comfortable English drover, Mr. Job Brown, like a bit of Warwickshire let into the moory boggish desolations of Galloway. But even as he lifted his eyes from the lily-pools where the broad leaves were already browning and turning up at the edges, lo! there, above him, peeping through the russet heather of a Scottish October, was a boulder of the native rock of the province, lichened and water-worn, of which the poet sings:

"'See yonder on the hillside scaur,
Up among the heather near and far,
Wha but Granny Granite, auld Granny Granite,
Girnin' wi' her grey teeth.'

"If the traveller will be at the pains to cross the Lane of Grennoch, or, as it is now more commonly called, the Duchrae Lane, a couple of hundred yards north of the bridge, he will find a way past an old cottage, the embowered pleasure-house of many a boyish dream, out upon the craggy face of the Crae Hill. Then over the trees and hazel bushes of the Hollan Isle, he will have (like Captain Austin Tredennis) a view of the entire defences of the Levellers and of the way by which most of them escaped across the fords of the Dee[Pg 225] Water, before the final assault by the king's forces.

"The situation was naturally a strong one—that is, if, as was at the time most likely, it had to be attacked solely by cavalry, or by an irregular force acting without artillery.

"In front the Grennoch Lane, still and deep with a bottom of treacherous mud swamps, encircled it to the north, while behind was a good mile of broken ground, with frequent marshes and moss-hags. Save where the top of the camp mound was cleared to admit of the scant brushwood tents of the Levellers, the whole position was further covered and defended by a perfect jungle of bramble, whin, thorn, sloe, and hazel, through which paths had been opened in all directions to the best positions of defence."

"Such about the year 1723 was the place where the poor, brave, ignorant cottiers of Galloway made their last stand against the edict which (doubtless in the interests of social progress and the new order of things) drove them from their hillside holdings, their trim patches of cleared land, their scanty rigs of corn high in lirks of the mountain, or in blind 'hopes' still more sheltered from the blast.

"Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod valley, you can see when the sun is setting over western Loch Moar and his[Pg 226] rays run level as an ocean floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings of farm-steadings, the dyke-ridges that enclosed the Homecrofts, small as pocket-handkerchiefs; and higher still, ascending the mountainside, regular as the stripes on corduroy, you can trace the ancient rigs where the corn once bloomed bonny even in these wildest and most remote recesses of the hills. All is now passed away and matter for romance—but it is truth all the same, and one may tell it without fear and without favour.

"From the Crae Hill, especially if one continues a little to the south till you reach the summit cairn above the farmhouse of Nether Crae you can see many things. For one thing you are in the heart of the Covenant Country.

"He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white among the darker heather—south to where on Kirkconnel hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six corpses—west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs to a stake—east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea."

"Save by general direction you cannot take in all these by the seeing of the eye from[Pg 227] the Crae Hill. But you are in the midst of them, and the hollows of the hills where the men died for their 'thocht,' and the quiet God's Acres where they lie buried, are as much of the essence of Scotland as the red flushing of the heather in autumn and the hill tarns and 'Dhu Lochs' scattered like dark liquid eyes over the face of the wilds."

Well may England, as she looked over the battlefields of Belgium, and mourned the thousands and tens of thousands of her brave men whose lives have paid the forfeit for her heedlessness, and listened to the bombardment of her North Sea coast towns by German battleships, and scanned the sky watching for the coming of the aërial invasion her people so much feared, have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:

Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?

The same identical influences and traits of human character that drove the Homecrofters from Scotland will be responsible[Pg 228] for our failure to take warning from England's lesson, if we do so fail. It is the disposition of intrenched interests to grasp for more and more, and constantly more, that has imperiled England's national life. The same grasping policy of the intrenched interests in the United States now imperils the national life of this nation in the future by the absorption of our national resources and what remains of our public domain into private speculative ownership while the toiling millions are crowded into the tenements. We could survive the loss of what the intrenched interests have already taken if they would only let loose on what is left and let Uncle Sam have a free hand to do with his own as is best for all his people in places like the Colorado River country. There the greater part of the land needed is still public land, and speculators have not as yet acquired the water rights and power possibilities.

England could not and the United States cannot maintain a great standing army, but England could have established and maintained a Homecroft Reserve of a[Pg 229] million men in Scotland, and we can do it in the Colorado River Valley, and other places where it ought to be done in the United States, provided the land and water power can be saved from the clutch of the speculators before they have so complicated the proposition as to interminably delay it while Uncle Sam is getting back from them what ought never to have been granted away.

England had the Scotch Homecrofters, and drove them from the homes of their forefathers to make great estates. We have got to organize our Homecroft Reservists and locate them, and train them, but that can be done.

There are thousands of the descendants of the Scotch Homecrofters serving England to-day in the Canadian Contingent Corps in Europe, and doubtless more than one of the crew of the Australian Cruiser that sunk the Emden could trace his pedigree back to a Galloway Drover, a Solway Smuggler, or a Border Raider. From the shielings of the Scotch Homecrofters there went out into the world a race that has made good, wherever it has[Pg 230] gone. Would it not be well to think of that in the United States to-day and breed some more of the same sturdy Homecroft Stock in this country, for patriotic service either in peace or war?

It was the active out-of-door life that made the Scotch Homecrofters strong. It is the sedentary, indoor life, or the monotony of factory work, that is now sapping the vitality of our people and working havoc with our racial strength. The pity of it is that we have a country where we can reproduce the strong races of many different countries, if we would only recognize that the necessity for doing it is the biggest and most important national problem we have. We can match the country and the people where nearly every big thing for the real uplift of humanity has been done in recent years.

The Colorado River Drainage Basin has many characteristics like Australia, where they have adopted a very similar system of Land Reclamation and Settlement and the plan for Universal Military Service that is advocated in this book. We can duplicate Switzerland in West[Pg 231] Virginia. We can match Belgium and Holland in Louisiana. We can do in Northern Minnesota what they have done in Denmark. We have many of the same problems in California that they have solved in New Zealand.

The fact should be carefully borne in mind, and never for a moment lost sight of, that everything that is advocated in the plan proposed in this book for national defense is something that would be chosen as a thing to be done if it had been determined to carry out the most splendid plan that could be devised for human advancement and national welfare in time of peace in the United States. Such a plan, having regard only to times of peace, would embody the entire plan advocated in this book. Even the military training of entire Homecroft communities, so as to be prepared for that emergency in case of war, is a discipline that would be most beneficial to physical and mental development in time of peace, without any regard to its importance in the event of war. It is most remarkable that all this should be true, but the basic reason for[Pg 232] it is that, after all, the highest ultimate objective of national existence in time of peace is to continually lift humanity to higher and higher levels of physical and mental development; and to persevere until we attain the highest possible type of rugged physical and mental strength in man and woman. When war comes, the thing most needed is men—strong, vigorous, and hardy men; and they are the ideal at which all plans for racial development should aim in time of peace.

The Homecroft System of Life and Education eliminates the difficulties arising from a reliance in time of war on untrained levies in a country like ours, where so few are physically fit, without long training, for soldierly service. The Homecrofter, earning his living by digging it from the ground, is always strong and instantly fit for a soldier's work. The Homecrofter lives under conditions where he is not a cog in a wheel—not a part of any complicated industrial machine from which no part can be withdrawn without derangement of the whole. He is an independent unit in industry, self-sustaining,[Pg 233] dependent on no one and no one dependent on him but his own family. If he is called away for military service, the family is able to conduct and cultivate the Homecroft, and gets its living therefrom. No one is left in need, as would so often happen in other cases, especially when State Militia might be called into real service. The Homecrofter earns his living in a way that makes it practicable for him to leave his accustomed vocation for a month or two every year for a period of military training without any prejudice or loss to him in that vocation.

The more these advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System are studied from a military point of view, the more their value will be appreciated. A rural nation like Servia or Montenegro can be practically a nation of soldiers. Every man of military age is always ready for service. The Russian Cossack System accomplishes the same result. A nation of shopkeepers, commercial clerks, and factory employees cannot be utilized in that way for military service. The farming and rural population of the United States[Pg 234] furnishes a better hope for a Citizen Soldiery in case of war than our city population, but in these days a farm has come to be really a factory, with complicated machinery, requiring training to operate it, and a chronic shortage of labor in busy seasons. Furthermore, rural population is as a rule so scattered that it would not be possible in time of peace to perfect the organization and give the Reservists the training necessary to prepare them for service in time of war and have them always ready for immediate action.

In the Homecroft Communities a million men may be almost as close together all the time as though they were in a Concentration Camp in time of war. The organization of every company and regiment would be complete, officers and all, constantly in touch and working together to promote peace and do the work of peace but ready to do the work of war at any time if need be. Officers in the Homecroft Reserve should be Homecrofters, trained in all the military knowledge necessary, but also trained as Homecrofters and getting their living that way.[Pg 235]

It has often been said both of this country and of England that the country must not be turned into an armed camp, like the Continent of Europe. The fear is well grounded that if that were done the military spirit would soon dominate the nation and plunge it into all the evils of Militarism, with the danger always to be feared of an ultimate military despotism.

The plan for a Homecroft Reserve entirely eliminates that objection. A great Homecroft community comprising a million acre Homecrofts, tilled and lived on by a million trained Homecroft Reservists, in the Colorado River Valley, would make no militaristic impression on the character of the people at large in the United States as a whole. And the same statement would hold good, if another similar Homecroft Reserve of a million men on a million acres in each State were established in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California, another in Louisiana, another in Minnesota, and another in West Virginia.

And yet this immense Homecroft Reserve, aggregating an army of five million[Pg 236] men in time of war, and ready at any time for instant service, would make the United States the most potentially powerful military nation in the world.

The lesson of this last great war will be learned, before it is over, by all the nations of the world. That lesson is that men, men of reckless daring and dauntless bravery, men utterly indifferent to their own lives when they can be sacrificed to save the nation, men like the Belgian gardeners who have fought for their homeland in this war, men like the Japanese gardeners who threw away their lives against Port Arthur, men like the Scotch Homecrofters who charged with the Scots Greys at Waterloo and have fought through the fierce carnage of a hundred bloody battlefields to sustain and build Britain's Empire Power; such men as the Minute Men of Concord or the Southern Chevaliers who rode with Marion; such men as those who fought with Jackson at New Orleans, whether they were Lafitte's smugglers and pirates from Barataria Bay or Mountaineers from other state or planters from the great[Pg 237] sugar plantations of Louisiana, men who, all of them, are fighting for their homes and their country, constitute a defense that rises above all others in strength and is the most powerful mobile force in modern warfare. Armed and equipped and organized they must be, and fired with the desperate valor that can be born only of patriotic devotion to a great cause; but when you have such men, and enough of them, no modern machinery of war, or engines of destruction, or fortifications can overcome them or stand against them. They are a force as irresistible as the eruption of a mighty volcano.

Those are some of the things to set to the credit of the plan for a Homecroft Reserve if needed for national defense in time of war.

Now measure their value in time of peace, for national defense against the evil forces that are gnawing at the very vitals of our national existence by degenerating our racial strength and physical and mental power as a people.

There is a remedy for the physical degeneracy caused by congested cities.[Pg 238] That remedy is that the populations of such cities shall be scattered into the suburbs where every family can have a home in which they can live in contact with nature. It must be a home with a garden, where they can, if need be, get their living from their own Homecroft. The Homecroft should be the principal source of livelihood for every family,—the factory employment, or the wage earned from it, should be secondary. This one condition, wherever it is brought into existence for an entire community, will end all labor conflicts and disturbances. The most pernicious and poisonous influence in American thought to-day starts from the minds of employers of labor who, sometimes perhaps subconsciously, think they must control labor by having the working people always on the edge of the precipice of starvation. The idea that the wage earner can only be controlled by being kept in a position of personal dependence and subserviency is as medieval, inhuman, and barbarously wrong as was the idea that human slavery was necessary for the control of labor.[Pg 239]

We have achieved religious liberty, political liberty, civil liberty, and personal liberty, but industrial liberty remains yet to be accomplished. Industrial slavery is the corner stone of our industrial edifice. It will continue so as long as the lives of great multitudes of wageworkers revolve around a job, and they know no other way to supply human needs but a wage. Better men will give better service, and employers will get better results, when every wage earner is located on a Homecroft from which he can in any hour of need provide the entire living for himself and family.

That condition is the only permanent remedy for unemployment. When all wage earners—all men and women—in this country are trained Homecrofters, able to build a house and furnish it themselves by their own skill and knowing how to get their living from one acre, whenever need be, the Homecroft life will be the universal life of the working people, and there will be no unemployment.

Unemployment will continue so long as there is a great mass of floating labor,[Pg 240] living from day to day on a wage while it lasts, and starving when it stops. No scheme can be devised that will end the miseries caused by unemployment, so long as that system of a floating mass of workers is perpetuated. Human genius cannot prevent the ebb and flow of prosperity. Eras of depression are inevitable. When they come, thousands will be out of employment. Labor Bureaus, private or public, will not change that condition, because they cannot create jobs where none exist. It is philanthropy and not business for an employer to retain men out of sympathy for them when he does not need their labor. Philanthropy is a poor foundation on which to try to build any economic structure. Better by far have every workingman a Homecrofter, whose labor is needed on his homecroft, in home-garden or home-workshop, whenever it is not needed in some wage-earning employment.

The labor of women and children in factories, aside from all other considerations, is an economic waste, from the broad standpoint of the highest welfare[Pg 241] and prosperity for all the people. Any woman who is a trained Homecrofter is worth more in dollars and cents per day or per week for what she can produce from that homecroft than she can earn in any factory. The same is true of every child old enough to seek factory employment. Homecroft women and Homecroft children will never work in factories, and whenever their labor cannot be had the labor of men will be substituted and the whole world will be the better for it when that time comes.

Every community of Homecrofters created to enlarge and maintain the Homecroft Reserve, would be a training school for Homecrofters. The term of enlistment for the educational training furnished by these great National Institutions for the training of Homecrofters would be five years. Each organized community would be practically a separate Homecroft village. Every one that was organized would make it easier to[Pg 242] organize the next. Public interest would grow and the popular demand would force the rapid expansion of the plan as soon as its benefits in the field of the education of the people were realized—just as happened in the case of the rural free mail delivery.

Whenever the nation starts, as is advocated in this book, to immediately establish a Homecroft Reserve of 100,000 in the Colorado River Country near Yuma; 100,000 in the San Joaquin Valley in California; 100,000 in Louisiana; 100,000 in West Virginia; and 100,000 in Minnesota,—500,000 in all,—and gets that part of its work for national defense done, each 100,000 will be rapidly extended to 1,000,000. That will mean that there will be 5,000,000 enlisted Homecroft Reservists being trained as soldiers of peace as well as soldiers for war—being trained to produce food for man with a hoe as well as to defend their country, if need arises, with a gun. Every Homecrofter and his entire family will be students, learning to be Homecrofters, all of them, and taking a five years' course. One fifth[Pg 243] of the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every year.

Every year, year after year, 1,000,000 trained, scientific Homecrofters—trained in home-handicraft, and in fruit-culture, truck-gardening, berry-growing, poultry-raising, and in putting all their products in shape for marketing, whether in their own stomachs or in the markets of the world—would be graduated from these Homecroft villages comprising the Homecroft Reserves. Each would have had a five years' course in that training—a year longer than required for an ordinary college course and of infinitely more practical value to them than a college course.

They would pay for the use and occupancy of the Homecroft, and for the instruction they would receive, a sum sufficient to cover all the cost of providing the instruction, and six per cent on the value of the Homecroft, four per cent interest and two per cent to go to a sinking fund that would equal the value of the Homecroft in fifty years. The government[Pg 244] would get back every dollar it invested, with interest, and make the profit between the cost of the Homecroft and its fixed ultimate value of $1,000. That value would be from twenty to thirty per cent profit on the original investment by the government.

Every one of the 1,000,000 Homecroft families that would be graduated every year would go out into the great field of our national life and activity, looking first for a Homecroft and second for employment in some industrial vocation.

Now how many of our people are there who can be induced to sit down and hold their heads in their hands until they have stopped the whirl in which most of their minds are involved, long enough to seriously weigh the difference in value to the country and to every industrial and commercial interest of 1,000,000 such trained homecrofters, compared with the 1,000,000 untrained and ignorant foreign immigrants whom we have been swallowing up every year for so many years in the maw of our congested cities?

One million trained Homecrofters, with[Pg 245] their families, coming each year into the social and industrial life of the whole people, scattering into every community where labor was needed, would in a comparatively few years solve every social problem and rescue the nation from its danger of eventual destruction by human congestion, the tenement life, and racial degeneracy. The graduated Homecrofters could never be induced to go into the congested tenement districts. They would insist on living in Homecrofts in the suburbs of the cities.

The nation ought to adopt immediately the whole system of establishing Homecroft communities as training schools for 5,000,000 Homecrofters, from which 1,000,000 would be graduated every year, without any regard to the value of the plan for a Reserve for national defense. It should be done, if for nothing else, to check the congestion of humanity in cities, create individual industrial independence, end unemployment, end woman labor in factories, end child labor, and insure social stability and the perpetuity of the nation.[Pg 246]

THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE COLORADO RIVER—THE NILE OF AMERICA

CHAPTER IX

In the Colorado River Valley in Arizona and California, and in the State of Nevada, the national government already owns large tracts of land and controls the locations required for power development. The work that could be done immediately in establishing Homecroft Reserves on those public lands, would reclaim vast areas of arid lands and develop water power that would have a value far beyond the cost of the work. The financial advantages to the government would be strikingly demonstrated by the work done in those places. The danger of the occupation of California, Oregon, and Washington by a Japanese invading force, before we could mobilize an army on the Pacific Coast, would be entirely removed at a large and steadily increasing profit to our government.

That may seem incredible to the average reader but it is none the less true. Its truth arises from the fact that the enormous values in productive land and in[Pg 248] water power that can be created have as yet no existence. They must be brought into existence by human labor, and large initial expenditures. Those expenditures are too large to be possible through the investment of private capital. When done by the national government, the profits would be large in proportion to the large original investment.

The national government should, without any delay, declare its policy to reserve to itself all water rights and water power resources in the Colorado River Canyon. It should reserve for its own operations all public land in the main valley of the Colorado River below the Canyon. It should resume ownership of every acre of land in that territory that has been heretofore located and is as yet unreclaimed or unsettled. That land should be acquired under a system similar to the Australian system, by purchase under an agreement as to price. If the acquisition of any of the land in that way proves impracticable, private rights in the land should be condemned exactly as would private rights in land needed for forts or fortifications.[Pg 249]

The rapid development and settlement of the Colorado River Valley along the lines herein advocated is a measure of national defense and urgently so. Every year's delay brings the converging lines of possible friction between the United States and Japan closer together. Whatever system we may adopt for national defense in that direction should be so quickly adopted that the safeguards developed by it will be of rapid growth. This is more particularly important if we look at the matter from the right standpoint, and appreciate that what we do is done rather to prevent war than to insure victory in case of war. We will never have a war with Japan unless it is the result of our own heedless indifference, apathetic neglect, and inexcusable unpreparedness.

Immense tracts of land in the Colorado River Valley are still owned by the national government which are capable of reclamation. Having resumed ownership of all unsettled or unreclaimed lands in the valley now in private ownership, the Government should lay out a great system for the storage of the flood waters of[Pg 250] the Colorado River in the canyon of the river. The water should be utilized to reclaim at least five million acres in California and Arizona.

The works necessary for the reclamation of at least a million acres of this land should be carried to completion with all possible expedition. This one million acres should be brought to the highest stage of reclamation and cultivation, subdivided into Homecrofts of one acre each, and as rapidly as possible settled by men with families who either already know or are willing to learn how to get a comfortable living for a family from one acre of land in the Colorado River Valley.

The Australian system of land reclamation and settlement should be applied to the colonization of these acre-garden farms or Homecrofts. On every one of them a house and outbuildings adapted to the climate should be built, costing not over $500. That is all that would be necessary in the way of buildings. Shade rather than shelter is needed and it is more important to provide ways to keep cool than ways to keep out the cold. Life[Pg 251] is lived practically out-of-doors all the year round.

These Homecroft settlements should be organized in communities of not less than one thousand each and, in advance of settlement, schoolhouses adapted to the climate and all necessary roads and transportation facilities should be brought into existence. The price to be paid for the right of occupancy of each acre Homecroft during the five year period of enlistment in the Educational System of the Homecroft Reserve Service, should be based, not on the cost, but on the full value of the reclaimed land and its appurtenant water right plus the entire investment for house and community improvements and the overhead expense of its development.

No cash payment should be required from the settler. He should only pay the fixed annual rental for use and occupation from year to year. The test of his acceptability as an applicant would be his physical fitness for the labor required in the development of that country, as well as for possible military service in the event of war. The most important[Pg 252] question would be his ability, with the help of his family, and with the instruction that would be given to all, to so cultivate and manage his acre Homecroft as to produce from it all the food needed by the family throughout the year. The first consideration in putting such a settler on the land would be the willingness of himself and family to do that one thing above all others and thereby demonstrate the practicability of the plan.

There would thus be brought into existence something rare among American institutions—an independent and self-sustaining community of a million men of military age with families from whom the mainstay of every family would be available for military service without interference with complex commercial or industrial conditions, and without in the slightest degree subjecting the family to possible privation from lack of food, shelter, or raiment. The question of raiment in the Colorado River Valley involves, if necessity exists for economy, an expense so small as to be negligible. If the men from such a community were absent for[Pg 253] five years in military service, the sale of surplus products and poultry in excess of the family needs for food, that could be produced from the acre, would amply supply the need of the family for clothes, and all their other necessary requirements.

The character of the cultivation necessary upon such an acre would be peculiarly adapted to the labor which would be available from the old men, the boys, the women, and the children of the community. Each family would continue to live in its accustomed home indefinitely. If the men of military age were called on for military service, all rentals or other charges against the land or for water maintenance or for instruction or upkeep of roads and public works should be remitted during such a period of actual service and borne by the national government. And in the event of the loss of the head of the family in the service, the ownership of a completely equipped and stocked homecroft should vest in the family in lieu of a pension.

Not only should the Australian land system be made applicable to such communities,[Pg 254] so that each settler could secure his home without the payment of any cash down, or anything more than the annual rental, but the Australian or Swiss system of military service should likewise be adopted, with reference to all these communities and the entire section of the country embraced in the Colorado River Valley.

The plan has no elements of uncertainty or impracticability. The land is there and the government already owns more than enough of it to carry out the plan without the acquisition of any land now in private ownership.

The water necessary to reclaim the land runs to waste year after year into the Gulf of California, and it never will be fully conserved and utilized until the government takes hold and does it on a big interstate scale such as can be done only by the national government. The latent water power should be developed as fast as needed and perpetually owned by the national government. Every available acre of land that can be reclaimed in the main Colorado River Valley, and on the[Pg 255] mesas adjoining it, should be acquired and gradually settled under this plan by the national government.

Every new acre thus developed and settled would add to the economic strength of the nation as well as contribute to its military strength. The fact that this whole section of the country can be so readily adapted to the Australian system of land reclamation and settlement, and also to the Australian system of military service, is one of the strongest reasons for locating the first demonstration of the advantages of such communities in the Colorado River Valley.

Other reasons exist, however, which should not be lost sight of. There is no other available section close enough to Southern California where a force could be developed and maintained that could be brought into action for the defense of Southern California quickly enough to make it safe to rely upon its efficiency for that purpose with certainty. But an army of a million men could be marched from the Colorado River Valley to Los Angeles or any point in Southern California[Pg 256] in much less time than troops could be transported across the Pacific Ocean.

To this end a great Military Highway should be built across the Imperial Valley to San Diego and thence to Los Angeles. Also another Military Highway paralleling the Southern Pacific Railroad from Yuma to Los Angeles with established stations for water supply on both routes at necessary intervals. These highways would in time of peace be a part of a transcontinental highway and would be constantly used by thousands of motor car travelers. No system of railroad or trolley transportation should be wholly depended on for the transportation of these troops. It should not be possible to check their advance by any interruption of traffic resulting from dynamiting bridges or tunnels or otherwise retarding or destroying rail communication. The assured safety to Southern California which would result from the proximity and readiness of the Homecroft Reserve would lie in the fact that every soldier from the Colorado River Valley could transport himself from his home to[Pg 257] the point where he was needed, and be sure that he would get there in time to meet any invading force.

It may be argued that a million men instantly liable for military service to defend our Mexican border or defend Southern California against possible invasion is more than would be needed. Right there lies the incontestable assurance of Peace. Neither Japan nor any other nation would ever seriously consider undertaking to land an army anywhere on the shores of the Gulf of California or the Pacific Ocean for attack upon any section of the United States if a million soldiers stood ready to step to the colors and shoulder their guns and military equipment and give their services wherever needed to repel such an invasion.

Every man living under this Swiss-Australian Homecroft System of military service would be hardened and seasoned for the duties of that service. The activities of his life and the digging of his living from the ground would render him fit at all times for the heavy duties of soldiering. Not only would he be hardened to labor,[Pg 258] but he would be inured to the trying climate of the Southwest, a climate so hot that people unaccustomed to it would melt in their tracks if they undertook any active physical labor under its blistering sun. Those who live in the climate, however, become readily acclimated to it, and are as satisfied with and loyal to the country as it is possible for human beings to be to the land of their home.

The plan of setting apart and developing this particular section of the country as a source of supply and place for the maintenance of an adequate citizen soldiery, would be strengthened by certain enlargements of the plan that would be entirely practicable from every point of view.

The period of the year when the men could best be spared from their homes for an interval of military training would be in the winter time. It would be found advisable, in training the men of the Colorado River Valley for military service, to move them once each year under military discipline to an encampment for field maneuvers at some point in Nevada[Pg 259] far enough to the North to bring them within range of the cold winter climate to be found in many of the valleys of Nevada. The best possible training these men could have would be to march them with a full military equipment from the Colorado River Valley to this winter training ground, and then march them back again to their homes, once every year. That would be physical service that would qualify them for the hardest kind of long distance marching that they might be called upon to do in any event of actual warfare.

The stimulating effect of the cold winter climate of Nevada on men from the hot climate of the Colorado River Valley would be of immense physical advantage to them, besides hardening them to campaigning in a cold country, as they would be hardened already by their home environment to campaigning in a hot country. A military road should be constructed for such use all the way from Yuma to Central Nevada, and then extended north to a point where it would connect with an east and west national highway leading[Pg 260] from Salt Lake City to Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco.

There are other details which should be worked out to complete the comprehensive plan for the establishment and maintenance of such an adequate and efficient citizen soldiery. The most important of these would be the establishment of Institutions for Instruction—Homecroft Institutes—which would train not only the children but the parents as well, in every community subject to this system, in everything relating to the high type of land cultivation that would be necessary to the success of the plan. Coöperative methods in the distribution and sale of their surplus products should also be adopted.

With careful study of all the questions involved relating to physical and mental stamina and strength and its development in that climate, a racial type could be developed with as much physical endurance as that of the Mojave Indians who have lived for centuries in that country. In the old days, before there were railroads or telegraph lines, their couriers would run for sixty miles without water[Pg 261] over the desert. They have powers of endurance exceeded probably by no other living race of men.

The settlements thus contemplated in the Colorado River Valley should be supplemented by the settlement, on Five Acre Homecrofts in Nevada, of as large a force of Homecrofters as might be needed for the Cavalry Arm of the entire Homecroft Reserves of the West and the Pacific Coast. This Homecroft Reserve Cavalry force should be located under the Australian system of land reclamation and settlement, and trained under the Australian system of universal military service. They should be located upon lands now owned by the national government or which could easily be acquired by it in various communities of anywhere from 100 to 1000 each, in all the valleys of the State of Nevada. That entire State has now a population of only 81,876 people, according to the census of 1910, and within its borders there are from three to five million acres of unoccupied and uncultivated lands, or land on which at present only hay or grain is grown,[Pg 262] which could be subdivided into five acre farms and settled under the Australian land system by men with families who would get their living, each family from its five acres, and be there all the years of the future instantly ready at any time for military service whenever and wherever they might be called to the flag.

It would be a very easy matter for the national government to coöperate with the State of Nevada in such a way that every law of the State and every plan for its development would fit in perfectly with this adequate and comprehensive plan for the establishment of a great Reserve force of Cavalry for the national defense. In Nevada, on the splendid stock ranges of that State, the system could be so developed as to establish a cavalry service large enough to serve all needs for that arm of the service, at least when needed anywhere in the Western half of the United States.

The climate of Nevada and the stock ranges of that State will produce not only a hardy and vigorous race of men but will produce a hardy and vigorous race of[Pg 263] horses as well. No horses in the world are stronger or better fitted for cavalry service than those bred in Nevada.

Were this plan once adopted with reference to the State of Nevada, it would not be possible for the national government to reclaim land and make it ready for settlement, with a house on each five acre tract, fast enough to supply the demand for such homes by industrious families who would enthusiastically conform to all the conditions of Reservist service in order to get the advantages and the benefits offered by such a system of land settlement.

Five acres of irrigated land intensively tilled will support a family anywhere in Nevada, but supplementing the five cultivated acres in the majority of cases, grazing privileges could be made appurtenant to the five acre farm which would materially increase its value and facilitate the establishment of an adequate Cavalry Service to be drawn from these Nevada communities. Each community of Homecrofters enlisted in this Cavalry Service should have set apart to them from the[Pg 264] public lands an area of grazing lands which they could use through the formation of a coöperative grazing association, such as have been so successfully conducted in some of the other grazing States.

In this connection, it may be interesting in passing to call attention to the similarity which this system of a Citizen Cavalry Service would have to the Cossack system in Russia. The Russian government maintains this invaluable cavalry arm of the Empire's military power without other expense than to furnish the arms and ammunition for each cavalryman, supplemented by a money payment when in service in lieu of rations.

Land grants have been made to the Cossacks, in return for which they must give the military service which is the condition upon which the land grant was made. The total area of all these grants is in the neighborhood of 146,000,000 acres and many of the Cossack communities have been made wealthy from the timber and mines on their lands. These Cossack communities are self-governing political[Pg 265] bodies within themselves, in all their local affairs. Their term of service begins with early manhood and ends only when they have reached the age of sixty. Their mode of life gives them all the physical vigor that could be attained by constant service, and when called to the colors in time of war, they regard active service as something to be much desired and it is entered upon with enthusiasm rather than regret.

The same conditions would hold good if a National Homecroft Reserve Cavalry Service were established in Nevada. The farmer could leave his home without prejudice to his family and would welcome with patriotic enthusiasm a call to the colors. At the same time his home life and home environment would be free from all the monotony and innumerable evils of life in a military barracks or camp in time of peace. It would have all the variety of an active, out-of-door, free, and independent rural life in one of the most bracing and stimulating climates in the world, and in a State which, if it were fully developed under this plan, would[Pg 266] have a population of at least five million citizens and their families, of the highest and most intelligent class that could be produced on American soil.

This great Cavalry Service of our citizen soldiery in the State of Nevada could be so quickly transported to and mobilized at any point on the Pacific Coast between Seattle and Los Angeles, in the event of threatened invasion, that no nation could by any possibility land an army on our Pacific shores without being almost instantly confronted by an organized force of citizen soldiers with its full quota of cavalry—not an untrained mob of volunteers but hardened and trustworthy men of training and experience in all that a soldier can learn to do in preliminary training without actual warfare.

The fact that such an overwhelming and irresistible force was known by all other nations to exist and to be available for immediate mobilization and defense, would in and of itself prove the best assurance we could have against the breaking out of a war which otherwise might well occur because[Pg 267] of our hopelessly inadequate regular standing army and our utter unpreparedness so long as we have no adequate force of citizen soldiery.

A citizen soldiery is what we must undoubtedly have in this country, but it must be a citizen soldiery trained and inured at all times in advance to the real hardships of war. They must have the physical stamina necessary to endure such hardships. They must be kept at all times physically fit by the labor of their daily life and the occupations whereby they earn their bread. They must be trained thoroughly and well in time of peace, as it is contemplated they shall be trained under the military system of Switzerland and Australia. That system would to a large extent be the model which would be the guide for the creation of the Homecroft Reserve, except that under the latter system the regular annual training period would be longer and the training more thorough and complete. It would be sufficiently so to make a reservist in every way the equal, so far as training goes, of a soldier in the regular army.[Pg 268]

The creation of a great Military Reserve under the plan proposed for a Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley for the national defense would require, for its complete and satisfactory fruition, the acquisition by the United States of the territory through which the Colorado River now flows from the present boundary line to the Gulf of California and extending around the head of the Gulf of California.

The Gulf of California should be made neutral waters forever, by treaty between the United States and Mexico, and this treaty should be agreed to by all the nations of the world. The neutral waters thus created should extend far enough into the open sea so that all commerce from the shores of the Gulf of California or reaching the markets of the world through that waterway from any of the vast interior territory embraced in the drainage basin of the Colorado River, could at any time reach the ocean highways of commerce without danger of being waylaid by the hostile ships of war of any nation.[Pg 269]

The territory which the United States should thus acquire from Mexico by peaceful agreement and purchase should include the section of land lying north of the most southerly line of New Mexico and Arizona, which runs through or very close to Douglas, Naco, and Nogales, extended due west to and across the Gulf of California and thence to the Pacific Ocean. The land lying north and east of this line and the Gulf of California and Colorado River should become a part of Arizona. The land lying north of the same line and extending from the Colorado River and the Gulf of California on the east to the Pacific Ocean on the west, should become a part of the State of California.

A neutral zone should be created, south of and parallel to the boundary line between the United States and Mexico, extending all the way from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Rio Grande River. This neutral zone should be controlled by an International Commission.

That commission should also have[Pg 270] jurisdiction to determine any controversies that might arise with reference to the Gulf of California. They should have the same jurisdiction over that neutral sea zone as over the neutral land zone. The jurisdiction of such an International Commission might well be extended to cover all controversies that might arise between the United States and Mexico, as to which it might be given full powers as an International Commission of Conciliation or Arbitration, whenever such disputed question was referred to it by the Executive or Legislative authority of either government, and in all cases before an actual declaration of war should be made by either country against the other.

Such an agreement would be of inestimable advantage to both countries, and would more than compensate Mexico for the transfer to the United States of the little corner of land which should be a part of Arizona and California. It is of no possible benefit to Mexico to hang on to it. Its acquisition by the United States is vital to its safe development. Its ownership by Mexico puts the great population[Pg 271] that will eventually live in the valley of the Colorado River in the same position with reference to their national outlet to the sea that the people of the Mississippi Valley would be in, if some other nation owned the mouth of the Mississippi River, or that New York would occupy if, for instance, Germany or France owned Long Island and Staten Island and the territory immediately adjacent to the Narrows and Long Island Sound on the mainland.

If the peace advocates in the United States, who limit their energies to the establishment of the machinery for arbitration or conciliation, would go one step farther and work out such a plan as that suggested above for getting rid of a national controversy before it becomes acute, they would render invaluable service to their country. The ownership of the delta of the Colorado River and the head of the Gulf of California is one of those certain points of danger that should be removed. The people of Mexico must realize that, and the creation of a neutral zone and the neutralization of the Gulf of[Pg 272] California would be of infinitely greater value to Mexico than the small tract she would transfer to the United States could ever be under any circumstances. For Mexico to continue to hold it, creates a constant danger of friction or conflict which would be entirely removed if it were taken over by the United States.

The situation now is exactly as though one man owned the doorway to another man's house. He could make no real beneficial use of it except to embarrass the owner of the house. Such a situation can only result in controversy. Is it not possible that the advocates of national arbitration and conciliation or of an International Court can be induced to see this and use their efforts to accomplish a great national benefit that is entirely practicable? The plan above proposed would have all the merits claimed for International Arbitration and Conciliation and for an International Peace Tribunal. That is what the proposed International Peace Commission between this country and Mexico would be, in fact, and its value and success being demonstrated[Pg 273] in one place where it could be practically put in operation, it would be much easier to get the same plan adopted in wider fields by other nations, and perhaps gradually evolve a world-wide system for an International Peace Tribunal that way.

Another change that should be made in existing boundary lines to facilitate the development of the resources of that country and its settlement by a dense population, is shown by the map on the following page. State lines in the arid region should have been located, so far as possible, where they would have followed the natural boundaries of hydrographic basins. When early errors can be now corrected with advantage to the people it should be done. The development of Northern California would be facilitated by separating it from Southern California at the Tehachapi Mountains. Then the great problem of the reclamation and settlement of the 12,500,000 acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys could be solved much easier than as the state is now constituted. It would also be to the advantage of Southern California to be able to deal with its vast problems of irrigation development without being complicated with those of Northern California.[Pg 274]

The accompanying map illustrates the lines which should be the boundary lines of the States of California, South California and Nevada. The North and South line between California and Nevada, running from Oregon to Lake Tahoe, should be continued south until it strikes the crest of the Pacific Watershed; thence it should follow the crest of that watershed southeast, south and southwest, until it joins the Pacific Ocean between Santa Barbara and Ventura. The southern boundary line of Utah should be extended until it intersects the line last described at the crest of the Pacific Watershed. The land north of the line so extended to the west and draining into Nevada, formerly in California, and comprising Mono and part of Inyo Counties should go to Nevada and all south of this east and west line should go to South California. Nevada[Pg 276] would gain by the exchange and so would South California. A glance at the map will satisfy anyone of the advantages to all the sections affected which would accrue from this correction of present boundaries, and the creation of the new State of South California.

CHAPTER X

California is a remote Insular Province of the United States—just as much an island as Hawaii, to all practical intents and purposes. It would be more easily accessible from Japan by sea, in case of war, than from the United States by land. It is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, now nothing more than a large lake in these days of modern steamships. It is bounded on the east and south by mountain ranges from which a thousand miles of desert and the Rocky Mountains intervene before the populous sections of the United States are reached. On the north inaccessible mountains separate California from the plains and valleys of Oregon. There are hundreds of places on its coast where an army could be landed. To reach it from the north, mountains must be crossed. From the east, mountains must be crossed. From the south, mountains must be crossed. From the west, the gentle waves of the Pacific, in all ordinary weather, lap the sloping sands which for nearly a thousand miles tempt a landing on so fair a shore.[Pg 278]

All this is true of Southern California, so far as its inaccessibility from the east is concerned, but it is more essentially true of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. There you have a great bowl, fashioned by Nature in such a way as to open invitingly to the warm and equable winds that come from the Pacific and the Japan current, while on the north, west, and south are high mountain ranges that protect from the blizzards that come out of the north or the hot desert blasts from the south.

This peculiar conformation of the great central valley of California makes its defense in case of war with any maritime nation a most difficult problem.

The idea that the Pacific Coast of the United States or the coast of California can be protected by a navy seems so utterly without foundation that it is difficult to treat it seriously. Do those who delude themselves with that mistaken dream recall that Cervera steamed in[Pg 279] from the sea and slipped into Santiago Harbor when practically the whole American Navy was searching and watching for him?

If England cannot protect two hundred miles of seacoast from the raids of German battleships, can we protect two thousand miles? Does anyone doubt that if Germany had been so disposed, and her battleships had been convoying fast transports laden with soldiers, she easily could have landed them at Scarborough or anywhere along that part of the English Coast? Does anyone doubt that Japan could do the same thing anywhere along the Pacific Coast, particularly when the fact is borne in mind that in the summer, often for weeks at a time, the Pacific Coast is enveloped in dense fogs that are almost continuous?

Does anyone question that the instant war was declared Japan would seize Alaska and the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands, and cut off all possibility of our navy operating anywhere except close to our few coaling stations on the mainland? If so, they should surely read "The Valor[Pg 280] of Ignorance" by Homer Lea, not for the author's opinions, but just to get the cold hard facts which our national heedlessness makes it so difficult to get the people of this country to realize.

In "The Valor of Ignorance" the fact is pointed out with the most specific detail that the number of transports Japan had, when that book was published—1909—was a transport fleet of 95 steamers with a troop capacity of 199,526 as against ten American transports. The author makes this further comment:

"Should Japan embark on these two fleets an average of two Japanese to the space and tonnage ordinarily deemed necessary for one American, then the troop capacity on a single voyage of these fleets would exceed three hundred thousand officers and men together with their equipment and supplies. That this would be easily possible and would work no hardship on the men was demonstrated by the Japanese winter quarters in Manchuria during the Russian War."

Is there anyone so blind as to believe that if such an army of invasion was started from Japan, convoyed by the[Pg 281] Japanese navy, that we could find and destroy that entire navy and then find and destroy ninety-five transports before they could land their soldiers on the beaches along the peaceful shores of California, Oregon, and Washington? The greater part of every year they are peaceful shores. That is why the name Pacific was chosen for that great ocean.

The unique feature about this whole subject is that while the American people are utterly indifferent, Japan, in an incredibly short space of time, has equipped herself with everything needful for such an invasion,—Navy, Transports, and Soldiers, probably the most perfectly organized army in the world.

That is the situation of California from the side of the Pacific Ocean. What is it from the land side?

If Japan contemplated an invasion of our territory, how many are there who realize that just five dynamite bombs exploded in the right places would block a tunnel on every one of the railroads leading into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley?[Pg 282]

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Central Pacific and the Western Pacific from the east.

Blow up one tunnel on each line and do the job thoroughly and well as the Japanese would do it,—that's the Japanese way,—and it would be weeks and perhaps months before one single train could be got in or out of California.

We may rest assured also that the Japanese, when they undertook that job, would not stop with blowing up one tunnel. They would blow up a dozen on every one of the railroads mentioned, and bridges and culverts and trestles. With a little dynamite, mixed with the reckless daring of the Japanese, California could be made inaccessible to an army from the east, except by sea, for a longer time than it would take to transport an army from Asia to America.

No doubt the idea will occur to some that soldiers could be transported from the Atlantic Coast to California through[Pg 283] the Panama Canal in time to meet such an emergency. But what would we transport them in? We have no ships. And it is no sure thing that the Japanese would not get the Panama Canal blown up and stop that channel of transportation, if war was begun between them and the United States. It would require nothing more desperate to accomplish it than we know the Japanese are ready for at any time the opportunity offered—nothing more desperate than Hobson's feat at Santiago.

The Japanese are a farsighted people and war with them is an exact science. They master every detail in advance. They proved that in their war with Russia. There can be no doubt—not because they have any hostile intentions towards the United States, but merely because it is a part of the duty of their professional military scientists—that the plans are now made in the war office at Tokio, for every detail of the whole project outlined above for dynamiting every railroad into California and blowing up the Panama Canal, in the event of war between the[Pg 284] United States and Japan. And it is quite probable that the men are detailed for the job and the dynamite carefully stored away with which to do the job, if the necessity arose for it.

Neither did they want a war with Russia. But it is a part of their religion to be prepared for war. It is the thorough Japanese way. Their way is not our way. They take no chances. We do nothing else but take chances. Because what we are doing or have done for national defense is as nothing.

All we spend on our navy is wasted, so far as any possible trouble with Japan is concerned. If war came, it would come like the eruption of Mont Pelée, so unexpectedly and quickly that escape was impossible. The people of the United States, if we have a war with Japan, will awaken some morning and read in all their morning papers that the Panama Canal has been blown up, and that tunnels on all the railroads into California and the Colorado River Bridges at Yuma and Needles have been blown up; that the 50,000 or more[Pg 285] Japanese soldiers in California have mobilized and intrenched themselves in impregnable positions in the mountains of the coast range near the ocean; that Japanese steamers have landed 10,000 more Japanese soldiers to reënforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, aëroplanes, and a complete equipment for a field campaign by this Japanese army of 60,000 men; that those Japanese steamers have landed at some entirely unfortified roadstead in California: Bodega Bay or Tomales Bay or Purissima or Pescadero or Santa Cruz or Monterey or Port Harford or any one of a dozen other places where they could land between San Diego and Point Arena.

The Japanese making this landing would within two days make a junction with the Japanese already in California. Then an army of occupation of 60,000 veteran soldiers is in military control of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley.

How surprised the good people would be who have been so anxious to get enough of the "inferior people" who are willing to do[Pg 286] "squat labor" for the American owners of the country, which had just been taken away from them by the Japanese. Does it make any American proud to contemplate that the whole situation above outlined is not only possible but that it is the exact thing that would happen if we had a war with Japan?

Soldiers for defense? We could not get them there in time, and we cannot maintain a soldier in idleness in a barracks in California for every Japanese who is industriously earning his living in a potato field, doing "squat labor" and thinking the while that he wishes his country would make it possible, as she could so easily do, for him to own a potato patch himself. Let no one imagine he is not thinking about it. The Japanese are a farsighted and subtle people, with brains four thousand years old.

And with this army of occupation of 60,000 Japanese veterans in possession of the great central valley of California, what would the Japanese do with our coast fortifications and the big guns that cost so much money and were designed[Pg 287] to riddle Japanese battleships miles at sea?

Why, the Japanese would just laugh at them. They would not be worth taking. If they thought they were they would take them, just as they took Port Arthur and Tsing Tau. But they would not try to do that until they had landed a couple of hundred thousand more veteran Japanese troops on the Pacific Coast. Then they would take our coast fortifications from the land side not so much by storm as by swarm.

Most probably they would be defending San Francisco or Sacramento from invasion while the Japs were intrenching themselves in the appropriate places to control every pass across the Siskiyous or the Sierras or the Tehachapi Mountains, making it impossible to get across those mountains with an army, even though the army could first be got across the deserts to the mountains.[Pg 288]

In winter the Siskiyous and the Sierras would be made impassible by Nature's snow and ice and avalanches, without any other defenses being built by the Japanese.

But one of the first things the Japanese would do would be to organize a force of aëroplane scouts with bombs to swoop out and down from their mountain aeries and dynamite culverts and bridges on every railroad approaching the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. They could make it impossible to keep open railroad communication in any way other than by an adequate force to repel an aëroplane attack stationed at every bridge and culvert across a thousand miles of desert. Once the bridges across the Colorado River at the Needles and Yuma were blown up, the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe would be out of commission for months.

What it would mean to get an army across the mountains into the great central valley of California cannot be appreciated by anyone who is unfamiliar with the stupendous canyons and chasms and the towering peaks of the Siskiyou and Sierra Nevada Mountains. Those[Pg 289] who toiled over them with the Donner party could have told the tale to those who calculate on scaling those mountains with an army in the face of Japanese batteries defending every pass. It would be a task greater than the capture of Port Arthur to capture one pass and get it away from the Japanese after we had got into motion and started in with the job of reconquering California.

The difficulty of getting an American army into Southern California after the Japanese had once occupied it, is described by Homer Lea in "The Valor of Ignorance" in the following warning words:

"Entrance into southern California is gained by three passes—the San Jacinto, Cajon and Saugus, while access to the San Joaquin Valley and central California is by the Tehachapi. It is in control of these passes that determines Japanese supremacy on the southern flank of the Pacific coast, and it is in their adaptability to defence that determines the true strategic value of southern California to the Japanese.

"Los Angeles forms the main centre of these three passes, and lies within three hours by[Pg 290] rail of each of them, while San Bernardino, forming the immediate base of forces defending Cajon and San Jacinto passes, is within one hour by rail of both passes.

"The mountain-chains encompassing the inhabited regions of southern California might be compared to a great wall thousands of feet in height, within whose enclosures are those fertile regions which have made the name of this state synonymous with all that is abundant in nature. These mountains, rugged and inaccessible to armies from the desert side, form an impregnable barrier except by the three gateways mentioned.

"Standing upon Mt. San Gorgonio or San Antonio one can look westward and southward down upon an endless succession of cultivated fields, towns and hamlets, orchards, vineyards and orange groves; upon wealth amounting to hundreds of millions; upon as fair and luxuriant a region as is ever given man to contemplate; a region wherein shall be based the Japanese forces defending these passes. To the north and east across the top of this mountain-wall are forests, innumerable streams, and abundance of forage. But suddenly at the outward rim all vegetation ceases; there is a drop—the desert begins.

"The Mojave is not a desert in the ordinary sense of the word, but a region with all the[Pg 291] characteristics of other lands, only here Nature is dead or in the last struggle against death. Its hills are volcanic scoria and cinders, its plains bleak with red dust; its meadows covered with a desiccated and seared vegetation; its springs, sweet with arsenic, are rimmed, not by verdure, but with the bones of beast and man. Its gaunt forests of yucca bristle and twist in its winds and brazen gloom. Its mountains, abrupt and bare as sun-dried skulls, are broken with cañons that are furnaces and gorges that are catacombs. Man has taken cognizance of this deadness in his nomenclature. There are Coffin Mountains, Funeral Ranges, Death Valleys, Dead Men's Cañons, dead beds of lava, dead lakes, and dead seas. All here is dead. This is the ossuary of Nature; yet American armies must traverse it and be based upon it whenever they undertake to regain southern California. To attack these fortified places from the desert side is a military undertaking pregnant with greater difficulties than any ever attempted in all the wars of the world."

Now after so easily taking California away from us because we stolidly refused, like the English people, to heed repeated warnings, what would the Japanese do? Southern California they would simply[Pg 292] occupy with a military force and continue to occupy it. Its irrigable lands in the coast basin are already all reclaimed and densely populated.

The Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys would be the paradise that they would develop into a new Japan.

Already we have shown how they could duplicate the 12,500,000 acres of irrigated and cultivated land in Japan in the drainage Basin of the Colorado River.

They could do it again in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California. There are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world in those valleys and within two years after they had taken possession of it they would have several million Japanese reclaiming and cultivating it. They would bring their people over as fast as all the steamers of Japan could carry them. And long before we had got real good and ready to reconquer California they would have peopled its great central valley with a dense Japanese population who would fight us, the original owners of the country, to defend their homes from invasion.[Pg 293]

It should immediately, with just the same energy and expedition that it would act if an invading Armada had actually sailed from Japan, buy 100,000 acres of land in the San Joaquin Valley that can be irrigated from the Calaveras River and from the Calaveras Reservoir if it were built. It should subdivide that tract into one acre Homecrofts and put 100,000 Homecroft Reservists on it. It should go to work and build, right now and without any dilly-dallying or delay, the Calaveras Reservoir. Those 100,000 Homecroft Reservists should be set to work to build the Calaveras Reservoir and the irrigation system necessary to irrigate that particular Homecroft Reserve tract, and all the works necessary to protect the entire delta of the San Joaquin River from overflow and protect the channel of the river and broaden it below Stockton—"open the neck of the bottle" as they say in that locality.

The government should go over onto the west side of the Sacramento Valley and[Pg 294] buy another 100,000 acres, and subdivide it into one acre Homecrofts and enlist another corps of 100,000 Homecroft Reservists and put them on that land. Then it should set them to work to build a great wasteway, to temporarily carry off the flood waters of the Sacramento River—one that will not split the Sacramento River but that will safeguard Sacramento from that catastrophe. That work should be continued until it is finished.

Another 100,000 acres in the neighborhood of Fresno should be likewise bought and another 100,000 Homecroft Reservists enlisted and located on it. They should be set to work to open a navigable waterway to Fresno and dig a great drainage canal that would also be a navigable canal, from Suisun Bay to Tulare Lake.

Another 100,000 acres in the upper end of the west side of the Sacramento Valley should be acquired and settled with 100,000 Homecrofters who would work on the construction of the Iron Canyon Reservoir and other reservoirs on the Sacramento River and its tributaries, and on a great[Pg 295] main line West Side Canal from the Sacramento River to the Straits of Carquinez.

Another 100,000 acres on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley should be acquired and settled with 100,000 Homecrofters who would work on the construction of the lower section of the West Side Canal from the Straits of Carquinez to the lower end of the San Joaquin Valley.

The government should not stop there. It should, as soon as the necessary legislative machinery can be evolved, go into the extreme southern end of the San Joaquin Valley and acquire 500,000 acres of land for a Homecroft Reserve of 500,000 families. It should build the works necessary to bring the water to irrigate this land from the Sacramento River by the great main-line canal from the river to the straits of Carquinez. Those straits should be crossed on a viaduct and the canal carried on down the west side of the valley, starting at an elevation high enough to cover the land to be irrigated in the lower valley. The increased value of the million acres would cover the entire cost of the works. Additional revenue could be[Pg 296] earned by the furnishing of water to other lands under the canal in the Sacramento and also in the San Joaquin Valley.

The coöperation of the State of California would be gladly extended and complete plans carried out for the reclamation of the San Joaquin Valley by a great canal on the east side of the valley heading in the Sacramento River near Redding, or at the Iron Canyon, and extending to the extreme southern end of the valley, as recommended by the Commission appointed by General Grant when President of the United States. That Commission was composed of General Alexander, Colonel Mendel, and Professor Davidson, three of the most eminent engineers and scientists of those days.

An aggregate area of 12,500,000 acres would, as the result of this policy, be reclaimed and settled in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. Having created a dense population ourselves in that country there would be no unoccupied land to tempt the Japanese. And with 1,000,000 Homecroft Reservists ready at any time to meet and repel an invasion, our occupancy[Pg 297] of the country would be assured forever.

There would not be room left for many Japanese immigrants, and if some of them did come they would be in such a hopeless minority that no danger would result from their being here. No condition could then be imagined in the future that would create a possibility of Japan, even with all the countless millions of China combined with her, being able to land on the Pacific Coast an army large enough to stand a moment against a Homecroft Reserve of a million soldiers from the Colorado River Valley and another million from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.

Whether it would be advisable to establish other Homecroft Reserves in Oregon and Washington would depend largely on the attitude of mind of the people of those States. If a few connecting railroad lines were built, troops could be transported by railroads running north across Southern California and Nevada to a connection with the railroads running down the Columbia River to Portland. These railroads would all be east of the[Pg 298] mountains until they connected with the Columbia River Railroad and would be free from danger of being destroyed by the blowing up of tunnels.

Of course it is a remote contingency that such a thing should ever become necessary, but if it ever did, the Canadian border could be defended with troops brought north through Nevada and Utah from the Colorado River Valley to great concentration camps at Chehalis and Spokane, in Washington, Havre in Montana, and Williston in North Dakota. As a matter of military precaution, the necessary connecting links should be built as military railroads, if nothing else,—such links as from Yuma to Cadiz, Pioche to Ely, Tonopah to Austin, Indian Springs to Eureka, and from Battle Mountain or Winnemucca as well as from Cobre on the Central Pacific line north to a connection with the Oregon Short Line. The ease with which these connections could be made, and the facility, in that event, with which troops from the Colorado River Valley could be transported to any point in North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, or Oregon, as well as their

proximity when at home in the Colorado Valley, to any point where they might be needed along the Mexican border or in Southern California, emphasizes the advantages of the Colorado River Valley as a location for the first great Homecroft Reserve force of 1,000,000 men, supplemented by another force of an equal number of men in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California. Once that was done, the question of the defense of the Pacific Coast would be settled for all time, so long as this Homecroft Reserve force was maintained and kept always in readiness for immediate service.

CHAPTER XI

The most dangerous aspect of the awakening of the people of the United States to a realization of their unpreparedness for war, and the appalling national disasters that might ensue from it, is the danger of creating a military caste which would gradually absorb to itself an undue control of Governmental authority and power, leading in the end to a military despotism.

Already the danger of this is seen in the assumption of the arbitrary power over inland waterway development now exercised by the corps of Army engineers and the Board of Army engineers, and the strong opposition emanating from them against the adoption of any improved system of river control that would protect the people from such appalling disasters as those which overtook the Mississippi Valley in 1912 and again in 1913.

It is a fact capable of absolute demonstration that a large portion of the damage[Pg 302] resulting from those floods was due to the stubborn refusal of the Army engineers to approve or adopt any plan for flood control that would supplement the levee system by source stream control of the floods on the upper tributaries, and by controlled outlets and spillways and auxiliary flood water channels in the lower valley. It is very doubtful whether the people of the delta of the Mississippi River will ever succeed in getting protection against the recurrence of devastating floods until this baleful influence of the Army engineers can be eliminated.

There are several reasons why this military control of inland waterways is detrimental to the country. The military caste in the United States has developed remarkable capacity for turning to their own advantage the influence which their control over appropriations for river and harbor improvements has centered in them. The Army engineers are wedded to the present piecemeal system of appropriations, popularly known as the "Pork Barrel" System. The reason for this is that it practically vests in them the autocratic[Pg 303] authority to determine whether the demands of the constituents of any Senator or Congressman for some local river or harbor improvement shall or shall not be granted. The representatives of the people, whether they be Congressmen or Senators, must humbly bow to a higher power and secure its gracious grant of consent or face the disappointment of their constituents. It ought not to be difficult for anyone with common sense, and with the most superficial knowledge of the manipulation of social and political influences in shaping legislation to understand the evils of this system, or the influence exerted through it by the military caste which is adverse to the best interest of the people at large.

The "Pork Barrel" System, with its piecemeal appropriations for local improvements, without any underlying comprehensive plan, as long as it prevails, will block the way to all efficient waterway development, or protection from periodical damage by devastating floods. And it will never be changed until popular indignation and protest breaks the stranglehold[Pg 304] that the military caste now has upon this class of legislation in Congress.

Their attitude in this whole field of public development is in humiliating contrast with that of the Samurai of Japan when the whole system of government of that nation was reconstructed and reorganized. The Samurai, actuated by a patriotic and self-sacrificing desire to promote the general welfare, surrendered entirely the privileges and prerogatives that they held as a military class, and accepted a system which took from them all power and submerged them in the mass of the people.

The military caste of this country apparently think only of their own aggrandizement, and persistently oppose any modifications of an evil system which would in the slightest degree involve a surrender of their autocratic authority or official prestige and power for the general welfare.

In this stupendous field of national development, where immediate progress is so vital to the people of the entire country, the stubborn opposition of the military[Pg 305] caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete coördination of all the departments of the government in the solution of the whole problem of river regulation and flood control and the upbuilding of a great inland waterway system.

Aside from that, there is an additional reason why the present system can never be relied upon for a complete solution of the problem of river regulation. This further difficulty lies in the system under which the military caste is organized. The military system which prevails in all matters administered through the Army, strangles all individual initiative and opinion. It automatically subordinates every engineer in the military service to the mental and personal domination of the chief of the Army engineers, whoever he may be. All original and creative engineering genius is muzzled or chloroformed as soon as it is born. If by any Caesarian operation it chances to come into being it is promptly strangled.

Another incurable defect in the military system when applied to civil construction[Pg 306] and internal development of the resources of the country, lies in the transfer of engineers from one assignment of duty to another after brief periods of service. This plan is no doubt advisable and possibly necessary in the military service. Its tendency is to bring all Army engineers up to a common general level of ability and experience. It destroys the peculiar originality and genius which can only result from long experience and training in one of the many special fields for which engineers must be developed in civil life.

This Army system might not work so badly if applied only to harbors and harbor improvement work, but it destroys efficiency when applied to such problems as those presented by a great river system like the Mississippi River and its tributaries. An army engineer in charge of the Lower Mississippi River district may have learned something of that problem, but by the time he has learned it he is transferred to some other part of the country and given a different problem to study. Another engineer is put in his place, and by the time he in his turn has[Pg 307] partially familiarized himself with the problem he is likewise transferred. And so it goes on, ignorance succeeds ignorance as fast as knowledge can be obtained.

A martinet at the head of the Army Engineering corps can stifle and render useless to the country the most brilliant engineering genius if it blossoms forth with any new theory or original suggestion. The Army engineer corps is bound hand and foot by prejudice and pride of caste. The engineering corps is a unit, arbitrarily dominated, intellectually and professionally, by the chief of the corps. Nothing original can develop under such an atmosphere of mental repression. The best engineering talent in the world is suppressed and rendered valueless by that system of organization. It can never solve the intricate and novel hydraulic problems presented by the Mississippi River which, with all its tributaries, must be treated as a unit in order to control its floods.

The people of the lower Mississippi Valley have for years endeavored to secure the construction of controlled outlets and[Pg 308] spillways, but their most urgent efforts have fallen dead at the door of the Army engineers or their associates or subordinates. The contractors profit financially by the "Levees Only" system. The politicians share the power developed by the local political machines which control the huge expenditures for levee construction and maintenance. Both are ardent advocates and devotees of the military caste system which perpetuates their powers, privileges, and perquisites. The rest of the people, wherever they dare to entertain an independent opinion, recognize that the Mississippi Valley can never be rightly developed so long as the present "Levees Only" system continues to prevail.

An engineering service composed entirely of engineers in civil life should be created to take over all the work relating to river regulation, flood control, and inland waterway construction, operation, and maintenance. The opposition to such a system for the administration of civil affairs by civil officials, instead of by the Army, has been based upon the plea that[Pg 309] nobody but army officers can be trusted to be honest in the expenditure of the funds of the national government. Such an opposition is an insult to the civil engineering profession of the United States and is completely refuted by the splendid constructive accomplishments of the United States Reclamation Service. No one questions the personal honesty of the Army engineers, but their methods are enormously wasteful and without results anywhere near commensurate to the amount of their expenditures. The system championed and supported by them has resulted in the waste of about $200,000,000. That vast sum, if it had been wisely and economically expended, would have gone a long way towards creating conditions on our river systems in which the water that now runs to waste in devastating floods would have been put into the river at the low water season to float boats on that would carry our inland commerce.

There never can be any escape from this carnival of waste and extravagance and impotent and useless expenditure until the whole system of river control and improvement[Pg 310] is changed. Control of it must be taken away from the Army and vested in civil control. Another reason for divorcing the Army entirely from control of river work is that it seems impossible for an Army engineer to recognize or reason back to original causes. He can see in a flood only something against which he must build a fortification after the flood has been formed. This is well illustrated by the blind adherence of the Army engineers, or at least of their chiefs, to the delusion that floods of the lower Mississippi Valley can be safeguarded against by the "Levees Only" system of flood protection in that valley. They utterly ignore the cause of the floods and therefore refuse to consider any system of source stream control or of controlled outlets, spillways, and wasteways.

Another illustration of this persistent adherence to mere local protection, instead of safeguarding against an original cause, is furnished by the work of the Army engineers in building the Stockton cut-off canal in California. This canal was built ostensibly to prevent the Stockton[Pg 311] channel from being filled with sediment to the detriment of navigation. In fact it was built to protect the city of Stockton from overflow and flood damage.

The first big flood that came filled up the cut-off canal and it is now useless. It would be clearly unavailing to reëxcavate it, because it would fill up again with the next big flood. The sediment which filled the canal was gathered by the river after it left the foothills and tore its way as a raging torrent through farms and fertile fields. It washed or caved them into the river and carried down and deposited the earth material in the cut-off canal.

The Army engineers, however, or at least their chiefs, had steadfastly set their faces against reservoir construction for flood control. But for this they might have built the great Calaveras Reservoir which would have afforded complete protection for the city of Stockton against floods. By controlling the flood at its source, storing the flood waters, and letting them into the river below only in a volume not larger than the channel would carry, all damage to the valley and to farms[Pg 312] lying between the foothills and the city of Stockton would have been avoided. No sediment would have been carried into the Stockton channel to impede navigation. The surplus flood water instead of running to waste would have been conserved and held back until needed for beneficial use.

Any such plan as this would have been contrary to all the precedents and theories of the military engineers. All the damages resulting from failure to adopt it merely illustrate the necessity of escaping from those precedents and theories, and the pride of opinion which clings to them with such desperate tenacity. That escape must be accomplished, if we are ever to get river regulation and flood protection in this country. Stockton will never get it until the Calaveras Reservoir has been built, and no flood-menaced section of the country will get protection until it is afforded to it by engineering and constructive forces dominated by the civil and not by the military authority of the Government.

The whole training of an Army engineer[Pg 313] is wrong, when it comes to dealing with river problems and the control of floods which can only be safeguarded against by controlling the remote causes which result in the formation of the flood. The idea of preventing the formation of floods by controlling those original causes, preserving forest and woodland cover, preserving the porosity of the soil, slowing up the run-off from the watershed, or holding back the flood waters in reservoirs or storage basins, seems to be beyond the scope of the powers of conception and construction of the military engineers of the United States Army. They see only results, and seem unable to comprehend original causes. Not only this, but they also oppose, by all the political arts in which the Army engineers are so well versed, every proposition to coördinate the work of the Army engineers in the field of channel work and local flood defense, with the work of other departments of the national government. Every department of the national government must be coördinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use of water[Pg 314] that would check rapid run off and hold back the flood water on the watershed where it originated, and in that way prevent the formation of a destructive flood.

The entire willingness of the Army engineers to subordinate the welfare of the people in every flood-menaced valley to the stubborn determination of the military caste to retain and broaden their own powers and privileges in this one field of action, shows what might be expected from any increase in the members of that caste, or any enlargement of their control over the civil affairs of the country.

The military caste in the United States will never approve any plan for national defense that does not center in and radiate from them. They will oppose it unless it broadens their influence and power, and imbeds it more strongly in the foundations of the Government. A plan such as is advocated in this book, will never have their coöperation, support, or endorsement, for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the original cause of war and to contribute[Pg 315] to the lessening of the power and prestige of the Army. The fact that it would at the same time supply the first and greatest need in the event of war—the need for toughened and trained men who could and would fight and dig trenches as well as seasoned soldiers—would gain no favor for the plan in the eyes of our military caste. The development of that system and the expenditures to be made for that purpose and the control of the men enlisted in it would not be vested in the War Department.

The military caste in this and every country is trained to regard its profession as one whose duty it is to accomplish results by brute force and human slaughter. Its only conception of a soldier is a man-killing machine, whose chief use in time of peace is to serve as a basis for appropriations to sustain a military establishment with all its multitudinous expenditures. Their conception of war is that it is an inevitable orgy of human slaughter, against which humanity is powerless to protect itself.

That a great force should be organized[Pg 316] for patriotic service under civil control instead of military domination, to battle against the destroying forces of Nature, and subjugate and control them for the advancement of humanity and all the arts and victories of peace, runs counter to every fiber of being of the military caste. And yet, none but the most superficial student of history and humanity can fail to realize the necessity for such an army of peace in this country. It is certainly true that wars will never cease until the inspiration and patriotism and national ideals developed by such a peaceful conquest of the forces of Nature has been substituted for the tremendous stimulus which the human race has in the past drawn from armed conflicts between nations. And the fact must be clearly recognized that in this way a force can be provided that will be instantly available to take the place of seasoned soldiers at any moment in the event that this nation should be drawn into a war of defense or for the maintenance of any great principle of human rights or justice to humanity.

We might be forced into a war within a[Pg 317] year and we might succeed in preserving the peace forever. No man can tell, because no human mind can forecast the future or predict what events may occur that may be beyond our power to control, and which might force us into a war. We do know, however, that the fight against the floods of the Mississippi River, and the fight against the great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, must go on year after year through all the centuries to come during which man continues to inhabit the Delta of the Mississippi River.

The memory of the great disaster to the city of Galveston, and the memory of the great floods of the Mississippi River in 1912 and 1913, are still fresh in the minds of the people. The defense of that part of our common country against such catastrophes in the future is worthy of the same patriotic energy and the same adequate expenditure that would be necessary to defend them against an armed invasion from Mexico or by any nation of the world.

Were such defense afforded, results would be obtained of such enormous[Pg 318] benefit to the United States in time of peace, without any regard to its relation to national defense in time of war, that to fail to do it would be as stupid as it would have been to fail to take the gold from the placer mines of California.

The gateway from the Gulf of Mexico to the great central valley of this country opens into a region so vast that the area comprised within the watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries embraces 41 per cent of the entire United States. This gateway opens into a great waterway system capable of being made continuously navigable all the year around through 20,000 miles of navigable waterways and commerce-carriers.

The gateway from the Gulf opens to a country of greater potential agricultural wealth than any other section of the earth's surface of the same area. The lower Mississippi Valley has well been styled the "Sugar-Bowl" of the continent. The State of Louisiana alone is larger in area by 10,000 square miles than the combined area of Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. It is capable of sustaining a larger population[Pg 319] and producing vastly more wealth than those three countries combined.

If you draw a line straight north from the southernmost point of Texas to the northern line of Oklahoma, and then turn and go straight east, projecting the northern line of Oklahoma past Cairo, Illinois, to the Tennessee River, following up the Tennessee River to the northeast corner of Mississippi, and then follow the eastern boundary line of Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, you have included within these extreme boundaries a territory as large as the whole German Empire. It is a territory possessing greater natural wealth and possibility of development than the German Empire, provided the great problems of water control and river regulation are solved in such a way as to promote the highest development of this region for the benefit of humanity, and provided further that the Coast region of this territory is protected not only from the floods of the river, but from the storms originating in the Gulf of Mexico. Protection from those storms requires the construction of a great dike similar to[Pg 320] the dikes of Holland that will hold out the waters of the Gulf not only at their normal height, but will also hold them back when they attain the abnormal height which at rare intervals results from the hurricanes or great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, such as that which overwhelmed Galveston.

Lafcadio Hearn, in "Chita," has described a Gulf Storm better than it will ever again be described. He prefaced the story of that storm with a picture of the havoc wrought by Nature's forces—the ceaseless charging of the "Ocean's Cavalry," that is quoted because it so clearly portrays the necessity for bulwarks of defense built in the spirit of military defenses.

"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five sloping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair—bowing[Pg 321] grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry; far out you can see, through a good glass, the porpoises at play where of old the sugarcane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams—whole forests of drift—huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;—and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.

"And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where the woods made their last brave stand against the irresistible invasion,—usually at some long point of sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just where the waves curl beyond such a point you may discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy shapes protruding above the water,—some high enough to resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and skeleton-hands,—with crustaceous white growths[Pg 322] clinging to them here and there like remnants of integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned oaks,—so long drowned that the shell-scurf is inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in despair from their deepening graves;—and beside these are others which have kept their feet with astounding obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand around,—soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the surface,—is everywhere pierced with holes made by a beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white claws;—while in the green sedges beyond there is a perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind bearing among reeds: a marvellous creeping of 'fiddlers,' which the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks, shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging[Pg 323] with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach lean more and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,—like the reaching arms of cephalopods.... Grand Terre is going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is going,—slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How it went I first heard from the lips of a veteran pilot, while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a drifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been tropically warm; we had sought the shore for a breath of living air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat lifted,—a sudden breeze blew,—lightnings flickered in the darkening horizon,—wind and water began to strive together,—and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my companion began his story; perhaps the coming of the storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him, listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice, but a tumult of many voices—voices of drowned men,—the muttering of multitudinous dead,—the[Pg 324] moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage against the living, at the great Witch-call of storms...."

The defense of the Gulf gateway of the United States of America not only against Nature's forces, whether coming in the form of an invasion by a mighty flood from the North, or the invasion of a great destroying storm wave from the South, must be accomplished by the adoption of a plan for the protection of that country similar to that proposed for the organization of a Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley and in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys and in the State of Nevada.

The national government should immediately acquire not less than 1,000,000 acres of land bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and lying between Bayou Lafourche and Atchafalaya Bay and the Atchafalaya River. Then a great dike should be built by the national government from Barataria Bay, following the most practicable course along the shores of the Gulf to and along the eastern shore of the Atchafalaya Bay and River to Morgan[Pg 325] City. Thence this great dike should skirt the northeastern shore of Grand Lake to the northern end of that lake. From there it should be continued north to the Mississippi River to a connection with that river near the headwaters of the Atchafalaya River.

The material necessary for the construction of this great embankment and protecting levee from the Gulf north to the Mississippi River should be taken entirely from the eastern side of the embankment, and the channel thus constructed should be enlarged sufficiently to build an adequate protecting levee on the east bank of the channel. The artificial channel thus constructed should be so large as to constitute a controlled outlet and auxiliary flood channel which, with the ten mile wide Atchafalaya wasteway, would take off all of the flood flow of the Mississippi River at that point in excess of the high water level as it rests against the levees in all ordinary flood years. The purpose of this outlet and wasteway would be to make it impossible that in any year of unusual floods the levees or banks should be subjected to any greater hydrostatic pressure than in ordinary years. The point where this controlled outlet would leave the river would be approximately the same place where the great Morganza Crevasse broke through the levee and opened a way for the flood to sweep with its devastating force through the country between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.[Pg 326]

Ten miles west of the great north and south embankment above described, on a north and south line which would pass close to the town of Melville in Louisiana and follow the west bank of the Atchafalaya River for some distance below Melville, another great embankment should be built, paralleling the one previously described. The material for the construction of this second embankment should be taken from its western side, thus forming a channel which should be used both as a drainage outlet and a navigable canal extending from the Bayou Teche to the Red River. At the point of its junction with the Red River, locks should be constructed which would[Pg 328] prevent any of the floods of the Red River from ever entering or passing through this navigable drainage canal. From that point another great embankment should be extended by the most practicable route to the west or northwest, where a junction could be formed with the high land in such a way as to turn all the surplus flood drainage from the Red River and all other rivers to the north into the great ten-mile wide wasteway lying between the two embankments and running south from the mouth of the Red River or from Old River to Grand Lake.

The volume of water that would make a flood twenty feet deep in a channel a mile wide could be carried through this wasteway with a flow of only about two feet in depth, and two great benefits thereby attained:

First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger from that cause obviated.

Second, the sediment carried by the water could be settled across a strip ten miles wide, which could be thereby brought to a level and its fertility enormously[Pg 329] enriched by these sedimentary deposits which it would receive only in years of great floods. In the meantime and in other years the land could be used for meadow, or for the production of crops which could be grown after the danger of overflow in any season had passed.

This ten-mile wide wasteway, supplemented by the auxiliary flood water channel paralleling its eastern embankment on the east, would completely control and carry to the Gulf all the excess flood water in years of extreme floods, and hold the high water level of the Mississippi River from Old River to the Gulf at an absolutely fixed level above which the river would never rise.

The ten-mile wide wasteway could be extended north from the mouth of Red River to the bluffs at Helena. Then from Helena south the entire Mississippi Valley would be protected against danger from floods in the Mississippi River in the extraordinary flood years which may come only once in a generation, and yet may come in any two consecutive years as[Pg 330] they did in 1912 and 1913. If this ten-mile wide wasteway, with its auxiliary flood water channel paralleling it, between it and the river, were constructed from Helena to the mouth of the Red River, and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, and in turn supplemented by source stream control of the floods of the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, the lowlands of the Mississippi Valley could be made as safe from overflow or damage by devastating floods as the highlands of the Hudson River or the dry plains of eastern Colorado. The entire area of the Mississippi River Valley now subject to overflow is about 29,000 square miles. This is an area one-third larger than the entire cultivated area of the Empire of Japan, which sustains a farming population of 30,000,000 people. The lands of the Mississippi River Valley are infinitely richer and of greater natural fertility than the farming lands of Japan. Every acre of the rich sedimentary soil of the Delta of the Mississippi River would, if intensively cultivated, produce food enough to feed a family of five, with a[Pg 331] large surplus over for distribution to the world's food markets.

The entire 1,000,000 acres to be acquired by the national government in Louisiana should be immediately acquired within the area bounded on the south by the great embankment along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and on the west by the great wasteway and auxiliary flood channel to be built from the mouth of Red River to Atchafalaya Bay and on the north and east by the Mississippi River.

This entire territory would be so absolutely and completely protected from all possibility of overflow by the proposed system of protection from floods or overflow and from Gulf Storms that any part of it could be safely subdivided into acre-garden-homes or Homecrofts. Every acre would be adequate for the support of a family when properly reclaimed, fertilized, and intensively cultivated. The variety of food that would be available for the people living on these one million Homecrofts would be greater probably than would be within the reach of people living in any[Pg 332] other section of the world. The mild and equable climate would make practicable a successful growth of every possible product of garden, orchard, or vineyard, including oranges and grape-fruit. Proximity to the Gulf and a network of canals that would lace and interlace the country in every direction would furnish them, at trifling cost or none at all, with the most delicious sea-foods, fish, crabs, shrimps, crayfish, and oysters without limit. Every canal and bayou would furnish its quota of fish and the oyster beds of the Louisiana coast are capable of almost limitless extension.

In addition to the cultivation of their Homecrofts for food from the ground, the Homecrofters enlisted in the Louisiana Homecroft Reserve would be afforded abundant occupation in catching or producing sea-food for themselves as well as for export. Anyone not familiar with the country can form no adequate conception of the stupendous possibilities of this bayou and Gulf coast country along this line of production and development.

More than this, the luggermen of the[Pg 333] bayous and the Gulf are the best coast-wise and shallow sea sailors in the world, and the bays and bayous of Louisiana, if inhabited by a dense population, would once again breed a race of seafaring people—sailors and fishermen—to man our navy or merchant marine.

The complete adoption of the plan advocated for the reclamation and settlement of these swamp and overflowed lands, and the establishment there of a perpetual reserve available for military service whenever needed of a million seasoned and hardened citizen soldiers, involves doing nothing that has not already been done by other nations of the world.

Holland has built dikes as defenses against the inroads of the ocean greater even than those proposed in Louisiana, and the plans of Holland for reclaiming for agriculture vast areas of land now buried beneath the waters of the Zuyder Zee are much bolder in conception and more difficult of accomplishment.

Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated the practicability and proved the success of a national policy[Pg 334] of land acquisition and colonization. What Australia has done in the reclamation and settlement of her deserts, we can do not only on our deserts but also in our swamps.

Switzerland and Australia have both proved the practicability of a military system similar to that which it is proposed to establish for the defense of the Gulf Gateway of this nation. The plan urged for Louisiana would in many respects be an improvement upon a plan which made it necessary to call men from commercial or industrial employment for military service.

CHAPTER XII

The result of the adoption of the Homecroft Reserve System would be that this generation would bequeath to future generations a country freed forever from the menace of militarism or military despotism, and also freed from the burdens of military and naval establishments. At the same time, the United States would be safeguarded against internal dangers and made impregnable against attack or invasion by any foreign power. Every patriotic citizen of the United States should have that thought graven on his mind. No other plan can be devised that will accomplish those results.

The reasons why they will be accomplished by the Homecroft Reserve System may be briefly summarized.

From the standpoint of national defense, and regarding war as a possibility, the following are the advantages of the system:

First: The maintenance of a Homecroft[Pg 336] Reserve of 5,000,000 trained soldiers would ultimately cost the government nothing. The entire investment required for the establishment of the Reserve would be repaid with interest by the revenues from the Homecroft rentals, and ultimately a revenue of $300,000,000 would be annually returned to the national government in excess of the entire expense of the maintenance of the Reserves.

Second: There would be no burden of a pension roll as the result of actual service by the Homecroft Reservists in the event of war. The Life Insurance System embodied in the general plan for a Homecroft Reserve would be substituted for a pension system.

Third: Every requirement of necessary military training for actual service in the field would be provided. Each Department of the Homecroft Reserve, embracing a million men, would be concentrated and fully organized, with annual field maneuvers.

Fourth: The whole body of the Homecroft Reserve would be men physically hardened and trained to every duty required[Pg 337] of a soldier in actual warfare. They would be inured to long marches and to every hardship of a campaign in the field. They would at all times be mobilized and ready for instant service.

Fifth: The whole 5,000,000 men in the Homecroft Reserve could be sent into active service without calling a man from any industry or commercial employment where he might be needed. The United States could put an army of five million men in the field at a moment's notice, without the slightest interference with commerce, manufacturing, or any branch of industry.

Sixth: No length of actual field service would impose any hardship or privation on the families of any of the Homecroft Reservists. Each family would continue to occupy and get its living from the Homecroft during the absence of the soldier of the family. The routine of the family and community life would continue undisturbed.

For the first fifty year period the cost of maintaining our present standing army of less than 100,000 men will be five billion dollars.[Pg 338]

During that same period the revenues from the Homecroft Reserve rentals would repay the entire investment required for the establishment and maintenance of the Reserve, and the ultimate cost to the government of the maintenance for fifty years of a reserve of five million men would be nothing.

For the second fifty year period, the net revenues from the Homecroft Reserve rentals, over and above the entire cost of the maintenance of the Reserve, would be fifteen billion dollars,—$300,000,000 a year every year for fifty years,—more than enough to cover the entire expense of our standing Army and Navy, as at present maintained.

In other words, the profit to the government from establishing a Military Reserve which would be at the same time a great Educational Institution for training Citizens as well as Soldiers, and a Peace Establishment for Food Production, would be large enough to cover the entire cost of the nation's regular Military and Naval Establishments. For all time thereafter, the country would be relieved from[Pg 339] the heavy financial burdens of maintaining them. The revenues that the regular Military and Naval Establishments will otherwise absorb could be diverted to building internal improvements, highways, waterways, railways, reclaiming lands, safeguarding against floods, preventing forest fires, planting forests, and supporting a great national educational system that would make the Homecroft Slogan the heritage of every child born to citizenship in the United States of America:

From the standpoint of peace, if there should never be another war, and as a means of national defense against the dangers that menace the country from within—civil conflict, class conflict, social upheaval, racial deterioration, and a degenerated citizenship—the advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System may be epitomized as follows:[Pg 340]

First: Every Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlement of 100,000 acres—100,000 Reservists—100,000 families, created by the national government, will be a model for an industrial community which will demonstrate that the cure for city congestion is the Homecroft Life in the suburbs or in nearby Homecroft Villages.

Second: It will further demonstrate that the physical and mental deterioration, poverty, disease, crime, human degeneracy, and racial decay now being caused by the tenement life can be prevented by the Homecroft Life.

Third: Child labor and Woman labor in factories will be proved to be economic waste because of the larger value of that labor at home devoted to producing food for the family from garden and poultry yard, and preparing and preserving it for home consumption. It will be demonstrated that no child or woman can be spared from a Homecroft for work in a factory.

Fourth: The fact will be established that the remedy for unemployment is universal Homecroft Training in the public[Pg 341] schools, the establishment of all wageworkers in Suburban Homecrofts or Homecroft Villages, and that every unemployed man or woman shall be set to work learning to be a Homecrofter.

Fifth: One million scientifically trained Homecrofters would be graduated annually from the National Homecroft Reserve System,—ten million every ten years,—with their families. These would scatter into every section of the United States and would leaven a large loaf. They would be a tremendous force to counteract the evil influences generated in the tenements. No Homecrofter's family would ever be content to live in a flat or a tenement. They would have learned the productive value of a Homecroft—a home with a piece of ground that will produce food for the family.

Sixth: The demonstration of the value of the Homecroft Life spread throughout the United States by the millions of Homecroft Reserve graduates would lead to a complete reconstruction of the Public School System of every State. The year would be divided into two terms—one,[Pg 342] a six months' term from fall until spring, during which the courses of study now pursued would be continued; the other, a six months' term from spring until fall, covering the entire growing season, during which fruit-growing, truck-gardening, berry-culture, poultry raising, home making, home-keeping, and home-handicraft would be taught. In the cities these Summer Homecroft Schools would be in the suburbs and would give every city child a chance to spend its days in the sunshine and fresh air, among the trees, birds, fields, and flowers, for six months of every year.

Every great institution must have a gradual growth. The Homecroft Reserve System should be started on a comparatively small scale in places where the immediate need of the practical benefits it will accomplish are most manifest. Its enlargement will follow as a natural evolution. Once well under way, it will grow by leaps and bounds, like the rural mail service or the Agricultural Department of the national government.

When the electric light was first demonstrated to be a scientific success, few[Pg 343] realized in how short a time electricity would light the world. The development of electric transportation and of the automobile are familiar illustrations. Only a few years have elapsed since Kipling wrote "Across the Atlantic with the Irish Mail." How many would then have believed possible the work of the Aëroplane Service in the present war? And yet, all that has so far been done is only a forecast of greater development in aërial navigation in the near future. The original inventor of the telephone has seen the evolution of its vast utilization and recently was the first to talk over a wire across the continent.

No one would for a moment question that the national government could establish an educational institution in which one thousand men with their families could be located in a cottage on an acre of ground, and the men trained in truck-gardening and poultry raising, and the women trained to cook the products of the garden and poultry yard for the family table. That is all there is to it; and to train a thousand men in that way is no[Pg 344] more difficult than to take a thousand raw recruits and transform them into a regiment of trained soldiers. It is likewise beyond question that the same man can be trained for both vocations, and every Homecroft Reservist would be so trained. Gardeners make ideal soldiers. The Japanese proved that.

No one familiar with the multitude of cases where it has been done, would have any doubt that a man and woman who know how to intensively cultivate an acre can produce from it what that man and that woman need for their own family to eat, and a surplus product worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars a year or more. Neither would they doubt that a thousand could do the same thing. Nor, again, would they doubt that one thousand men and women of average intelligence and industry, who did not know how, could learn the way to do it from competent instructors.

If that can be done with one thousand it can be done with ten thousand; and if it can be done with ten thousand it can be done with one hundred thousand, or[Pg 345] one million, or five million. It would indeed be strange if this nation could not train five million families so they would be competent truck-gardeners, when that vocation has been mastered by thirty million of Japan's rural population.

The militarists contend that the Standing Army should be increased to 200,000 men, an increase of 100,000, assuming that the present army were enlisted up to its full authorized strength of 100,000. A Homecroft Reserve of 100,000 men, properly established, organized, and trained, would be of vastly more value to the country for national defense than an increase of 100,000 men in the Standing Army; but there should be no such limit on the extension of the Homecroft Reserve. It should be steadily increased until the full quota of 5,000,000 has been established. But in order to draw comparisons between the respective advantages of the two systems, let it be assumed that the establishment of a Homecroft Reserve were to be first authorized by Congress for 100,000 men, the same number that it is contended should be added[Pg 346] to the regular Standing Army. In that event the most immediate beneficial results would be secured by the establishment of Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements of ten thousand acres each (from which they should be developed to a strength of not less than one hundred thousand each as rapidly as possible) in the following locations:

In California, ten thousand acres should be acquired by the national government in the vicinity of Redding in the upper Sacramento Valley, and settled with that number of Homecroft Reservists who would work on the Iron Canyon Reservoir and the system of diversion canals therefrom.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired on the west side of the Sacramento Valley, near Colusa, and 10,000 Homecroft Reservists located thereon, who would work on a great system to control the flood waters of the Sacramento River, and to save and utilize the silt for fertilization by building a series of large settling basins.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired[Pg 347] near Stockton where 10,000 Homecroft Reservists would be located, who would work on the Calaveras Reservoir and an irrigation system to utilize the stored water therefrom, and also carry forward any further work necessary for the complete protection of Stockton and the delta of the San Joaquin River from floods.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired near Fresno, where 10,000 Homecroft Reservists would be located, who would work on a navigable channel to Fresno and a drainage canal through the center of the San Joaquin Valley.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired near Bakersfield, where 10,000 Homecroft Reservists would be located, who would work on the irrigation canals and systems necessary for the complete reclamation of the lands on which they were settled, and of other lands acquired by the national government in the San Joaquin Valley.

That would provide a force of 50,000 Homecroft Reservists in the one particular portion of the United States where they are most likely to be needed for actual military service.[Pg 348]

In Louisiana, ten thousand acres should be acquired of the best garden land in the Bayou Teche Country, on which 10,000 Homecroft Reservists would be located, and set to work building the great Atchafalaya Controlled Outlet, and the western dike to form the Auxiliary Flood Water Channel from Old River to the Gulf of Mexico.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired in the vicinity of New Roads, where 10,000 Homecroft Reservists would be located, and set to work building the north and south dike forming the eastern bank of the auxiliary flood water channel from Old River to Morgan City and thence to the Gulf of Mexico, to protect the whole territory between the Atchafalaya River and the Mississippi River from overflow by backwater from the Atchafalaya.

That would establish 20,000 Homecroft Reservists at a point from which they could be quickly transported to any point where troops might be needed for the defense of the Gulf Coast or the Mexican Border.

In West Virginia, ten thousand acres[Pg 349] should be acquired in the valley of the Monongahela River and its tributaries in that State for 10,000 Homecroft Reservists who would do the work of building the necessary reservoirs and works for the regulation of the flow of the Monongahela River and the prevention of floods thereon.

Ten thousand acres should be acquired in the valley of the Little Kanawha near Parkersburg, and between Parkersburg and Huntington, and 10,000 Homecrofters located thereon, who would labor on the works necessary for the development of all the water power capable of development in West Virginia and for the regulation of the flow of every river flowing out of West Virginia into the Ohio so there would be no more floods from those rivers.

This West Virginia Department of the Homecroft Reserve could be transported to any point on the Atlantic Seacoast in a very brief time. In a day troops for the defense of New York could be rushed from West Virginia to that city over the Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio and Chesapeake and Ohio Railroads.[Pg 350]

Ten thousand Homecrofters should be located in Northern Minnesota, in the Lake Region, where the Mississippi River has its sources. They should be set to work to enlarge the present National Reservoir System on the headwaters of the Mississippi River until the entire flow of the Mississippi River at Minneapolis and St. Paul had been completely equalized throughout the year, for the development of power at those cities, and for the improvement of navigation on the upper Mississippi.

The construction work indicated above, which should be done by the Homecroft Reserve in the locations named, should be carried forward simultaneously with the work of reclaiming or preparing for cultivation in acre tracts and building the cottage homes on the lands set apart for the establishment of the Homecroft Reserves thereon. A part of the men should be engaged in this work while others were engaged on the projects above specified for the construction of which their labor would be utilized.

The Reservists would be paid wages for[Pg 351] all this work which would give them a start and enable them to establish themselves on their Homecrofts as soon as the houses were ready for occupancy. In many cases it would probably be found that families of Homecrofters would prefer to live on their homecroft while the work of completing its construction was being done, and would provide tents or inexpensive houses for such temporary occupancy, at their own expense.

The immediate establishment of these initial units of the Homecroft Reserve, aggregating only 100,000 men, would enlarge the military forces of the United States to the extent that it is now vigorously contended the standing army should be immediately enlarged.

Instead of being condemned to idleness in barracks, the soldiers comprising the increased forces would be doing useful and productive labor and would build enormously valuable internal improvements.

It would cost $100,000,000 a year to maintain, as a part of the present military system of the United States, the proposed increase of 100,000 men, which[Pg 352] the Militarists contend should be added to the regular army for our national defense.

That $100,000,000 a year, divided among the projects above named, would provide the following amount for each project annually until completed:

Another $100,000,000—the amount an additional 100,000 men added to the regular army would cost for the second year—would provide $1000 for the improvement of every acre of the total 100,000 acres purchased or set apart by the government for subdivision into one acre Homecrofts for the Homecroft Reserves in California, Minnesota, Louisiana, and West Virginia. Of that $1000 an[Pg 353] acre, $100 would more than cover its cost, $200 an acre would cover the investment for reclamation and preparation for occupation, and $500 an acre would cover the cost of the house and outbuildings, leaving a surplus to the government of $200 an acre on each of the 100,000 Homecrofts.

Every Homecroft would thereafter return to the government from the rental charge thereon, six per cent on a valuation of $1000 to cover interest and sinking fund, and an additional six per cent for all other expenses of instruction, operation, and maintenance. And perpetually thereafter, for all time, those 100,000 Homecrofts would provide a permanent force of 100,000 Reservists for the national defense, without any cost to the government for their maintenance.

The Homecroft Reserves should be established on the basis of an organization of 1000—ten companies of 100 each—in one organized and united community. These community organizations, which would each furnish a regiment in the Reserve, would be organized primarily as[Pg 354] Educational Institutions, with Instructors to train the Homecrofters in every branch of scientific truck-gardening, fruit-growing, berry-culture, poultry raising, preparing products for market and for home consumption, coöperative purchase of supplies and distribution of products, home-handicraft and "housekeeping by the year." The officers of each company and of the regiment would be resident Homecrofters like the rest. They would have received their military training in military schools established and maintained by the War Department for that purpose. No better use could be made of the military posts now in existence and of their equipment and buildings than to use them as military schools for training officers under the exclusive control and management of the War Department. Every company in the Homecroft Reserve should be thoroughly drilled at least once every week for ten months of the year, leaving two months for a long march and an annual encampment and field maneuvers.

The number of regiments in the Homecroft Reserve could be increased just as[Pg 355] fast as the necessary Educational and Military Instructors could be developed for the establishment of new Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements. That would be very rapidly, after the first few years. Once the details had been worked out for one Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlement of 10,000 men, the duplication of the plan would be routine work.

There would be no possibility of enlarging the system fast enough to keep pace with the applications for enlistment. The benefits to the individual who served a five years' enlistment in the Homecroft Reserve would be obvious to the whole people. More than that, the opportunity to combine a soldier's patriotic service to his country with home life and educational instruction for the entire family would appeal to a multitude of industrious families without capital. They would see the opportunity through that channel to establish themselves in homes of their own on the land. That is the ambition and hope of millions of our fast multiplying population.

A charge of Ten Dollars a month as[Pg 356] the rental value of each acre Homecroft would be a very low amount to be paid for the use and occupation of the Homecroft and the instruction and training going with it. That charge would provide an annual rental to the government of $120 from each and every Homecroft. That would cover, on a fixed valuation of $1000 on each Homecroft, four per cent interest and two per cent for a sinking fund, and would leave six per cent for cost of operation and maintenance, cost of educational instruction and schools, cost of life insurance, and cost of maintenance of military equipment and organization.

In return for this annual rental of $120, the Homecrofter would get a home that would yield him a comfortable income, instruction in everything he would need to know to produce the desired results from its intensive cultivation, schooling for his children,—in fact every advantage that comes within the compass of a wage earner's life,—and during the five year period of enlistment he would learn what would be to him the most valuable trade he could be taught—the trade of[Pg 357] getting his own living by his own labor and that of his family from an acre of ground.

He would be able—and every enlisted Homecrofter would be trained with that end in view—to lay by enough from his sales of surplus products during the five years of his service to buy a Homecroft of his own, at the expiration of that term, in any part of the country where he desired to settle. He should save at least $2000 during the five years.

A life and accident insurance system would be worked out in all its details, and a sufficient part of the annual rental of $120 a year set apart for that purpose to provide both accident and life insurance for every Homecrofter during the five year period of service in the reserve. In the event of the death or permanent disability of any Homecrofter, either in time of peace or during actual warfare, the fee simple title to an acre Homecroft in lieu of a pension should vest in his heirs or in the person who would have been entitled to a pension if the general pension system had been applicable to the case. In this way[Pg 358] the burden on the people of an enormous pension roll as the aftermath of a war would be obviated. The value of the Homecroft secured in lieu of a pension would be much more than $1000. It would not only furnish a permanent home for the survivors, but a home that would yield them a living and $500 or $1000 a year and over as the income from fruit, berries, vegetables, and poultry produced on the Homecroft.

The advantages to the family of the Reservist of this plan over the ordinary pension system is too manifest to need comment. Its advantage to the people can be appreciated when we bear in mind that the amount already paid out for pensions on account of the Civil War is $4,457,974,496.47 and $46,092,740.84 more on account of the Spanish-American and Philippine Wars.

The Homecrofts that would go to the families of Reservists under this plan would not be located in the same communities as those occupied by active Reservists, but in Homecroft Rural Settlements created and organized for the special[Pg 359] purpose of Homecroft grants in lieu of pensions or life insurance or accident insurance. The right to a Homecroft in lieu of a pension should arise not only in case of death, but also in the event of any serious permanent injury disabling the Reservist from active service or from labor in ordinary commercial or industrial vocations.

That is what the Homecroft Reserve System would offer to the individual Homecrofter. Is there any doubt that it is a good proposition for him and his family?

The chief difficulty in bringing the public to a realization of the advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System, particularly its financial advantages, is to get away from the common idea that a thing can be done on a small scale, but not on a large scale. Many things can be done on a large scale better and more economically than on a small scale, and this is one of them.

The problem of providing adequately for the national defense of a country as big as the United States is a large problem and must be solved in a large way.[Pg 360]

The total amount that it would be necessary for the United States to invest, in order to permanently establish a Homecroft Reserve of 5,000,000 trained soldiers, would be less than it has already paid out for pensions; and its whole investment in the Homecroft Reserve Establishment would be returned to the government with interest. The amount the United States has already paid for pensions amounts to $4,729,957,370.65. Within two years it will have exceeded five billion dollars.

Most people lose sight of the magnitude of the present appropriations, expenditures, and operations of the United States, as well as of their wastefulness under the present military system. We are spending over $100,000,000 a year on a standing army of less than 100,000 enlisted men. That amounts to a billion dollars in ten years. It is five billion dollars in fifty years. And we may be certain that five billion dollars will be spent, and probably much more, in the next fifty years on a standing army. When that has been spent it is absolutely gone, just as much[Pg 361] as though it had been invested in fire crackers and they had all been set off and there was nothing left, not even noise.

It is not contended that this country should spend less than $100,000,000 a year on its army, but it is contended that it should not spend more. And for what it does spend it should get larger results. $100,000,000 a year ought to be enough to maintain an army enlisted to the full strength of 100,000 men to which the army is now limited by Act of Congress. In addition it should support the necessary organization and training schools to furnish all the officers required for the National Construction Reserve and for the National Homecroft Reserve. The officers of the Homecroft Reserve should be permanently located as residents of the community where their regiment is established.

The officers for the National Construction Reserve should be attached to the Regular Army except when detailed for the work of training those reserves during the period set apart for that work each year. At least one-half of the rank and file[Pg 362] of a regular force of 100,000 men in the Standing Army should be composed of men trained for service as officers in the National Construction Reserve, and available for instant transformation into such officers. The training of those officers should be one of the most important functions of the Regular Army. The Army should forthwith take up that work and cease any further connection with the civil work of internal improvements.

If the Standing Army of the United States were increased to an actually enlisted strength of 200,000 men as is now being urged, it would mean the addition of another $100,000,000 a year to the military burdens of the people of the United States, and we would still be without any adequate national defense in case of war with a first-class power.

Now compare the plan for a Homecroft Reserve and its results, from the financial point of view, with this proposition to increase the Regular Army to a total strength of 200,000 men.

The annual cost of an increase of 100,000 men in the Regular Army would be[Pg 363] $100,000,000 a year; or $5,000,000,000 in fifty years. Every dollar of that huge sum would be drawn from the people by taxation. When spent it would be gone, leaving nothing to show for its expenditure. The economic value of the labor of 100,000 men would be wasted. That would be another $5,000,000,000 in fifty years, estimating the potential labor value of each man at $1000 a year. That makes the stupendous total economic loss and waste of money and human labor of ten billion dollars in fifty years,—an amount ten times as large as the whole national debt of the United States,—an amount as large as the combined national debts of Great Britain and France, which an eminent authority has said are so large that they never can be paid.

Measure up against that proposition the Homecroft Reserve plan and compare results:

Every $1000 of capital invested in the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve will reclaim and fully equip an acre Homecroft with a Reservist and his family on it. There is no reason why the capital[Pg 364] necessary for that should be provided from current revenues. In fact it should not be so provided, because it would be invested in property to be perpetually owned by the national government, from which future generations will derive an enormous annual revenue.

A fixed average valuation of one thousand dollars for each Homecroft would be more than enough to cover the cost of reclamation, preparation for occupancy, building roads, houses, and outbuildings, water systems, sanitation, institutes for instruction, schools, libraries,—in fact everything needed to be done to make each Homecroft ready for occupancy as a productive acre garden home, with a complete community organization. It would also cover the cost of the original military equipment of the Reservist who would occupy the Homecroft.

Each Reservist would pay for the use of the Homecroft and for educational instruction for himself and family, a net annual rental of $120, being twelve per cent on the fixed capitalized value of $1000 placed on each Homecroft. Of that rental[Pg 365] of twelve per cent, four per cent would be apportioned to interest, and two per cent to create a sinking fund that would cover the entire principal in fifty years. The remaining six per cent would cover expenses of operation and maintenance, instruction, and all other expenses connected with the Homecroft Reserve Establishment, including military expenditures. The government would be under no expense whatsoever for the maintenance of this Homecroft Reserve Establishment that would have to be borne out of the general revenues, not even for field maneuvers. There would be no expenses of railway transportation to those maneuvers. Every regiment would march to and from its annual encampment.

One hundred and twenty dollars a year would be the revenue to the government from one Homecroft. After that it becomes merely a question of multiplying units. The revenue from 5,000,000 Homecrofts would be $600,000,000 a year. As fast as the capital was needed for investment in the creation and establishment of Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements, it[Pg 366] could be easily secured by the government. A plan that would insure this would be the adoption of a financial system to cover this branch of the operations of the Government which would be modeled after the French Rentes System. Instead of Government Bonds, as they are now called, Government Homecroft Certificates would be issued, bearing four per cent interest, in denominations of twenty-five dollars. The interest on each certificate would be one dollar a year. If such certificates were available, the purse strings of the people would be opened to take them as readily as those of the French people were opened to take the securities issued by the French Government to pay the war debt of a billion dollars to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War.

$500,000,000 a year of these certificates could be issued every year for ten years. That would complete the work of creating the entire Homecroft Reserve Establishment and provide the capital of $5,000,000,000 necessary for investment therein.

Starting from that point, in fifty years[Pg 367] thereafter the entire investment of $5,000,000,000 would have been repaid with all current interest, and the government would own the 5,000,000 Homecrofts free and clear of all indebtedness or financial obligations relating thereto.

2. An economic waste of another $5,000,000,000, being the potential labor value of the 100,000 men who would be withdrawn from industry.

The Homecroft Reserve Establishment would provide a military force of 5,000,000 men instead of 100,000.

It would provide for the maintenance of this immense force during the fifty years without any ultimate cost to the government.

It would create and vest in the government in perpetual ownership property consisting of 5,000,000 acre Homecrofts worth $1000 apiece,—a total property[Pg 368] value of $5,000,000,000 which would be acquired by the Government, and fully paid for from the Rental Revenues from the property during the fifty year period.

It would thereafter provide from those Rental Revenues an annual income to the government of six per cent on $5,000,000,000 amounting to $300,000,000 a year.

The potential labor value of the 100,000 men in each Homecroft Reserve Corps would be saved and transformed into an actual productive value of the $1000 which each would annually produce from his Homecroft. The productive labor value of each Corps of 100,000 Homecroft Reservists therefore would amount to $5,000,000 in fifty years. That is the same amount that would represent the economic waste during that same period, of the potential labor value of the additional force of 100,000 men which it is now proposed shall be added to the regular army.

The economic value of the productive labor of the entire Homecroft Reserve of 5,000,000 men in the fifty years would be fifty times $5,000,000,000.[Pg 369]

And in order to save the enormous expense and waste that would result from increasing the standing army, and, in addition, to achieve the stupendous benefits that would result from the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, it is only necessary that the same common sense business methods and principles should be applied to the operations of the government that any large corporation would adopt if it had the financial resources, of the United States.

Why should anyone be staggered at the proposition for the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, or balk at it because it is big?

When the national government owns 29,600,000 acres of national forests in the drainage basin of the Colorado River, is there any reason why it cannot reclaim and settle in one-acre garden homes, the comparatively small area of 1,000,000 acres which is only a part of what it owns in the main valley of the Colorado River between Needles and Yuma?

If it can do that in the Colorado River Country is there any reason why it should[Pg 370] not take a million acres of land in northern Minnesota, which it now owns, and reclaim it and settle it in one-acre garden homes? The government now owns, in addition to that land, 987,000 acres of national forest in Minnesota.

If the government can acquire by purchase, as is now being done, another million acres of forest lands in the Appalachian Mountains under the Appalachian National Forest Act, is there any reason why it should not acquire a million acres of land in West Virginia and irrigate it and subdivide it into one-acre garden homes, and put Homecrofters on it to intensively cultivate the land?

If it can do that in West Virginia, is there any reason why it should not be done in Louisiana or in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley in California?

In the case of the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements the government will see to it, itself, that its work does in fact result in actual home making, whereas speculators get the ultimate benefit of much of the other work that it does.[Pg 371]

If the government can maintain a Department of Agriculture at an expense of $20,000,000 in one year, for the instruction of farmers in agriculture, who get the benefit of that service without paying for it, is there any reason why it should not maintain educational institutions to train Homecroft Reservists in Acreculture, if they pay for the cost of that instruction and all the expenses of maintaining the necessary educational institutions?

If the government can enlist men in the regular army for national defense and put them in camps and barracks in time of peace to waste their time in idleness, is there any reason why it should not enlist men in a Reserve and put them in Homecrofts, where their labor will be utilized in production, and the elevating influence of family and community life be substituted for the demoralizing influences of the life of the camp or barracks?

There is no more reason why the government should not build and perpetually own the Homecrofts used for this national purpose of education and defense than there is that it should not own the Military[Pg 372] Academy at West Point or the Naval Academy at Annapolis, or any land used by the Agricultural Department for any of its work, which is educational, or by the War Department, which is for national defense. The Homecrofts used to train and maintain in the service the Homecroft Reserves would be used for a combination of both purposes, and their cost would be just as properly classified as an expenditure for national defense as the cost of any existing camp, barracks, or army post now owned by the government.

The burden of the Standing Army of less than 100,000 men now maintained by the United States could be very considerably reduced by establishing as large a portion of it as possible in the Homecroft System, were it not for the false ideals as to human values that are apparently so deeply imbedded in the minds of the military caste.

The entire Homecroft Reserve System should be organized as a separate department of the National government like the Forest Service or Reclamation Service, and should be known as the Homecroft Service.[Pg 373]

The Homecroft Reserve in Minnesota should be known as the Department of the Reserves of the North; the Reserve in Louisiana as the Department of the Reserves of the South; the Reserve in West Virginia as the Department of the Reserves of the East; the Reserve in the Colorado Valley and Nevada as the Department of the Reserves of the West; and the Reserve in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California as the Department of the Reserves of the Pacific.

The Louisiana Reservists would be trained as Homecrofters and sailors; the West Virginia and Minnesota Reservists would be trained as Homecrofters and Foresters; the Colorado River and California Reservists would be trained as Homecrofters and Irrigators—Conquerors of the Desert; the Nevada Reservists would be trained as Homecrofters and Cavalrymen,—the Cossack Cavalry of America,—and all would be good soldiers, as well as the very highest type of good citizens.[Pg 374]

During the entire two months devoted to the regular annual march, encampment, and field maneuvers, the members of the Homecroft Reserve would be under the military control and direction of the War Department, exactly as they would be in times of actual warfare. During the remaining ten months they would be under the civil jurisdiction of the Homecroft Service.

One of the insuperable obstacles in the way of efficient national defense by State Militia is the impossibility of rapid mobilization, and the practical certainty that in case of actual war none of the States on the coast of the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico would permit their State Militia to be diverted from the protection of their own State. This would leave the great seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, or cities located near the Atlantic Coast like Baltimore and Washington, without an adequate force for their protection in case of war.

One of the chief reasons for concentrating a million of the Homecroft Reserves in one State would be to facilitate the establishment of a perfect military organization on a large scale as is required by[Pg 376] modern warfare; and to avoid delay in mobilization and expense for transportation to annual encampments and field maneuvers. The Homecroft Reserve plan contemplates that there shall be no expenditure for railroad transportation except in the event of actual warfare. The Reserves in California and in the Colorado River Valley would be marched with their full equipment to one great concentration camp in Nevada for their annual encampment and for field maneuvers. The whole military organization, officers, auxiliaries, and military machinery, for an army of two million men would thus be given actual training every year in the complicated work of handling a great army in the field. That would not be possible if they were scattered over the United States from Dan to Beersheba, in little bunches of a company here and another there.

Annual encampments for field maneuvers for the other sections of the reserve should be established at least 400 miles distant from their regular permanent Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements.[Pg 377]

The Roman soldiers were trained to march twenty miles in six hours and carry their heavy equipment. The Emperor Septimius Severus marched at the head of his army on foot and in complete armor for eight hundred miles from the Danube to Rome in forty days—twenty miles a day. Such a march, once every year, should be a part of the training of every soldier in the Homecroft Reserve.

There would be no difficulty in finding places in Texas adapted for the field maneuvers of the 1,000,000 men comprising the Homecroft Reserve in Louisiana, and the annual encampment of those in Minnesota could be located in Montana.

In West Virginia the country is mountainous and smaller units of organization would be more easily adapted to that State, as in Switzerland. In West Virginia the government would not acquire its entire million acres in one body. It would be scattered into many different sections of the State, in practically every valley, but more particularly in the rolling country lying between the mountains and the[Pg 378] Ohio River, which stretches all the way from Wheeling to Huntington in West Virginia. If it were desirable to concentrate the entire million men in one annual concentration camp, the best location for it would be in the northern part of the peninsula of Michigan.

There are many reasons why West Virginia should be chosen for the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve for the eastern section of the United States. Its chief advantage is its central location, almost equi-distant between Maine and Florida and within marching distance from any point on the Atlantic seaboard, the Mississippi River, or the Great Lakes.

Switzerland could be reproduced in West Virginia, with the climatic and physical conditions of the two countries so much alike. The Swiss Military System could be applied to the entire State. With a million regularly enlisted Homecroft Reservists at all times ready for service, there would then be in addition a large unorganized reserve composed of graduates from the Homecroft Reserves[Pg 379] or who had received a military training in the public schools. It would be entirely practicable to engraft the entire Swiss system of universal military training in the public schools on the school system of the State of West Virginia.

Switzerland has a total area of 15,975 square miles with a population of 3,741,971. West Virginia has an area of 24,170 square miles and a population of 1,221,119. The addition of 1,000,000 Homecroft Reservists to its population with their families, would bring the total population up to nearly twice that of Switzerland. The marvelous adaptability of West Virginia to the Homecroft idea and its possibilities as a fruit and vegetable and poultry producing country were fully set forth in an article in the "National Magazine" for December, 1913, which has been reprinted under its title, "West Virginia, the Land Overlooked," in a pamphlet issued by the Department of Agriculture of the State of West Virginia.

The following pertinent statements are made in that article: "Fifty years of amazing progress in West Virginia gives a[Pg 380] new significance to her motto, 'Montani semper liberi,' meaning 'Mountaineers always freemen.' There is something in the environment and in the rugged scenery of the State that gives its people the freedom loving spirit of the Swiss." The "strategic importance" of the State is shown in these words: "A circle with a radius of two hundred and fifty miles makes West Virginia the center of all the markets laved by the waters of the Atlantic and the great lakes on the north. Within this circle is located the capital of the nation and twelve of the world's greatest cities."

With these facts in mind, anyone who will look at a map of the eastern half of the United States will agree that West Virginia is the right State in which to rear and train and concentrate the Reserve Force required for the defense of the east and the Atlantic seaboard.

The northern half of the State of Minnesota affords perhaps the most perfect adaptability of any section of the United States to the plan for a Homecroft Reserve of one million men to be located[Pg 381] there. The national government now owns more than a million acres of land that could be reclaimed for this purpose. The national government also owns national forests in the State of Minnesota aggregating close to a million acres. The land needed for the 1,000,000 Homecrofts could be selected from land already owned by the government, or other lands could be acquired. That country is the original Homecroft section in the United States. The people of Duluth have tried it out and found it good. Anyone who wants proof of the possibilities of acre production needs only to go to Duluth and make some investigations there. He will find unquestionable records of acreage production of vegetables, running all the way from $1000 to $4000 an acre in one year.

The population of the United States is out of balance—too many consumers in cities—too few producers in the country—with a steadily increasing food shortage and higher cost of living in consequence. The annual production of food from the 5,000,000 acres owned by the national government, and intensively cultivated[Pg 382] by the Homecroft Reserve, would tend largely to reduce the cost of living. It would aggregate more than half the value of the entire annual production from all the farms of the United States to-day.

That would, however, be but a small part of the stupendous enlargement of the economic power of the United States that would result from the work that would be done by the National Construction Corps to increase the area available for food production, and enlarge the productiveness of lands already under cultivation. The great works that would be built by the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service would accomplish:

(a) The utilization of the waters of eastern streams for increasing the annual production of between 150 and 200 million acres by supplemental irrigation in the humid and sub-humid sections of the country;

(b) The reclamation by irrigation of at least 75 million acres of land now desert in the western part of the United States;

(c) The reclamation by drainage or protection from overflow of 75 million[Pg 383] acres of swamp and overflow lands situated largely in the eastern and southern states.

A total of 150 million acres of worthless deserts and swamps would be reclaimed and devoted to food production. That would be equivalent to the actual creation of an area of that enormous extent of new lands where none had been before, and these new lands would be the most fertile and highly productive of any lands in the United States. If the annual gross production of the 150 million acres of reclaimed deserts and swamps were put at only $60 an acre, which is a low estimate, it would amount to $9,000,000,000 a year, and the world needs the food. The value of all the wealth produced on farms in the United States in 1910 was estimated by the Secretary of Agriculture to have been $8,926,000,000.

The application of supplemental irrigation to lands in the United States already under cultivation by rainfall, as is done upon large areas in France, Spain and Italy, would double or treble the production of farm crops on such lands. And if[Pg 384] 100,000,000 acres of those lands were intensively cultivated and fertilized, as is now done on much of the land devoted to truck-gardening on the Atlantic coast, the gross food production from every acre intensively tilled in that way can be increased more than $1,000 a year. That would mean an increase in the food supplies of the United States aggregating an annual total of one hundred billion dollars a year.

These figures look so large as to seem visionary to those who are uninformed as to the facts, but it is only a question of multiplying units of from one to five acres into which the land would be subdivided for tillage by Homecrofters. With a population of 100,000,000 to feed now, and the practical certainty that it will be 200,000,000 in another fifty years, and 400,000,000 within a century, shall we hesitate to train the Homecrofters who would each produce a gross yield of more than $1,000 from every acre to feed our multiplying millions?

If we do not train millions of our people to be Homecrofters and intensive soil-cultivators,[Pg 385] how are we going to feed our population when it reaches 200,000,000 or 400,000,000?

All we need to do, to be sure of having at least 100,000,000 Homecrofters, each producing $1,000 worth of food from a one-acre-garden home or Homecroft, when our population has grown to 400,000,000 within a century, is to graduate 1,000,000 Homecrofters every year from the Homecroft Reserve Educational System as is in this book advocated and shown to be entirely practicable.

Forestry also should be borne in mind in measuring the enlargement of the nation's economic power through the work of the National Construction Reserve, not only the perpetuation of present forests, but the establishment of new forest plantations by planting trees. The forestry resources of the nation should be administered and developed on a business basis. Forests should be planted on every acre of land better adapted to forestry than to agriculture. Forest plantations should be established and maintained near every city or town that would coöperate by maintaining a Forestry and Homecroft[Pg 386] School as an adjunct to the forest plantation established by the national government.

The value of matured forests should be carefully estimated, and the length of time required to bring them to maturity. Forestry Construction Bonds should be issued to cover the cost of the work of the Construction Corps of the Forest Service. They should be 100 year bonds, issued under a plan that would carefully estimate the income that would be derived from the forests after they had attained to maturity. The first fifty years should be allowed for the period of growth, during which only the interest on the bonds should be payable. The second fifty year period should be the period of liquidation, during which a sinking fund would be accumulated from sales of wood and timber sufficient to cover the entire principal of the bonds, in addition to the amount paid for interest thereon during the full term of one hundred years through which the bond would run. The generations of the future, who would derive the benefit from the work of[Pg 387] this generation, would provide for the payment of the debt from the income from the forest resources which had been created for their benefit and bequeathed to them by this generation. A hundred years is none too far ahead to plan in formulating a great national forestry policy for such a nation as the United States. The adoption of the policy of developing this branch of the country's resources and economic power by a Forestry Bond Issue relieves the plan of any difficulty that might otherwise arise if the expenditures had to be met from current revenues. There is no right reason why this generation should bear the entire burden of planting what future generations will harvest. This generation would get a large benefit, but the benefits to future generations would be far greater. They would inherit the vast resources of wood and timber which would be created by the wise forethought of the present generation.

Whenever this country has put itself on the economic basis that will be established by the adoption of the National[Pg 388] Construction Reserve and Homecroft Reserve System, and maintains without ultimate cost to the government a system that insures to the United States greater military strength than that of any other nation, the economic currents and manifest benefits to the people created by that condition will force all other nations to abandon their systems of enormously expensive standing armies and armaments.

The final power that must be relied on to ultimately make an end of war is the drift of economic forces—a power as irresistible as the onward flow of the Gulf Stream or the Japan Current. The universal adoption of the Homecroft System of Education and Life that would eventually be brought about by the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve would vest in the United States an economic power that no other nation could stand against, unless it adopted a similar system. We would have the economic strength that China has to-day, supplemented by all the advantages of national organization and modern science and machinery. After generations of following[Pg 389] after false gods, we would have abandoned the fallacious teachings of Adam Smith and returned to the sound principles of national and human life laid down in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin.

Kropotkin calls attention to the fact that in Great Britain alone the area under cultivation was decreased in the last fifty years more than five million acres. That land was once cultivated by human labor. The hardy yeomanry who tilled it have been forced into the congested cities or have emigrated to other lands, and the five million citizen soldiers that England might have had on those five million acres were not there when the day of her great need came.

England is now paying the penalty of her adherence to the political economy of Adam Smith instead of to that of Kropotkin. She has pursued a national policy that counts national wealth in dollars instead of in men.

Let us learn a lesson from England's mistakes, the mistakes which have brought upon her such an appalling calamity.[Pg 390]

If the 5,000,000 acres that have been thrown out of cultivation in England in the last fifty years were now settled with 5,000,000 Homecroft Reservists, under the plan proposed for adoption in the United States, those Homecrofters could pay off the national debt of Great Britain in just two years and live comfortably the meanwhile. A total net annual production of only $500 an acre, multiplied by the labor of 5,000,000 men for one year, would amount to $2,500,000,000. That would be enough to pay off the national debt of France in less than three years, and of Russia in less than two years. It would pay off the entire war debt of the world in twenty years. That gives some idea of the economic strength of a Homecroft nation, such as we must create in the United States of America. The possibilities of acreage production are steadily increasing as our scientific knowledge of the mysteries of plant growth and methods of fertilization advances.

The United States is now at the forks of the road. Certain destruction is our fate if we continue the drift away from[Pg 391] the land into the congested cities. If, instead of that, we become a nation of Homecrofters, no dream can picture the future strength of this country or the human advancement that its people will accomplish, to say nothing of the production of national wealth so great as to be practically inconceivable.

In the future the power of the nations of the world will be in proportion to the wise use they make of their productive resources, and the extent to which they provide opportunities for acreculture and create Homecroft Rural Settlements instead of crowding humanity into congested cities where they become consumers and cease to be producers of food.

If the present war has proved anything it has proved that the one thing above all others which insures the national defense is trained and seasoned men,—and enough of them to overwhelm any invading enemy by the sheer force and weight of innumerable battalions. In all the future years the fundamental military strength of every nation is going to be measured by the number of such men that she has immediately[Pg 392] available for instant service, with adequate arms and equipment.

The establishment of a Homecroft Reserve by the United States of America will make of this nation a living demonstration of the truth of those immortal words of Henry W. Grady:

"The citizen standing in the doorway of his home—contented on his threshold—his family gathered about his hearthstone—while the evening of a well spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest—he shall save the republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are exhausted."

THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS

CONTAINS

RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION
Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE: THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE ***

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1891-1900	24,806
1901-1905	64,102
1905-1906	14,243
1906-1907	30,226
	———
Total	133,377

Caucasian males of military age	262,694
Japanese males of military age	45,725

Caucasian males of military age	163,682
Japanese males of military age	17,000

Iron Canyon Reservoir	$10,000,000
Sacramento Flood Control	10,000,000
Calaveras Reservoir	10,000,000
San Joaquin River	10,000,000
Drainage Canal to Bakersfield	10,000,000
Atchafalaya Controlled Outlet	10,000,000
Atchafalaya Protection Levees	10,000,000
Monongahela Reservoirs	10,000,000
Ohio River Reservoirs	10,000,000
Mississippi River Reservoirs	10,000,000
	——————
Total	$100,000,000

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

Our National Defense

THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE

BY

GEORGE H. MAXWELL

THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS

PREFATORY NOTE

FOREWORD

CONTENTS

OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE

THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

Immigration by political periods:

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE COLORADO RIVER—THE NILE OF AMERICA

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS

CONTAINS

RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION
Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

Arizona	$71,000,000
California	100,700,000
Idaho	24,500,000
Nevada	37,800,000
Oregon	3,500,000
Utah	53,000,000
Washington	17,500,000
Total	$308,000,000

Colorado	$54,000,000
New Mexico	17,800,000
Wyoming	12,500,000
Total	$84,300,000

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

Our National Defense

THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE

BY

GEORGE H. MAXWELL

THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS

PREFATORY NOTE

FOREWORD

CONTENTS

OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE

THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

Immigration by political periods:

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE COLORADO RIVER—THE NILE OF AMERICA

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER

THE FIRST BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS

CONTAINS

RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION
Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.