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+Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our National Defense:
+       The Patriotism of Peace
+
+Author: George Hebard Maxwell
+
+Release Date: December 13, 2011 [EBook #38288]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE: ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE
+
+THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE H. MAXWELL
+
+
+THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS
+
+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
+
+    "_Peace hath her victories
+    No less renowned than war_"
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+President Schurman of Cornell recently said:
+
+"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 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, 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 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 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
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I Page
+
+SHALL THERE BE AN END OF WAR?                                   1
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+INADEQUACY OF MILITARIST PLANS FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE            24
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IMPREGNABLE DEFENSE AGAINST FOREIGN INVASION                   44
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION RESERVE                                  74
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ADAPTABILITY OF SYSTEM FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE                   115
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MENACE OF ASIATIC COMPETITION AND INVASION                    135
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+JAPAN AND THE COLORADO RIVER VALLEY                           176
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+STRENGTH OF A HOMECROFT RESERVE                               213
+
+     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 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.
+
+Chapter IX
+
+HOMECROFT RESERVE IN COLORADO RIVER VALLEY                    247
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CALIFORNIA A REMOTE INSULAR PROVINCE                          277
+
+     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 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.
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MILITARISM AND THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY                         301
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BENEFITS FROM THE NATIONAL HOMECROFT RESERVE SYSTEM           335
+
+     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._
+
+Its adoption will strengthen every plan that can be devised to prevent war.
+
+It will vitalize the influence of this nation in behalf of peace.
+
+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, 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.
+
+"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
+
+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 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.
+
+To every reader of this book let it be said, as a personal message:
+
+When you have read this book, do not lay it down with the thought:
+
+"Yes, that is a good idea. I hope somebody will succeed in getting it
+done."
+
+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, 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 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 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?
+
+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 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 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.
+
+And then it will fail unless given power to enforce its decrees.
+
+That power will never be vested in it by the nations, not in this
+generation at least.
+
+All plans for arbitration rest on the same insecure foundation.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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_.
+
+In case of war, they have no plan.
+
+_They leave that to the Militarists._
+
+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 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.
+
+The Pacificists, in case of war, have no plan of their own to propose.
+
+_They, too, leave that to the Militarists._
+
+Then we have the _Pacificators_.
+
+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 that this plan may fail, or its success be long delayed,
+and that in the meantime it affords no guarantee of peace.
+
+The Pacificators, however, propose no plan in the event of war.
+
+_They also leave that to the Militarists._
+
+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 following platform was adopted by the Woman's Peace Party:
+
+     "The purpose of this organization is to enlist all
+     American women in arousing the 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 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.
+
+_They likewise leave that to the Militarists._
+
+So, although we have plans galore to promote peace, we have in case of war
+no plans except those of the Militarists.
+
+They have three plans:
+
+_First:_ A standing army large enough for any contingency.
+
+_Second:_ A standing army, reënforced by state militia.
+
+_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.
+
+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.
+
+_But we have no such assurance._
+
+The Peace Advocates give no guarantee against war.
+
+The Militarists believe war inevitable.
+
+Neither insures peace and neither is prepared against war.
+
+The people are between the upper and the nether millstone.
+
+We cannot be certain of peace.
+
+We are undefended in case of war.
+
+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 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.
+
+_It can be done and it must be done._
+
+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 order that we may preserve the
+nation and promote human welfare.
+
+Anyone who rejects the possibility of war must be blind to current events.
+
+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.
+
+Every prediction that there would be no more wars has proved false.
+
+Every plan heretofore proposed to prevent war has thus far proved futile.
+
+Every influence relied on to put an end to war has proved a broken reed.
+
+The Socialists have inveighed against war.
+
+Now they are voting war loans and fighting in the armies.
+
+The labor organizations have long proclaimed their opposition to war.
+
+The war is on, and they are apparently giving little attention to it.
+
+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 the present, but once more the
+people are doing the fighting.
+
+We have been told that the workingmen of the world have power to stop war.
+
+No doubt they have, if they would use it, but they will not do so.
+
+While this greatest of all the world's wars was brewing, the workingmen
+were busy manufacturing the machinery of destruction.
+
+And they are still doing it.
+
+And they will keep on doing it, as long as wages are to be earned that way.
+
+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.
+
+Some manufacturer has thereby made a profit.
+
+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 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.
+
+_It is the hypocrisy of it all that makes it so revolting._
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But she gets something for what she spends besides soldiers and
+battleships.
+
+While she has been perfecting the most 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.
+
+Have we done the same? No.
+
+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 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.
+
+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.
+
+_The Wizards of Wall Street are wise._
+
+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.
+
+_The people have been asleep a long time but some day they will wake up._
+
+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 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.
+
+_The Frankenstein of war can be controlled._
+
+But it can only be controlled by organizing a system of national defense
+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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+In "On Board the Good Ship Earth," Herbert Quick says:
+
+     "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
+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 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 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.
+
+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
+     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
+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 $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 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.
+
+     "_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._"
+
+And again, the same author says:
+
+     "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
+     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 Army belongs in this class,
+and so in fact does the State Militia.
+
+The question of national defense involves two separate and distinct
+problems:
+
+First, the defense of the nation against invasion by another nation.
+
+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.
+
+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, _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 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 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. 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 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.
+
+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:
+
+     "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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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?
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 people, and it would have saved millions from death by
+famine.
+
+_Is death by war any worse than 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 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 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 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 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?
+
+In "The Valor of Ignorance," the author, Homer Lea, most truly says:
+
+     "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 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 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, 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_?
+
+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 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 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 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 all government work shall be done by day's work and none by contract.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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:
+
+    "Every Child in a Garden,
+    Every Mother in a Homecroft, and
+    Individual Industrial Independence
+    For every worker in a
+    Home of his own on the Land."
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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.
+
+Look at California!
+
+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 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 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 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 increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in
+1896 to 61,115 in 1909.
+
+Then he gives us these facts:
+
+     "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:
+
+            1891-1900     24,806
+            1901-1905     64,102
+            1905-1906     14,243
+            1906-1907     30,226
+                          ------
+                Total    133,377
+
+     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:
+
+            Caucasian males of military age    262,694
+            Japanese males of military age      45,725
+
+     In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth
+     of the male population of military age:
+
+            Caucasian males of military age    163,682
+            Japanese males of military age      17,000
+
+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.
+
+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:
+
+     "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 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.
+
+_What are we going to do about it?_
+
+That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States
+straight in the face.
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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_.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+_They tried that once with the Chinese, with what result?_
+
+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.
+
+_But what happened?_
+
+The Chinese were not only faithful and 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, and food producer, were
+gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition
+of the Chinese.
+
+So we excluded 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 _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 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 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 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.
+
+But where shall they go?
+
+_To the Philippines?_
+
+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 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.
+
+_Shall they go to Manchuria?_
+
+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.
+
+The Japanese will not go to Manchuria for another reason.
+
+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 binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.
+
+Where then will they go?
+
+_To South America?_
+
+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.
+
+_Will they go to Mexico?_
+
+Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the 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 Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate
+the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian
+race will possess Mexico.
+
+"_Why?_" some one asks.
+
+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._
+
+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 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]
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Mexicans are descended, on the one side," says Mr.
+Cunningham Graham, "from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the
+Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very
+fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself--elements which had just
+emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors."]
+
+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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
+
+_Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?_
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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:
+
+            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
+
+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:
+
+            Colorado      $54,000,000
+            New Mexico     17,800,000
+            Wyoming        12,500,000
+
+            Total         $84,300,000
+
+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 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._
+
+What would have to be done to accomplish that has already been told.
+
+_How is it to be done?_
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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._
+
+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.
+
+_We are doing the same with reference to Japan._
+
+The English with stolid, self-satisfied complacency pinned their faith
+entirely on their navy as a national defense.
+
+_We are doing practically the same thing, with reference to Japan._
+
+And now the English have been awakened by an appalling national catastrophe
+which was preventable.
+
+_Must we be awakened in the same way?_
+
+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 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:
+
+    "Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?
+      (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.)
+    The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there.
+      (Highlanders! March! By the right!)
+    There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air:
+      There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare;
+    But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
+      When they hear their pipes playing.
+
+              --'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt.
+
+     "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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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
+     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 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 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:
+
+    "Of all sad things of tongue or pen,
+    The saddest are these, it might have been."
+
+_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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
+
+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 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 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.
+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.
+
+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, 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 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.
+
+_But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?_
+
+It has much to do with it.
+
+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 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 of
+the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every
+year.
+
+_What would be the result?_
+
+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 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE
+COLORADO RIVER--THE NILE OF AMERICA
+
+Map showing the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River and the
+Corrected Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico.
+
+The area of the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River is 265,000 square
+miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles. That is a territory
+smaller than the area of the Colorado River Drainage Basin in Arizona and
+New Mexico.]
+
+
+
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+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 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._
+
+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 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 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 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?
+
+The California and Oregon from the north.
+
+The Southern Pacific from the south.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+_The Japanese do not want a war with the United States._
+
+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 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 "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 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_.
+
+What would the California Militia be doing all this time?
+
+_It is better not to dwell on unpleasant subjects._
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+_What should the United States do to prevent all this?_
+
+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 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 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
+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
+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
+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
+
+[Illustration: Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to
+Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the
+North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany;
+2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston.]
+
+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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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
+     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
+     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
+     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 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.
+
+[Illustration: Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old
+River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and
+Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the
+Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf
+Coast Dike.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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_.
+
+_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 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:
+
+    _Every child in a Garden,
+    Every mother in a Homecroft, and
+    Individual Industrial Independence
+    For every worker in a
+    Home of his own on the Land._
+
+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:
+
+_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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+_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 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.
+
+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 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 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:
+
+      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
+
+That amount of money for one year would complete most of the above
+projects.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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._
+
+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 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 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
+$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 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 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
+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 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.
+
+Now put the two propositions side by side and look at them.
+
+An increase of 100,000 men in the Standing Army would mean in fifty years:
+
+1. An expense of $5,000,000,000 for maintenance.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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._
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: Map showing Territorial Divisions and Locations of the
+Departments of the National Homecroft Reserves. Also showing the Corrected
+Mexican Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico, and the New State of South California.]
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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
+
+    WE DARE NOT FAIL
+    THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN--Poem
+    CHARITY--Poem
+    CHARITY THAT IS EVERLASTING
+    THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER
+    COMMERCIAL COMPETITION OF JAPAN
+    A WARNING FROM ENGLAND
+    THE GARDEN SCHOOL IS THE OPEN SESAME
+    THE LESSON OF A GREAT CALAMITY
+    OUR MOTTO--"DROIT AU TRAVAIL"
+    THE SIGN OF A THOUGHT--THE SWASTIKA
+    THE CREED AND PLATFORM OF THE HOMECROFTERS
+    "HOMECROFT"--THE MAKING OF A WORD
+
+Price $1.00
+Including Postage
+
+May be ordered by mail from
+
+RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION
+COTTON EXCHANGE BUILDING, NEW ORLEANS, LA.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Our National Defense, by George H. Maxwell.
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our National Defense:
+       The Patriotism of Peace
+
+Author: George Hebard Maxwell
+
+Release Date: December 13, 2011 [EBook #38288]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE: ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1><span class="smcap">Our National Defense</span></h1>
+
+<h2>THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE</h2>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>GEORGE H. MAXWELL</h2>
+
+<h4>
+THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS</h4>
+
+<p class="center">
+RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION<br />
+<br />
+WASHINGTON<br />
+<span class="smcap">Maryland Building</span><br />
+<br />
+NEW ORLEANS<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cotton Exchange Building</span><br />
+<br />
+1915<br />
+<br />
+<i>Copyright, 1916</i>,<br />
+<br />
+<span class="smcap">By Rural Settlements Association</span>.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+TO<br />
+<br />
+ALL HOMECROFTERS<br />
+<br />
+THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">"<i>Peace hath her victories</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i10"><i>No less renowned than war</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFATORY NOTE</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>Ammunition</i> is necessary to win a battle. Where it is a great <i>Battle for
+Peace</i>, to be fought with pen and voice, the ammunition needed is <i>facts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever the people of the United States know the <i>facts</i> relating to the
+subject to which this book is devoted, <i>then what it advocates will be
+done</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>President Schurman of Cornell recently said:</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>All that is true. But when the problem is analyzed <i>there is no other way
+that can be devised</i>, except that proposed in this book, that will
+safeguard the nation against foreign attack or invasion, and do it
+<i>adequately</i>, without incurring<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"The Iron in the Blood" is a chapter in "The Coming People," by Charles F.
+Dole, published by T. Y. Crowell &amp; Co. of New York. A reprint of this book
+can be had for twenty-five cents from the Rural Settlements Association.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span> 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 co&ouml;rdinating
+by forming the Board of River Regulation. Through that board, all necessary
+plans would be worked out for co&ouml;rdinating 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>get the facts</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This book, <span class="smcap">Our National, Defense&mdash;The Patriotism of Peace</span>, 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.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+<span class="smcap">George H. Maxwell</span>, <i>Executive Director</i>,<br />
+Rural Settlements Association,<br />
+National Reclamation Association.<br />
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+<h2>FOREWORD</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p>If so, <i>you will be convinced of that fact</i>, if you will carefully and
+thoughtfully read this book through from cover to cover; and <i>you will also
+be convinced</i> that the only road to safety is that pointed out in this
+book.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>again</i> occupy and burn Washington, as it was burned in 1814, and
+capture and levy an enormous indemnity upon New York?</p>
+
+<p>Would you contemplate with indifference and equanimity <i>the annexation of
+the Pacific Coast of the United States to Japan</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> that in the event<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span> this question, which overshadows in
+importance every other question affecting the people of the United States?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>
+dangers that now menace its future welfare?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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?</p>
+
+<p><i>Would it interest you to know</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>If you doubt any of the foregoing statements, <i>read the book</i>; and you will
+be convinced of their <i>absolute truth</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<p>CHAPTER I <span class="tocnum">Page</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Shall There Be An End of War?</span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_1'>1</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Question may be answered in the affirmative by the
+United States?&mdash;Facts must be made known to the
+people&mdash;Nationwide educational campaign is
+necessary&mdash;Every individual must be aroused to
+action&mdash;Appalling consequences of triumph of
+militarism&mdash;United States must lead the world in its
+overthrow&mdash;Cannot be dependent for peace on co&ouml;peration
+of other nations&mdash;Appalling losses may result from
+public apathy and indifference&mdash;Necessity for national
+policy for flood prevention&mdash;Naval is out of
+balance&mdash;Other things more needed than
+battleships&mdash;Nationalisation of manufacture of
+armaments and battleships&mdash;There must be an end of
+private profit from such manufacture&mdash;It inspires
+militarism and stimulates war.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER II</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Inadequacy of Militarist Plans for National Defense</span>     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_24'>24</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Militarists believe war inevitable&mdash;Urge United States
+is unprepared&mdash;Peace Advocates leave to Militarists all
+plans for National Defense&mdash;Militarists have no
+adequate plan&mdash;Enormous cost of large standing
+army&mdash;Menace of a military despotism&mdash;No reliance can
+be placed on State Militia&mdash;Impracticability of a
+Reserve composed of men who have served in the Regular
+Army&mdash;War must be recognised as a
+possibility&mdash;Hypocrisy of opposition to war by those
+who profit from so-called civilized warfare&mdash;Peace
+Propaganda must be harmonized with national
+defense&mdash;All plans far world Peace have thus far proved
+futile&mdash;United States spends enormous sums on Army
+without any guarantee of national defense&mdash;The
+Frankenstein of War can be controlled.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>CHAPTER III</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Impregnable Defense Against Foreign Invasion</span>   <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_44'>44</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Plans for national defense must primarily operate to
+prevent war&mdash;Reasons why War Department will never
+devise satisfactory system&mdash;Militarists have no
+sympathy with peace movement&mdash;It aims to render
+military profession obsolete&mdash;Standing Army is economic
+waste of money and men&mdash;It should be a great
+educational institution&mdash;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&mdash;Comparison of
+Military Expenditures and Results in United States and
+Japan&mdash;Increase of Standing Army to 200,000 would be
+futile and unwarranted&mdash;European War will not bring
+disarmament&mdash;Warning of Field Marshal Earl
+Roberts&mdash;Standing Army promotes military spirit which
+increases danger of war.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER IV</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">National Construction Reserve</span>     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_74'>74</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Enlistment of Construction Corps in government Services
+in time of peace&mdash;Transformation of same organization
+into military force in time of war&mdash;National forces
+must be organized for conflict to save, not destroy,
+life and property&mdash;Forest Service and Reclamation
+Service work should be done by Reservists enlisted in
+Construction Corps&mdash;Same system should be adopted in
+all government services&mdash;Construction Reserve to be so
+trained as to instantly become army of trained soldiers
+whenever needed&mdash;More than work enough in time of peace
+for a million Reservists&mdash;planting forests&mdash;fighting
+forest fires&mdash;preventing floods&mdash;irrigating
+deserts&mdash;draining swamps&mdash;building highways, waterways,
+and railways&mdash;Importance of safeguarding nation against
+destruction by Nature's invading forces.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>CHAPTER V</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Adaptability of System for National Defense</span>        <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_115'>115</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Swiss Military System ideal for Switzerland&mdash;Not
+adapted to United States as a whole&mdash;Reserve of wage
+earners impracticable&mdash;Their mobilization would cripple
+industry and cause privation for families&mdash;City clerks
+and factory workers lack physical stamina&mdash;A citizen
+soldiery needed of hardy men like founders of this
+nation&mdash;Anglo-Saxon stock is deteriorating in
+cities&mdash;Only remedy is Homecrofts for workingmen and
+their families&mdash;Otherwise Industry will destroy
+Humanity&mdash;Greatest danger to the City of New York is
+from within&mdash;Racial degeneracy is most serious
+menace&mdash;Patrician class warned against Roman System
+which resulted in Proscription and Confiscation&mdash;The
+spirit of Switzerland should sway the world&mdash;Inadequate
+Standing Army a serious danger&mdash;Invites attack against
+which it cannot defend&mdash;United States Standing Army
+gives no assurance of national safety.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER VI</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Menace of Asiatic Competition And Invasion</span>     <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_135'>135</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Japanese influx into Hawaii and Pacific Coast
+States&mdash;Unexpected incident like blowing up of Maine
+might precipitate conflict&mdash;In that event peace
+advocates and governments might be powerless to prevent
+war&mdash;Japanese merit the good will of other
+nations&mdash;Reasons why they come to Pacific Coast&mdash;Japan
+is overpopulated&mdash;30,000,000 rural people on 12,500,000
+acres&mdash;Population increasing 1,000,000 annually&mdash;More
+Japanese in California of military age than entire Army
+of United States&mdash;Japanese in South America and
+Mexico&mdash;United States must meet economic competition of
+Japan&mdash;Pacific Coast must be settled with Caucasian
+population that will cultivate the soil as Japanese
+would cultivate it if it were their country&mdash;Otherwise
+armed conflict with Japan inevitable.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a></span></p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER VII</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Japan and the Colorado River Valley</span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_176'>176</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Another Japanese Empire could be created in the
+Drainage Basin of the Colorado River&mdash;What Japanese
+would do with that country if it were Japanese
+Territory&mdash;We waste annually water containing
+357,490,000 tons of fertilizing material&mdash;5,000,000
+acres can be reclaimed between Needles and
+Mexico&mdash;Every acre would support a family&mdash;Climate
+makes gardening equivalent to hot house culture out of
+doors&mdash;Inexhaustible supplies of nitrogen, phosphates,
+and potash for fertilizer&mdash;Enormous possibilities of
+electric power development&mdash;Japan would fight the
+Desert and Conquest it with same thoroughness that she
+fought Russia&mdash;Would develop vast Commerce from
+Colorado River and Gulf of California&mdash;Japanese
+Colonization in Mexico&mdash;Spirit of Speculation retards
+development by United States&mdash;What should be done with
+the Colorado River Valley&mdash;United States must reclaim
+and colonize that country the same as Japanese would do
+if it belonged to them.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER VIII</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Strength of a Homecroft Reserve</span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_213'>213</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>A Homecroft Reserve in Scotland of one million Soldiers
+would have prevented this last great war&mdash;Scotch
+Homecrofters make such Soldiers as the Gordon
+Highlanders and the Black Watch&mdash;Story of the Gordon
+Highlanders&mdash;The Scots were the original
+Homecrofters&mdash;The description in "Raiderland" of the
+Homecrofts in Galloway&mdash;Grasping greed of intrenched
+interests drove the Homecrofters from Scotland&mdash;Same
+interests now blocking development in United
+States&mdash;Homecroft System of Education and Life would
+breed a race of stalwart soldiers in United
+States&mdash;Could leave home for actual service without
+disturbing industrial conditions&mdash;Homecrofters would be
+concentrated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</a></span> for training and organization&mdash;Would
+eliminate all danger of militarism or military
+despotism&mdash;Comparison in value of 1,000,000 trained
+Homecrofters with 1,000,000 immigrants&mdash;Homecroft
+Reserve System will end child labor and woman labor in
+factories and will also end unemployment.</p></div>
+
+<p>Chapter IX</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Homecroft Reserve in Colorado River Valley</span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_247'>247</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>United States owns land, water and power&mdash;Development
+by national government would result in vast profit to
+it&mdash;Australian System of Land Reclamation and
+Settlement should be adopted&mdash;Action should be prompt
+to forestall friction between United States and
+Japan&mdash;Will never have war with Japan except as result
+of apathy and neglect&mdash;United State must create in
+Colorado River Valley dense population settled in
+self-containing Communities&mdash;Characteristics of Country
+particularly adapt it to requirements for Homecroft
+Reserve&mdash;Safety of Southern California from invasion
+would be insured&mdash;Military Highways to San Diego and
+Los Angeles&mdash;Defense of Mexican Border&mdash;Homecroft
+Cavalry Reserve in Nevada similar to Cossack Cavalry
+System&mdash;Correction of Mexican Boundary Line to include
+mouth of Colorado River in the United States&mdash;New State
+of South California to be formed.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER X</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">California a Remote Insular Province</span>      <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_277'>277</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>More easily accessible from Japan by sea than from
+United States by land, in case of war&mdash;Mountain Ranges
+bound it north, east, and south&mdash;All plans for defense
+of California with a Navy or coast fortifications are
+futile and a delusion&mdash;Bombardment of English towns and
+comparison<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">[Pg xviii]</a></span> of English Coast and California
+Coast&mdash;Japan would, if war were declared, seize Alaska,
+Philippines, and Hawaii&mdash;Would then transport an army
+of 200,000 to California&mdash;Railroad tunnels and bridges
+being destroyed by dynamite would render relief by
+United States impossible&mdash;Reliance on Panama Canal too
+uncertain&mdash;Quickness with which occupation of
+California would be accomplished by Japanese&mdash;Huge
+military difficulties in the way of United States
+reconquering it&mdash;Mountain passes would be fortified by
+Japanese&mdash;Railroad bridges, culverts, and tunnels
+across deserts would be dynamited&mdash;To recapture a
+single mountain pass more difficult than capture of
+Port Arthur&mdash;Death and Desolation are Supreme in the
+Southwestern Deserts&mdash;Japanese would rapidly colonize
+all vacant lands in California&mdash;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.</p></div>
+
+<p>CHAPTER XI</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Militarism and the Mississippi Valley</span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_301'>301</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Military caste absorbs to itself undue power&mdash;Danger
+seen in military opposition to improved system for
+river regulation&mdash;Military control of inland waterways
+detrimental to country&mdash;Army Engineers wedded to System
+of "Pork Barrel," political, piecemeal
+appropriations&mdash;Reason why Army methods of education
+hamper progress in river improvement&mdash;Mississippi River
+requires comprehensive treatment&mdash;Necessity for Source
+Stream Control on all upper tributaries&mdash;Why the
+Calaveras Reservoir was not built&mdash;Blunder in
+Construction of Stockton Cutoff Canal&mdash;War may be
+uncertain, but necessity for fight against floods and
+storms is certain&mdash;Description of a great Gulf
+Storm&mdash;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.</p></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xix" id="Page_xix">[Pg xix]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>CHAPTER XII</p>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Benefits From the National Homecroft Reserve System </span>       <span class="tocnum"><a href='#Page_335'>335</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>What this generation would bequeath to future
+generations&mdash;United States safeguarded against internal
+dangers and made impregnable against attack or
+invasion&mdash;No other plan will accomplish that
+result&mdash;Summary of reasons why Homecroft Reserve System
+will accomplish it&mdash;Comparison of cost of larger
+Standing Army and same number of Homecroft
+Reserve&mdash;Epitome of advantages of a Homecroft Reserve
+from the standpoint of Peace&mdash;Homecroft Reserve System
+must be evolved gradually&mdash;Rapid development would
+follow when system once well established&mdash;This is
+illustrated by growth of Rural Mail service, Electric
+lighting, a&euml;rial navigation, and telephone&mdash;Where the
+first 100,000 Homecroft Reservists should be
+located&mdash;50,000 Reservists in California, 50,000 in
+Louisiana, 80,000 in West Virginia, and 10,000 in
+Minnesota&mdash;Specification of apportionment to projects
+of the $100,000,000 that would be saved from military
+expenditures for increased Standing Army&mdash;Homecroft
+financial System proposed&mdash;Homecroft Certificates to be
+issued&mdash;Advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System to
+the Homecrofter&mdash;Economic power created for the Nation
+would result in Universal Peace.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE</h2>
+
+<h3>THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+
+<p><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?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Its adoption will strengthen every plan that can be devised to prevent war.</p>
+
+<p>It will vitalize the influence of this nation in behalf of peace.</p>
+
+<p>It will make the nation impregnable in case of war, if, notwithstanding all
+efforts to prevent it, war should come.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."</p>
+
+<p>This is a government, not so much by the people as by the <i>thought</i> of the
+people.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>That can be brought about only by a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> nation-wide campaign in which every
+patriotic citizen must participate. Each must first learn the facts himself
+and then carry the knowledge to others&mdash;drive it home to them and stir them
+to action.</p>
+
+<p>To every reader of this book let it be said, as a personal message:</p>
+
+<p>When you have read this book, do not lay it down with the thought:</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that is a good idea. I hope somebody will succeed in getting it
+done."</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>do things themselves</i>, to lift
+the deepening shadow of militarism from this nation, and rescue the world
+from the barbarism of war.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>That battle must be fought with voice and pen against ignorance,
+indifference,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> and every powerful interest intrenched in selfish opposition
+to human advancement.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> paid no heed. Military
+expenditures have grown larger and larger&mdash;they have trebled within a
+generation&mdash;and the people have voiced no vigorous protest. <i>They have been
+"asleep at the switch.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And after all these centuries we are in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> the midst of the most bloody and
+destructive war the world has ever known.</p>
+
+<p>Civilization has crashed backwards into the abyss of barbarism, in Europe
+at least, and no one can foresee the end.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a policy that will bring permanent
+and enduring universal peace to the world.</p>
+
+<p>That policy must be adopted. There can be no alternative. The final triumph
+of militarism would be too appalling to contemplate.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Must every home remain liable to be ruined and destroyed by the fires of
+war?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Must the flower of the world's manhood continue to be flung into the jaws
+of death to satiate the blood lust of militarism?</p>
+
+<p>Must the wheels of industry turn, and the sweat of human labor, for all
+time, be given to make machinery for human slaughter?</p>
+
+<p>Is there no inspiration to patriotism that will move the people to action
+but the death combat?</p>
+
+<p>Is there no glory to be won, that will stir heart and brain to supreme
+effort, except by causing human agony and devastation?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Must this nation, as well as others, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of the adoption of a right national policy by the United
+States will<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot allow the success of our own basic plan for peace, <i>and for
+safeguarding this nation against war</i>, to depend on the co&ouml;peration of any
+other nation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Disarmament or the limitation of armaments is impracticable without the
+consent of all the great powers.</p>
+
+<p>Nationalization of the manufacture of armaments, if it is to be a
+world-wide influence, must have world-wide adoption.</p>
+
+<p>No plan for a peace tribunal can be successfully made effective without all
+nations agreeing to abide by its decrees.</p>
+
+<p>And then it will fail unless given power to enforce its decrees.</p>
+
+<p>That power will never be vested in it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> by the nations, not in this
+generation at least.</p>
+
+<p>All plans for arbitration rest on the same insecure foundation.</p>
+
+<p>Arbitration voluntarily of any one controversy between nations is
+practicable, where consent is expressly given to arbitrate that particular
+controversy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The plan for an international force, either army or navy, is too remote a
+possibility to be depended on now for practical results.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo precipitated the
+present war, but it was not the cause of the war.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;<i>but it was not the match that exploded</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> long in advance of a
+condition of actual controversy.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> destroyed by
+fire, not by the earthquake. The earthquake was unavoidable, the fire was
+wholly preventable.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> floods, and the
+consequent risk of fire losses in flood-menaced cities, is that <i>all such
+cities</i> should be completely protected against floods, under a nation-wide
+policy for flood protection and prevention.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that the people of the country at large give no heed whatever to
+the risk of tremendous losses of life and property<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> by flood, arises from a
+fixed habit of apathetic indifference, and the fact that no commercial
+interest pushes steadily in behalf of flood protection.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+palaces. That is a gruesome and ghastly hypocrisy that must come to an end,
+if the world is ever to attain to universal peace.</p>
+
+<p>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, a&euml;roplanes, and
+ammunition.</p>
+
+<p>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 a&euml;roplanes, battleships are too
+uncertain a defense, and may have decided that we need something else.</p>
+
+<p>A battleship costs anywhere from ten to twenty million dollars, and they
+are too expensive to be built for experiment or ornament.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Congress is a mirror. It merely reflects public sentiment. So long as the
+need for battleships and more battleships&mdash;for bigger and still bigger
+battleships&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;it is to be hoped it is near at hand,&mdash;when they will be held in the
+same estimation as are nowadays the pirates who forced their victims to
+walk the plank.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;murderers and manglers of whole battalions of their
+fellowmen&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Under the conditions that surround this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>To make this clear, the various schools of thought on the subject should be
+classified, and their views briefly outlined.</p>
+
+<p>On the one hand we have the <i>Militarists</i>. They constantly clamor for a
+bigger navy and a larger army on the ground that we are unprepared for
+war&mdash;unarmed, unready, undefended&mdash;and that war is liable to occur at any
+time.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand we have the <i>Passivists</i>. They have the courage of their
+convictions. Believing in peace, they oppose<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> 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 <i>for which
+they deserve infinite credit</i>.</p>
+
+<p>In case of war, they have no plan.</p>
+
+<p><i>They leave that to the Militarists.</i></p>
+
+<p>Between these two extremes we have the <i>Pacificists</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> who are builders
+of battleships or manufacturers of armor plate or armaments, and their
+associates.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Pacificists, in case of war, have no plan of their own to propose.</p>
+
+<p><i>They, too, leave that to the Militarists.</i></p>
+
+<p>Then we have the <i>Pacificators</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> that this plan may fail, or its success be long delayed,
+and that in the meantime it affords no guarantee of peace.</p>
+
+<p>The Pacificators, however, propose no plan in the event of war.</p>
+
+<p><i>They also leave that to the Militarists.</i></p>
+
+<p>Finally comes the Woman's Movement for Constructive Peace, out of which has
+grown the organization of the Woman's Peace Party.</p>
+
+<p>Much may be hoped for from this organization if it will concentrate its
+strength, and not try to do too many things at once.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The following platform was adopted by the Woman's Peace Party:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The purpose of this organization is to enlist all
+American women in arousing the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>They likewise leave that to the Militarists.</i></p>
+
+<p>So, although we have plans galore to promote peace, we have in case of war
+no plans except those of the Militarists.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They have three plans:</p>
+
+<p><i>First:</i> A standing army large enough for any contingency.</p>
+
+<p><i>Second:</i> A standing army, re&euml;nforced by state militia.</p>
+
+<p><i>Third:</i> A standing army with a reserve composed of men who have served a
+term of enlistment in the regular army.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>But we have no such assurance.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Peace Advocates give no guarantee against war.</p>
+
+<p>The Militarists believe war inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>Neither insures peace and neither is prepared against war.</p>
+
+<p>The people are between the upper and the nether millstone.</p>
+
+<p>We cannot be certain of peace.</p>
+
+<p>We are undefended in case of war.</p>
+
+<p>The situation is illustrated by the old darkey's coon trap that would
+"catch 'em either comin', or gwine."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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. <i>Not so.</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"The wars of the past will sink into comparative
+insignificance when future historians compile
+statistics of coming conflicts among the nations of the
+earth."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>It can be done and it must be done.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In that event we must strongly appeal to patriotism and try to induce the
+surrender of personal profit or benefit in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> order that we may preserve the
+nation and promote human welfare.</p>
+
+<p>Anyone who rejects the possibility of war must be blind to current events.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Every prediction that there would be no more wars has proved false.</p>
+
+<p>Every plan heretofore proposed to prevent war has thus far proved futile.</p>
+
+<p>Every influence relied on to put an end to war has proved a broken reed.</p>
+
+<p>The Socialists have inveighed against war.</p>
+
+<p>Now they are voting war loans and fighting in the armies.</p>
+
+<p>The labor organizations have long proclaimed their opposition to war.</p>
+
+<p>The war is on, and they are apparently giving little attention to it.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again it has been declared that kings make wars and the people
+fight them.</p>
+
+<p>That is all very true, in the past and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> the present, but once more the
+people are doing the fighting.</p>
+
+<p>We have been told that the workingmen of the world have power to stop war.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt they have, if they would use it, but they will not do so.</p>
+
+<p>While this greatest of all the world's wars was brewing, the workingmen
+were busy manufacturing the machinery of destruction.</p>
+
+<p>And they are still doing it.</p>
+
+<p>And they will keep on doing it, as long as wages are to be earned that way.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Some manufacturer has thereby made a profit.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It is civilized warfare, among civilized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>It is the hypocrisy of it all that makes it so revolting.</i></p>
+
+<p>And if it were not that so many <i>are</i> 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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The awful waste of war has been made clear, and yet the most monstrously
+wasteful war of history is now being fought.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Germany makes no hypocritical pretenses to being a nation of peace. She is
+avowedly a nation of warriors and believes in war.</p>
+
+<p>But she gets something for what she spends besides soldiers and
+battleships.</p>
+
+<p>While she has been perfecting the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Have we done the same? No.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;a
+quarter of a billion dollars a year&mdash;for which we get nothing in
+return,&mdash;not even national defense,&mdash;that we are told we cannot afford<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> to
+enter upon any great plans for internal improvements, or stop floods, or
+regulate rivers, or build a genuine waterway system.</p>
+
+<p><i>And the people stand for it, and allow themselves to be "led by the nose
+as asses are."</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Wizards of Wall Street are wise.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The people have been asleep a long time but some day they will wake up.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It gives one an unpleasant, gruesome<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Frankenstein of war can be controlled.</i></p>
+
+<p>But it can only be controlled by organizing a system of national defense<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>Whatever we do for national defense should be done primarily to <i>prevent</i>
+and <i>safeguard against</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+plain that there never could be any misunderstanding as to that being the
+primary purpose of the plan.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>An illustration of this situation might be drawn from the case of an
+a&euml;roplane constructed for a&euml;rial 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. A&euml;rial navigation
+would be the primary purpose of its construction. Water navigation would be
+secondary, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>They are devoted to their duty, as they understand it, and are as brave and
+loyal <i>soldiers</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> chivalrous Knights of the
+Middle Ages, or the Crusaders who fought the Saracens to rescue the Holy
+Sepulcher from the infidels&mdash;picturesque and romantic but expensive and
+useless.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>and doing it well</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>Men with the military training appear to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> entirely lack the analytical mind
+that seeks for <i>causes</i>, and comprehends that by removing the <i>cause</i>, the
+evil itself may be safeguarded against, or may in that way be prevented
+from ever coming into existence.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>Solid arrays of facts presented to them have contributed nothing to
+breaking down their stolid egotism.</p>
+
+<p>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 co&ouml;rdinate
+the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same
+plane with the others in working out plans for constructive co&ouml;peration.</p>
+
+<p>The members of the military caste do not seem to be able to comprehend that
+the stamp of an inferior caste which they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In "On Board the Good Ship Earth," Herbert Quick says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"All institutions must sooner or later be transformed
+so as to accord with the principles of democracy&mdash;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."</p></div>
+
+<p>The standing army to-day represents an economic waste of labor of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+entire body of enlisted men. Many soldiers are demoralized by the
+inactivity or idleness of the life of the camp or the barracks.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> and citizenship, not
+ruin them for it as it now so often does.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This wasteful situation taken as a whole makes it impracticable to work out
+any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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,&mdash;and those too
+best qualified to give opinions on a matter of this
+sort,&mdash;I am convinced that, under our system of
+military enlistment, it is impracticable to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>(1) The proposed Reserve system so clearly shown in the above quotation to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+be impracticable; (2) Reliance upon State Militia to re&euml;nforce the regular
+army&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> $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.</p>
+
+<p>"The totals for the ten fiscal years 1905 to 1915 have
+been as follows:</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Permanent appropriations (including Pacific railroads transportation and enlisted men's deposit fund)</td><td align='right'>$11,999,271.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Fortification acts, armories and arsenals, and military posts in sundry civil acts, and deficiencies for military establishments in deficiency acts</td><td align='right'>113,071,133.17</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Army appropriation acts</td><td align='right'>868,536,993.31</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Military Academy acts</td><td align='right'>13,802,873.00</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Total</td><td align='right'>$1,007,410,270.48</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>"However, in spite of this showing of the great expense
+of maintaining a small army, the Militarists keep up
+their clamor&mdash;particularly at such a time as this, and
+again whenever a military appropriation bill is up for
+consideration in the House&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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":</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 <i>fifty thousand</i> troops with <i>no reserve</i> of
+regulars.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Japan could support a standing peace army exceeding
+one million men for the same amount of money this
+Republic now spends on fifty thousand.</i></p>
+
+<p>"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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"<i>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.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<p>And again, the same author says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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, <i>per se</i>,
+worthless until put to effective use. This Republic,
+drunk only with the vanity of its resources, will not
+differentiate between them and actual power.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Japan, with infinitely less resources, is militarily
+forty times more powerful.</i></p>
+
+<p>"Germany, France, or Japan can each mobilize in <i>one
+month</i> more troops, scientifically trained by educated
+officers, than this Republic could gather together in
+<i>three years</i>. 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 <i>five days</i>. The United States could not mobilize
+for active service a similar force in <i>three years</i>. A<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
+modern war will seldom endure longer than this.</p>
+
+<p>"Not only has this nation no army, but it has no
+military <i>system</i>."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>after hostilities have begun</i>, is no
+system at all, and cannot be classed as a system for national defense. It
+is a system for national delusion. A Volunteer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> Army belongs in this class,
+and so in fact does the State Militia.</p>
+
+<p>The question of national defense involves two separate and distinct
+problems:</p>
+
+<p>First, the defense of the nation against invasion by another nation.</p>
+
+<p>Second, the defense of the nation and of its social, civil, and political
+institutions from internal disturbance and civil conflict.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>but no more</i>. Set the limit
+there and keep it there, and fight any plan for an increase.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> <i>that it is not doing</i>, of
+more importance than to maintain an army of 100,000 instead of 50,000, or
+than to build more battleships at this time.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> have to
+have an army five or ten times 200,000.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>everything that may be necessary to prevent war or to defend
+ourselves in the event of war</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Field Marshal Earl Roberts told the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> English people, over and over again,
+that they were in imminent danger of a war with Germany. No one believed
+him&mdash;at least not enough of them to make any impression on public
+sentiment&mdash;and England was caught unprepared by the present war.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, let full weight be given to Lord Roberts' declaration and
+warning as to the future, as recently published:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>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.</i>"</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> If Germany should prevail, the ambition of her War Lords
+would know no limit, until Germany dominated the world.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Russia, England, and France, however<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> trained,
+equipped, and organized to fight any first-class power according to the
+methods of modern warfare.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> before
+we could whip this raw material into shape for a fighting force and get it
+armed and equipped for actual warfare.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> and the growth of the
+empire to which they are all patriotically devoted.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>We must plan to enlist our national forces in a great conflict with Nature,
+<i>to save life and property</i>, instead of enlisting them in conflicts with
+other nations <i>to destroy life and property</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> same extraordinary energy and invincible determination
+that war arouses.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;tens of thousands of them&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The cost of all reclamation work done by the national government should be
+charged against the land and repaid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> Commerce
+Department, should be co&ouml;rdinated and brought together in a Board of River
+Regulation. The co&ouml;rdination 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 co&ouml;rdinating Board of River Regulation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>But in case of war</i>, the National Construction Reserve must be so
+organized that it can be instantly transformed into <i>an army of trained and
+seasoned soldiers</i>&mdash;soldiers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Such floods as those which swept through the Mississippi Valley in 1912 and
+1913 are <i>an invasion by Nature's forces</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a stupendous project but
+entirely practicable.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> so reduced, and the
+flow of the river so regulated, as never in the future to cause damage or
+destruction.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This great work of safeguarding and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>It necessitates working out, in co&ouml;peration 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It necessitates the establishment and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>No argument ought to be needed to convince<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the Thirty Years' War Germany was a land wasted and
+destroyed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> of the greatest empires of the world have succumbed to and
+been annihilated by the Desert.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Which conflict should call for the greatest patriotic effort for national
+defense?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> people, and it would have saved millions from death by
+famine.</p>
+
+<p><i>Is death by war any worse than death by famine?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 d&eacute;bris. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>In "The Valor of Ignorance," the author, Homer Lea, most truly says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;in the protection of our river valleys from
+floods,&mdash;in the defense of the whole Western half of the United States
+against the inroads of the desert,&mdash;in the protection of the mountain
+ridges of the Eastern half of the United States from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span> deforestation,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> a national system for bringing into action concerted human
+effort and constructive energy will be organized.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>and could not get</i>, at least, <i>not quick enough to save ourselves
+from a stupendous disaster</i>?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We would need and could not get <i>men</i>,&mdash;trained <i>men</i>,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>This necessity for men, <i>trained and hardened men</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> from the intolerable heat, to those not
+accustomed to it, of the southwestern deserts, to the freezing blizzards of
+the North.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The surveyors of the Land Department, the topographers of the Geological
+Survey, the men in the field in every branch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> 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&mdash;the stuff of which soldiers must be
+made.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>That all government work shall be done by day's work and none by contract.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> reason of our
+country being involved in war with any other nation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The work of the Reclamation Service, instead of being confined to the West
+only, should be extended to the entire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>In every State the works should be built, in co&ouml;peration 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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. Co&ouml;peration 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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> authority, initiative
+and financial resources of the national government.</p>
+
+<p>The Office of Public Roads of the national government should be made a
+Service for <i>Construction</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>A Waterway Service for <i>Construction</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> countries of Europe&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This would necessitate the employment of an ultimate total of a million
+men,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> outlined for the
+creation of a National Homecroft Reserve were adopted as an additional
+means of national defense.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Every private soldier in the regular<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most serious aspects of our unpreparedness for any military
+conflict lies in the <i>incompleteness</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> immediately for the War Department to train these officers.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In this country the life of the apartments,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> special
+automobile service would have to be provided for their transportation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> the strong racial type from which we are all
+descended.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> home and a garden home. It must be a Homecroft&mdash;a home with an
+abundance of sunshine and fresh air, in decent, sanitary surroundings&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Our first great national undertaking should be the creation of a national
+system of life that will realize the ideals of the Homecroft Slogan:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Every Child in a Garden,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Every Mother in a Homecroft, and<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Individual Industrial Independence<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For every worker in a<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Home of his own on the Land."<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></div></div>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the result of the wrong
+conditions that surround their lives,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;the
+direct result of the system of industry and human life which she has
+herself created and for which she alone is responsible.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> words the depth of degradation to which a great mass of
+humanity has sunk in that modern Babylon&mdash;rich as well as poor.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>at</i> the gates,&mdash;they are <i>within</i> the gates.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Do not these domestic enemies constitute a more immediate danger than any
+foreign enemy?</p>
+
+<p>The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow
+our imaginations, is still in the remote distance&mdash;a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> future possibility,
+not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> in cities or from social or labor
+conflicts, more than by any danger of conflict with another nation.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+autocracy. From that time on we would follow in the footsteps of Rome to
+our certain doom as a people and a nation.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;between the army above and the proletariat below&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The patrician class in this country, who are now in their hearts praying
+for a strong centralized military government,&mdash;patiently and persistently
+planning for it, and making steady progress, too,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> from a military government to
+a military despotism.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> ourselves against invasion without an army
+so huge as to dwarf our present army into insignificance.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The population of Switzerland is less than that of the city of London, but
+if London were a nation by itself, with its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> congested population, human
+degeneration, artificial life, moral decay, and economic dependence, it
+would be impossible of defense from a military point of view.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;no other race
+of people&mdash;who more richly <i>deserve and merit the good will of other
+nations</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> is sparsely inhabited&mdash;a country that is to them a Land of
+Promise&mdash;a Land flowing with milk and honey&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;not a mere owner looking for
+a tenant.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Look at California!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;grazing ground for herds of
+live stock where there should be gardens intensively cultivated and homes
+forming closely settled communities.</p>
+
+<p>In Japan, on 12,500,000 acres, the same<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> 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&mdash;really they are not farmers&mdash;they are
+gardeners&mdash;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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If California's garden lands were as densely populated as Belgium was
+before the war, there would be no Japanese<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>It would require large and comprehensive planning, and the co&ouml;peration 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> that a war would cost, and the
+risk of having California devastated by that war in the same way that
+Belgium has been destroyed?</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>to
+populate the Pacific Coast</i>?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In his book he calls attention to the fact that the Japanese population in
+Hawaii<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in
+1896 to 61,115 in 1909.</p>
+
+<p>Then he gives us these facts:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<h4>Immigration by political periods:</h4>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>1891-1900</td><td align='right'>24,806</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>1901-1905</td><td align='right'>64,102</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>1905-1906</td><td align='right'>14,243</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>1906-1907</td><td align='right'>30,226</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='right'>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Total</td><td align='right'>133,377</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>During the last six years there have come to the United
+States (Report of Bureau of Immigration) 90,123
+Japanese male adults.</p>
+
+<p>In California the Japanese constitute more than
+one-seventh of the male adults of military age:</p></div>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Caucasian males of military age</td><td align='right'>262,694</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Japanese males of military age</td><td align='right'>45,725</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth
+of the male population of military age:</p></div>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Caucasian males of military age</td><td align='right'>163,682</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Japanese males of military age</td><td align='right'>17,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The alien land law of California will not allay racial controversy&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Tacoma, Wash., Jan. 5 (1915).&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"An amendment submitted in November permitting aliens
+to own land in cities was overwhelmingly defeated."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> whole mainland territory of the United States,
+or will have when our army is enlisted up to its full strength of 100,000
+men.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>What are we going to do about it?</i></p>
+
+<p>That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States
+straight in the face.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The same author who has been previously quoted, referring to the Philippine
+Islands, says:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The short period of time within which Japan is able to
+transport her armies to this continent&mdash;200,000 men in
+four weeks, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> half million in four months, and more
+than a million in ten months&mdash;necessitates in this
+Republic a corresponding degree of preparedness and
+rapidity of mobilization.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> Act, a situation which can never be applied to Japan
+without creating a certainty of war immediately or in the future.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> then the disarmament of Asiatic nations would have to
+be coupled with the further safeguard of an agreement stopping emigration
+from Asia to America&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> that will not only be equal but superior to theirs.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>The present European war is the result of primary causes that were so
+deeply<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Japan to-day has the most efficient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> military system of any nation of the
+world. This statement refers to the <i>system</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>provided always</i>, 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 <i>provided further</i>, 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 <i>the hive must swarm</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>rots</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> which will
+subordinate Commerce and Industry to the welfare of Humanity.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let the question of exploitation be first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> 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 "<i>squat labor</i>," as they term it, that is necessary to
+get the gold from the gardens of California&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><i>They tried that once with the Chinese, with what result?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>But what happened?</i></p>
+
+<p>The Chinese were not only faithful and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> and food producer, were
+gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition
+of the Chinese.</p>
+
+<p>So we excluded the Chinese.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> <i>unless other measures are adopted to supplement one that will
+ultimately prove so futile</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> as the Nonresident Landlord System has caused in Ireland?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> as vital and national, and
+forthwith apply the only possible practicable solution.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But where shall they go?</p>
+
+<p><i>To the Philippines?</i></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Shall they go to Manchuria?</i></p>
+
+<p>Yes, to some extent, but the great body of the overflowing population of
+Japan will not go to Manchuria.</p>
+
+<p>It is a bleak, cold, dreary, and inhospitable country, already to a large
+extent cultivated and populated.</p>
+
+<p>The Japanese will not go to Manchuria for another reason.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.</p>
+
+<p>Where then will they go?</p>
+
+<p><i>To South America?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Will they go to Mexico?</i></p>
+
+<p>Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate
+the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian
+race will possess Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Why?</i>" some one asks.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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. <i>That is as certain as fate.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In the preface of that book we find this description of a "gentle and
+joyous passage at arms" of the Mexicans with the Chinese.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"I fancy that a number of the miscreants who, owing to
+a mere misunderstanding, massacred three hundred
+Chinamen in Torreon not long since&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> 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&mdash;a number of these miscreants, I fancy, are on
+other days delightful citizens."<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> "The Mexicans are descended, on the one side," says Mr.
+Cunningham Graham, "from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the
+Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very
+fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself&mdash;elements which had just
+emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Japanese, if they had the opportunity, would give the same careful
+study to every minute detail of conquesting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;in all a total of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>They would figure on <i>acreculture</i> rather than <i>agriculture</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> the incredible fertility and productiveness of the bottom lands
+and increase that of the mesa lands.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Some enterprising American Congressional Economist would then tell them
+that they surely could not contemplate spending that much <i>on anything but
+a war</i>. They would tell him that they were <i>going into a war with the
+Desert</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Then the American Speculator would come on the scene with his accumulated
+wisdom gained through many failures of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>So the Japanese in this thorough way<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>That would leave them many millions of acres&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The Japanese would pump from underground with electric power the last
+possible drop of available water to promote surface<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> 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&mdash;at
+least enough to turn such lands into forest plantations where water enough
+for agriculture could not be provided for the land.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Why is not all this done by the Caucasian race who now control this great
+valley of the American Nile&mdash;the people whose flag flies over it?</p>
+
+<p>Why, with all this incredible wealth lying undeveloped under our feet, do
+we not seize the necessary tools and develop it ourselves?</p>
+
+<p>Why indeed? The facts stated are facts, physical facts not to be denied.
+Why do we leave this empire untouched?</p>
+
+<p><i>Because thus far our only system of development has been speculation and
+human exploitation.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Because the agricultural immigrants<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> from Italy&mdash;the ideal settlers for the
+Colorado River Valley&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Australia and New Zealand,&mdash;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, <i>and they are doing it</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Those who comprise this speculative class, which opposes all such
+constructive<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the
+ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army
+<i>hired</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>If we wait for the speculators to do it, long before the time comes when
+they can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>We are told we must employ more soldiers to protect us. The Japanese
+colonists,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> wherever they go, will go with both a hoe and a gun, and will
+protect themselves.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> 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&mdash;men of military age&mdash;on the Pacific Coast of Mexico?</p>
+
+<p>In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because
+it does not pay. Would that argument<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>That is a total annual production to which the Japanese would develop this
+land within a generation of Ten billion dollars a year&mdash;and very little of
+the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> land is to-day cultivated. Most of it is unreclaimed desert.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to this the mineral output of the states lying entirely within
+that territory for 1913 was as follows:</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Arizona</td><td align='right'>$71,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>California</td><td align='right'>100,700,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Idaho</td><td align='right'>24,500,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Nevada</td><td align='right'>37,800,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Oregon</td><td align='right'>3,500,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Utah</td><td align='right'>53,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Washington</td><td align='right'>17,500,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Total</td><td align='right'>$308,000,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Colorado</td><td align='right'>$54,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>New Mexico</td><td align='right'>17,800,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Wyoming</td><td align='right'>12,500,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Total</td><td align='right'>$84,300,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The lands in the delta of the Colorado River where the Japanese are now
+settling comprise more than a million acres of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> most marvelously
+fertile land in all the world.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<i>the one and only thing</i> that can possibly prevent this from happening.</p>
+
+<p>What is that "one and only thing" that they must do to save the Colorado
+River Valley for our own people?</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>What would have to be done to accomplish that has already been told.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>How is it to be done?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> Spirit of Speculation is the only thing that stands in the way of it.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Shall we admit that we cannot do what Australia, New Zealand, Norway,
+Sweden, and Switzerland have done?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Successful acreculture requires, however, <i>a man who knows how</i>. 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, <i>but they can be taught</i>. 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thousands of the immigrants</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thousands are out of work</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> 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&mdash;and that means <i>now</i>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Is it not evident that it is the economic potentialities of the Japanese
+race that we must meet?</i></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;instantly ready for
+any emergency. All<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> Japanese invasion, which
+can be safeguarded against in no other way.</p>
+
+<p><i>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?</i></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p><i>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.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the English people stubbornly refused to heed warnings of the danger of
+war with Germany.</p>
+
+<p><i>We are doing the same with reference to Japan.</i></p>
+
+<p>The English with stolid, self-satisfied complacency pinned their faith
+entirely on their navy as a national defense.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>We are doing practically the same thing, with reference to Japan.</i></p>
+
+<p>And now the English have been awakened by an appalling national catastrophe
+which was preventable.</p>
+
+<p><i>Must we be awakened in the same way?</i></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">(Highlanders! March! By the right!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">When they hear their pipes playing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">&mdash;'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> all Great Britain ring with their praises.
+Their first laurels, won at a bloody cost, have never
+been dimmed.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"'My brave Highlanders! You still have your bayonets!
+Remember Egypt!' the commander shouted.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> into Spain and were in the fights that sent
+Joseph Bonaparte's army reeling home.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"In 1897 the Gordons were the heroes of all Britain.
+They, and a regiment of Gurkhas,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.'</p>
+
+<p>"Officially the Gordons are the Ninety-second Highland
+Infantry."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>England had the original stock from which to breed such a brave and hardy
+race of soldiers, and <i>they were the original Homecrofters</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>It may be argued that this suggestion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> been reared, is strikingly described by S. R. Crockett in
+his novel "The Raiders."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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&mdash;well, as our mouths when we had done eating
+them. Woods of tall Scotch firs stood up<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> unites its slow-moving lily-fringed stream
+with the Black Water o' Dee rushing down from its
+granite moorlands.</p>
+
+<p>"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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'See yonder on the hillside scaur,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up among the heather near and far,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wha but Granny Granite, auld Granny Granite,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Girnin' wi' her grey teeth.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>
+Water, before the final assault by the king's forces.</p>
+
+<p>"The situation was naturally a strong one&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod
+valley, you can see when the sun is setting over
+western Loch Moar and his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> rays run level as an ocean
+floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings
+of farm-steadings, the dyke-ridges that enclosed the
+<i>Homecrofts</i>, 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&mdash;but it is truth all
+the same, and one may tell it without fear and without
+favour.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the
+slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white
+among the darker heather&mdash;south to where on Kirkconnel
+hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six
+corpses&mdash;west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide
+drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs
+to a stake&mdash;east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and
+Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of
+Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea."</p>
+
+<p>"Save by general direction you cannot take in all these
+by the seeing of the eye from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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 a&euml;rial invasion her people so much feared,
+have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Of all sad things of tongue or pen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The saddest are these, it might have been."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's
+footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?</i></p>
+
+<p>The same identical influences and traits of human character that drove the
+Homecrofters from Scotland will be responsible<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> 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&mdash;strong, vigorous, and hardy men; and
+they are the ideal at which all plans for racial development should aim in
+time of peace.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this immense Homecroft Reserve, aggregating an army of five
+million<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>men</i>, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> sugar plantations of Louisiana, <i>men who, all
+of them, are fighting for their homes and their country</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>There is a remedy for the physical degeneracy caused by congested cities.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>job</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>That condition is the only permanent remedy for unemployment. When all wage
+earners&mdash;all men and women&mdash;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, <i>and there will be no
+unemployment</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Unemployment will continue so long as there is a great mass of floating
+labor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?</i></p>
+
+<p>It has much to do with it.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> 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&mdash;just as happened in the case of the rural free
+mail delivery.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;500,000 in
+all,&mdash;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&mdash;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 <i>students</i>, learning to be
+Homecrofters, all of them, and taking a five years' course. One fifth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> of
+the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every
+year.</p>
+
+<p><i>What would be the result?</i></p>
+
+<p>Every year, year after year, 1,000,000 trained, scientific
+Homecrofters&mdash;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&mdash;would be graduated from these Homecroft villages
+comprising the Homecroft Reserves. Each would have had a five years' course
+in that training&mdash;a year longer than required for an ordinary college
+course and of infinitely more practical value to them than a college
+course.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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?</i></p>
+
+<p>One million trained Homecrofters, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<h4>THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST
+IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE
+COLORADO RIVER&mdash;THE NILE OF AMERICA</h4>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
+<img src="images/image246.jpg" width="500" height="508" alt="Map showing the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River and the
+Corrected Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico.
+
+The area of the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River is 265,000 square
+miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles. That is a territory
+smaller than the area of the Colorado River Drainage Basin in Arizona and
+New Mexico." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Map showing the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River and the
+Corrected Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico.
+
+The area of the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River is 265,000 square
+miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles. That is a territory
+smaller than the area of the Colorado River Drainage Basin in Arizona and
+New Mexico.</span>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>to prevent war</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> is lived
+practically out-of-doors all the year round.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>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</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>There would thus be brought into existence something rare among American
+institutions&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Not only should the Australian land system be made applicable to such
+communities,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> mesas adjoining it, should be acquired
+and gradually settled under this plan by the national government.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> in much less time than troops could be
+transported across the Pacific Ocean.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> the point where he was needed, and be
+sure that he would get there in time to meet any invading force.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> from
+Salt Lake City to Reno, Sacramento, and San Francisco.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Homecroft
+Institutes&mdash;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. Co&ouml;perative methods in the distribution and sale of their surplus
+products should also be adopted.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span> over the desert. They have powers of
+endurance exceeded probably by no other living race of men.</p>
+
+<p>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,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>It would be a very easy matter for the national government to co&ouml;perate
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> horses as well. No horses in the world are stronger or better
+fitted for cavalry service than those bred in Nevada.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> public lands an area of
+grazing lands which they could use through the formation of a co&ouml;perative
+grazing association, such as have been so successfully conducted in some of
+the other grazing States.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+of our hopelessly inadequate regular standing army and our utter
+unpreparedness so long as we have no adequate force of citizen soldiery.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>That commission should also have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 412px;">
+<img src="images/image274.jpg" width="412" height="650" alt="" title="" />
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>California is a remote Insular Province of the United States&mdash;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.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span> from the sea and
+slipped into Santiago Harbor when practically the whole American Navy was
+searching and watching for him?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;1909&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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."</p></div>
+
+<p>Is there anyone so blind as to believe that if such an army of invasion was
+started from Japan, convoyed by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> 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 <i>are</i> peaceful shores. That is why the name Pacific was chosen
+for that great ocean.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;Navy, Transports, and Soldiers, probably the most perfectly
+organized army in the world.</p>
+
+<p>That is the situation of California from the side of the Pacific Ocean.
+What is it from the land side?</p>
+
+<p>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?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The California and Oregon from the north.</p>
+
+<p>The Southern Pacific from the south.</p>
+
+<p>The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Central Pacific and the Western
+Pacific from the east.</p>
+
+<p>Blow up one tunnel on each line and do the job thoroughly and well as the
+Japanese would do it,&mdash;that's the Japanese way,&mdash;and it would be weeks and
+perhaps months before one single train could be got in or out of
+California.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>No doubt the idea will occur to some that soldiers could be transported
+from the Atlantic Coast to California through<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> 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&mdash;nothing more desperate than Hobson's feat at Santiago.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Japanese do not want a war with the United States.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+Pel&eacute;e, 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> 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 re&euml;nforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same
+steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, a&euml;roplanes, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>How surprised the good people would be who have been so anxious to get
+enough of the "inferior people" who are willing to do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> "squat labor" for
+the American <i>owners of the country</i>, 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> to riddle Japanese battleships miles at sea?</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>swarm</i>.</p>
+
+<p>What would the California Militia be doing all this time?</p>
+
+<p><i>It is better not to dwell on unpleasant subjects.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But one of the first things the Japanese would do would be to organize a
+force of a&euml;roplane 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 a&euml;roplane 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Entrance into southern California is gained by three
+passes&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Los Angeles forms the main centre of these three
+passes, and lies within three hours by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;the
+desert begins.</p>
+
+<p>"The Mojave is not a desert in the ordinary sense of
+the word, but a region with all the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> 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 ca&ntilde;ons 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 Ca&ntilde;ons, 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."</p></div>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> occupy with a military
+force and continue to occupy it. Its irrigable lands in the coast basin are
+already all reclaimed and densely populated.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys would be the paradise that they
+would develop into a new Japan.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>What should the United States do to prevent all this?</i></p>
+
+<p>It should <i>immediately</i>, 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&mdash;"open the neck of the bottle" as they say in
+that locality.</p>
+
+<p>The government should go over onto the west side of the Sacramento Valley
+and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> main line West
+Side Canal from the Sacramento River to the Straits of Carquinez.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>
+earned by the furnishing of water to other lands under the canal in the
+Sacramento and also in the San Joaquin Valley.</p>
+
+<p>The co&ouml;peration 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+of the country would be assured forever.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+mountains until they connected with the Columbia River Railroad and would
+be free from danger of being destroyed by the blowing up of tunnels.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 514px;">
+<img src="images/image299.jpg" width="514" height="650" alt="Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to
+Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the
+North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany;
+2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to
+Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the
+North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany;
+2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston.</span>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span></p>
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>It is a fact capable of absolute demonstration that a large portion of the
+damage<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>
+that the military caste now has upon this class of legislation in Congress.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete
+co&ouml;rdination 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Another incurable defect in the military system when applied to civil
+construction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The people of the lower Mississippi Valley have for years endeavored to
+secure the construction of controlled outlets and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The first big flood that came filled up the cut-off canal and it is now
+useless. It would be clearly unavailing to re&euml;xcavate 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The whole training of an Army engineer<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> 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 co&ouml;rdinate 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 co&ouml;rdinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use
+of water<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 co&ouml;peration, support, or endorsement,
+for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the
+original cause of war and to contribute<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> 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&mdash;the need for toughened and
+trained men who could and would fight and dig trenches as well as seasoned
+soldiers&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>That a great force should be organized<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>We might be forced into a war within a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Were such defense afforded, results would be obtained of such enormous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> and producing
+vastly more wealth than those three countries combined.</p>
+
+<p>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, <i>provided</i> 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 <i>provided further</i> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that
+the trees&mdash;when there are any trees&mdash;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&mdash;bowing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> grievously and thrusting out arms
+desperately northward as to save themselves from
+falling. And they are being pursued indeed;&mdash;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&mdash;whole forests of drift&mdash;huge trunks of
+water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow
+Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles
+to destroy;&mdash;and amid their eternal strife the islands
+and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not
+less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.</p>
+
+<p>"And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where
+the woods made their last brave stand against the
+irresistible invasion,&mdash;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,&mdash;some high enough to
+resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling
+likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and
+skeleton-hands,&mdash;with crustaceous white growths<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>
+clinging to them here and there like remnants of
+integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned
+oaks,&mdash;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;&mdash;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,&mdash;soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the
+surface,&mdash;is everywhere pierced with holes made by a
+beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with
+hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white
+claws;&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>
+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,&mdash;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,&mdash;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,&mdash;a sudden breeze blew,&mdash;lightnings flickered in
+the darkening horizon,&mdash;wind and water began to strive
+together,&mdash;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&mdash;voices of drowned
+men,&mdash;the muttering of multitudinous dead,&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>
+moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage
+against the living, at the great Witch-call of
+storms...."</p></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 462px;">
+<img src="images/image326.jpg" width="462" height="650" alt="Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old
+River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and
+Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the
+Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf
+Coast Dike." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old
+River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and
+Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the
+Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf
+Coast Dike.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger
+from that cause obviated.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> 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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> large surplus over for distribution to the world's food markets.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>More than this, the luggermen of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span> 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&mdash;sailors and fishermen&mdash;to man our navy or
+merchant marine.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated the practicability and
+proved the success of a national policy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>The reasons why they will be accomplished by the Homecroft Reserve System
+may be briefly summarized.</p>
+
+<p>From the standpoint of national defense, and regarding war as a
+possibility, the following are the advantages of the system:</p>
+
+<p><i>First:</i> The maintenance of a Homecroft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Second:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Third:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fourth:</i> The whole body of the Homecroft Reserve would be men physically
+hardened and trained to every duty required<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fifth:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sixth:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>For the first fifty year period the cost of maintaining our present
+standing army of less than <i>100,000</i> men will be <i>five billion dollars</i>.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>During that same period</i> 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 <i>five million men</i> would be
+<i>nothing</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;$300,000,000 a year every year
+for fifty years,&mdash;more than enough to cover the entire expense of our
+standing Army and Navy, as at present maintained.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, the profit to the government from establishing a Military
+Reserve which would be at the same time a great <i>Educational Institution</i>
+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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><i>Every child in a Garden,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Every mother in a Homecroft, and</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Individual Industrial Independence</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>For every worker in a</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Home of his own on the Land.</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;civil conflict, class conflict, social upheaval, racial
+deterioration, and a degenerated citizenship&mdash;the advantages of the
+Homecroft Reserve System may be epitomized as follows:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>First:</i> Every Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlement of 100,000 acres&mdash;100,000
+Reservists&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Second:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Third:</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fourth:</i> The fact will be established that the remedy for unemployment is
+universal Homecroft Training in the public<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Fifth:</i> One million scientifically trained Homecrofters would be graduated
+annually from the National Homecroft Reserve System,&mdash;ten million every ten
+years,&mdash;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&mdash;a home with a
+piece of ground that will produce food for the family.</p>
+
+<p><i>Sixth:</i> 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&mdash;one,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When the electric light was first demonstrated to be a scientific success,
+few<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> 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 A&euml;roplane Service in the present war? And yet, all
+that has so far been done is only a forecast of greater development in
+a&euml;rial 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> 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:</p>
+
+<p><i>In California</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Ten thousand acres should be acquired<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>In Louisiana</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>In West Virginia</i>, ten thousand acres<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Reservists would be paid wages for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> the Militarists contend should be added to the regular army for our
+national defense.</p>
+
+<p>That $100,000,000 a year, divided among the projects above named, would
+provide the following amount for each project annually until completed:</p>
+
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td align='left'>Iron Canyon Reservoir</td><td align='right'>$10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Sacramento Flood Control</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Calaveras Reservoir</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>San Joaquin River</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Drainage Canal to Bakersfield</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Atchafalaya Controlled Outlet</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Atchafalaya Protection Levees</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Monongahela Reservoirs</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Ohio River Reservoirs</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Mississippi River Reservoirs</td><td align='right'>10,000,000</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='right'>&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>Total</td><td align='right'>$100,000,000</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>That amount of money for one year would complete most of the above
+projects.</p>
+
+<p>Another $100,000,000&mdash;the amount an additional 100,000 men added to the
+regular army would cost for the second year&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Homecroft Reserves should be established on the basis of an
+organization of 1000&mdash;ten companies of 100 each&mdash;in one organized and
+united community. These community organizations, which would each furnish a
+regiment in the Reserve, would be organized primarily as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> 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, co&ouml;perative
+purchase of supplies and distribution of products, home-handicraft and
+"<i>housekeeping by the year</i>." 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.</p>
+
+<p>The number of regiments in the Homecroft Reserve could be increased just
+as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>A charge of Ten Dollars a month as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;in fact every advantage that
+comes within the compass of a wage earner's life,&mdash;and during the five year
+period of enlistment he would learn what would be to him the most valuable
+trade he could be taught&mdash;the trade of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> getting his own living by his own
+labor and that of his family from an acre of ground.</p>
+
+<p>He would be able&mdash;and every enlisted Homecrofter would be trained with that
+end in view&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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?</i></p>
+
+<p>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, <i>and this is one
+of them</i>.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> as though it
+had been invested in fire crackers and they had all been set off and there
+was nothing left, not even noise.</p>
+
+<p>It is not contended that this country should spend <i>less</i> than $100,000,000
+a year on its army, <i>but it is contended that it should not spend more</i>.
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The annual cost of an increase of 100,000 men in the Regular Army would be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>
+$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,&mdash;an
+amount ten times as large as the whole national debt of the United
+States,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Measure up against that proposition the Homecroft Reserve plan and compare
+results:</i></p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>$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.</p>
+
+<p>Starting from that point, in fifty years<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Now put the two propositions side by side and look at them.</p>
+
+<p>An increase of 100,000 men in the Standing Army would mean in fifty years:</p>
+
+<p>1. An expense of $5,000,000,000 for maintenance.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The Homecroft Reserve Establishment would provide a military force of
+5,000,000 men instead of 100,000.</p>
+
+<p>It would provide for the maintenance of this immense force during the fifty
+years without any ultimate cost to the government.</p>
+
+<p>It would create and vest in the government in perpetual ownership property
+consisting of 5,000,000 acre Homecrofts worth $1000 apiece,&mdash;a total
+property<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Why should anyone be staggered at the proposition for the establishment of
+the Homecroft Reserve, or balk at it because it is big?</i></p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>If it can do that in the Colorado River Country is there any reason why it
+should<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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 <i>agriculture</i>,
+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 <i>Acreculture</i>, if they pay for the cost of that
+instruction and all the expenses of maintaining the necessary educational
+institutions?</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><i>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.</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Conquerors of the Desert; the Nevada
+Reservists would be trained as Homecrofters and Cavalrymen,&mdash;the Cossack
+Cavalry of America,&mdash;and all would be good soldiers, as well as the very
+highest type of good citizens.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;">
+<img src="images/image374.jpg" width="600" height="403" alt="Map showing Territorial Divisions and Locations of the
+Departments of the National Homecroft Reserves. Also showing the Corrected
+Mexican Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico, and the New State of South California." title="" />
+<span class="caption">Map showing Territorial Divisions and Locations of the
+Departments of the National Homecroft Reserves. Also showing the Corrected
+Mexican Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico, and the New State of South California.</span>
+</div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;twenty miles a day. Such a march, once
+every year, should be a part of the training of every soldier in the
+Homecroft Reserve.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The following pertinent statements are made in that article: "Fifty years
+of amazing progress in West Virginia gives a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> 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."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The population of the United States is out of balance&mdash;too many consumers
+in cities&mdash;too few producers in the country&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>(<i>a</i>) 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;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>b</i>) The reclamation by irrigation of at least 75 million acres of land
+now desert in the western part of the United States;</p>
+
+<p>(<i>c</i>) The reclamation by drainage or protection from overflow of 75
+million<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> acres of swamp and overflow lands situated largely in the eastern
+and southern states.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>creation</i> 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 <i>the world needs the food</i>. 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> 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 <i>one hundred billion dollars a
+year</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p><i>If we do not train millions of our people to be Homecrofters and intensive
+soil-cultivators,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> how are we going to feed our population when it reaches
+200,000,000 or 400,000,000?</i></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 co&ouml;perate by maintaining a
+Forestry and Homecroft<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> School as an adjunct to the forest plantation
+established by the national government.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever this country has put itself on the economic basis that will be
+established by the adoption of the National<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>The final power that must be relied on to ultimately make an end of war is
+the drift of economic forces&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Let us learn a lesson from England's mistakes, the mistakes which have
+brought upon her such an appalling calamity.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The United States is now at the forks of the road. Certain destruction is
+our fate if we continue the drift away from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>acreculture</i> and create Homecroft
+Rural Settlements instead of crowding humanity into congested cities where
+they become consumers and cease to be producers of food.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;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<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> available for instant
+service, with adequate arms and equipment.</p>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<p>"<i>The citizen standing in the doorway of his home&mdash;contented on his
+threshold&mdash;his family gathered about his hearthstone&mdash;while the evening of
+a well spent day closes in scenes and sounds that are dearest&mdash;he shall
+save the republic when the drum tap is futile and the barracks are
+exhausted.</i>"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER</h2>
+
+<h3>THE FIRST BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS</h3>
+
+<h4>CONTAINS</h4>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">We Dare Not Fail</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Brotherhood of Man</span>&mdash;Poem<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Charity</span>&mdash;Poem<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Charity that is Everlasting</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Secret of Nippon's Power</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Commercial Competition of Japan</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">A Warning from England</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Garden School is the Open Sesame</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Lesson of a Great Calamity</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Our Motto&mdash;"Droit au Travail"</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Sign of a Thought&mdash;the Swastika</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">The Creed and Platform of the Homecrofters</span><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">"Homecroft"&mdash;the Making of a Word</span><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Price $1.00</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">Including Postage</p>
+
+<p class="center">May be ordered by mail from</p>
+
+<h4>
+RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION<br />
+<span class="smcap">Cotton Exchange Building, New Orleans, La.</span><br />
+</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Our National Defense:
+       The Patriotism of Peace
+
+Author: George Hebard Maxwell
+
+Release Date: December 13, 2011 [EBook #38288]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE: ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Bryan Ness, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. (This
+book was produced from scanned images of public domain
+material from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE
+
+THE PATRIOTISM OF PEACE
+
+BY
+
+GEORGE H. MAXWELL
+
+
+THE FOURTH BOOK OF THE HOMECROFTERS
+
+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
+
+    "_Peace hath her victories
+    No less renowned than war_"
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+President Schurman of Cornell recently said:
+
+"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 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, 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 coordinating
+by forming the Board of River Regulation. Through that board, all necessary
+plans would be worked out for coordinating 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 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 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
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER I Page
+
+SHALL THERE BE AN END OF WAR?                                   1
+
+     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 cooperation
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+INADEQUACY OF MILITARIST PLANS FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE            24
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+IMPREGNABLE DEFENSE AGAINST FOREIGN INVASION                   44
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+NATIONAL CONSTRUCTION RESERVE                                  74
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ADAPTABILITY OF SYSTEM FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE                   115
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MENACE OF ASIATIC COMPETITION AND INVASION                    135
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+JAPAN AND THE COLORADO RIVER VALLEY                           176
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+STRENGTH OF A HOMECROFT RESERVE                               213
+
+     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 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.
+
+Chapter IX
+
+HOMECROFT RESERVE IN COLORADO RIVER VALLEY                    247
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+CALIFORNIA A REMOTE INSULAR PROVINCE                          277
+
+     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 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.
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MILITARISM AND THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY                         301
+
+     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.
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BENEFITS FROM THE NATIONAL HOMECROFT RESERVE SYSTEM           335
+
+     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, aerial 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._
+
+Its adoption will strengthen every plan that can be devised to prevent war.
+
+It will vitalize the influence of this nation in behalf of peace.
+
+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, 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.
+
+"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
+
+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 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.
+
+To every reader of this book let it be said, as a personal message:
+
+When you have read this book, do not lay it down with the thought:
+
+"Yes, that is a good idea. I hope somebody will succeed in getting it
+done."
+
+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, 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 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 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?
+
+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 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 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 cooperation 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.
+
+And then it will fail unless given power to enforce its decrees.
+
+That power will never be vested in it by the nations, not in this
+generation at least.
+
+All plans for arbitration rest on the same insecure foundation.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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
+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, aeroplanes, 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 aeroplanes, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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_.
+
+In case of war, they have no plan.
+
+_They leave that to the Militarists._
+
+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 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.
+
+The Pacificists, in case of war, have no plan of their own to propose.
+
+_They, too, leave that to the Militarists._
+
+Then we have the _Pacificators_.
+
+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 that this plan may fail, or its success be long delayed,
+and that in the meantime it affords no guarantee of peace.
+
+The Pacificators, however, propose no plan in the event of war.
+
+_They also leave that to the Militarists._
+
+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 following platform was adopted by the Woman's Peace Party:
+
+     "The purpose of this organization is to enlist all
+     American women in arousing the 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 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.
+
+_They likewise leave that to the Militarists._
+
+So, although we have plans galore to promote peace, we have in case of war
+no plans except those of the Militarists.
+
+They have three plans:
+
+_First:_ A standing army large enough for any contingency.
+
+_Second:_ A standing army, reenforced by state militia.
+
+_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.
+
+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.
+
+_But we have no such assurance._
+
+The Peace Advocates give no guarantee against war.
+
+The Militarists believe war inevitable.
+
+Neither insures peace and neither is prepared against war.
+
+The people are between the upper and the nether millstone.
+
+We cannot be certain of peace.
+
+We are undefended in case of war.
+
+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 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.
+
+_It can be done and it must be done._
+
+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 order that we may preserve the
+nation and promote human welfare.
+
+Anyone who rejects the possibility of war must be blind to current events.
+
+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.
+
+Every prediction that there would be no more wars has proved false.
+
+Every plan heretofore proposed to prevent war has thus far proved futile.
+
+Every influence relied on to put an end to war has proved a broken reed.
+
+The Socialists have inveighed against war.
+
+Now they are voting war loans and fighting in the armies.
+
+The labor organizations have long proclaimed their opposition to war.
+
+The war is on, and they are apparently giving little attention to it.
+
+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 the present, but once more the
+people are doing the fighting.
+
+We have been told that the workingmen of the world have power to stop war.
+
+No doubt they have, if they would use it, but they will not do so.
+
+While this greatest of all the world's wars was brewing, the workingmen
+were busy manufacturing the machinery of destruction.
+
+And they are still doing it.
+
+And they will keep on doing it, as long as wages are to be earned that way.
+
+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.
+
+Some manufacturer has thereby made a profit.
+
+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 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.
+
+_It is the hypocrisy of it all that makes it so revolting._
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+But she gets something for what she spends besides soldiers and
+battleships.
+
+While she has been perfecting the most 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.
+
+Have we done the same? No.
+
+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 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.
+
+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.
+
+_The Wizards of Wall Street are wise._
+
+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.
+
+_The people have been asleep a long time but some day they will wake up._
+
+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 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.
+
+_The Frankenstein of war can be controlled._
+
+But it can only be controlled by organizing a system of national defense
+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
+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
+aeroplane constructed for aerial 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. Aerial navigation
+would be the primary purpose of its construction. Water navigation would be
+secondary, and 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 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 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 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 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 coordinate
+the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same
+plane with the others in working out plans for constructive cooperation.
+
+The members of the military caste do not seem to be able to comprehend that
+the stamp of an inferior caste which they 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.
+
+In "On Board the Good Ship Earth," Herbert Quick says:
+
+     "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
+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 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 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.
+
+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
+     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
+be impracticable; (2) Reliance upon State Militia to reenforce 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 $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 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.
+
+     "_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._"
+
+And again, the same author says:
+
+     "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
+     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 Army belongs in this class,
+and so in fact does the State Militia.
+
+The question of national defense involves two separate and distinct
+problems:
+
+First, the defense of the nation against invasion by another nation.
+
+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.
+
+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, _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 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 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. 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 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.
+
+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:
+
+     "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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 Commerce
+Department, should be coordinated and brought together in a Board of River
+Regulation. The coordination 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 coordinating 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 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 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 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?
+
+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 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 cooperation 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 people, and it would have saved millions from death by
+famine.
+
+_Is death by war any worse than 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 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 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 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 debris. 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 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?
+
+In "The Valor of Ignorance," the author, Homer Lea, most truly says:
+
+     "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 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 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, 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_?
+
+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 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 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 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 all government work shall be done by day's work and none by contract.
+
+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 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 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 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 cooperation 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 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. Cooperation 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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:
+
+    "Every Child in a Garden,
+    Every Mother in a Homecroft, and
+    Individual Industrial Independence
+    For every worker in a
+    Home of his own on the Land."
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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.
+
+Look at California!
+
+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 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 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 cooperation 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 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 increased from 116 in 1884 to 22,329 in 1896; and from 22,329 in
+1896 to 61,115 in 1909.
+
+Then he gives us these facts:
+
+     "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:
+
+            1891-1900     24,806
+            1901-1905     64,102
+            1905-1906     14,243
+            1906-1907     30,226
+                          ------
+                Total    133,377
+
+     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:
+
+            Caucasian males of military age    262,694
+            Japanese males of military age      45,725
+
+     In Washington the Japanese constitute nearly one-ninth
+     of the male population of military age:
+
+            Caucasian males of military age    163,682
+            Japanese males of military age      17,000
+
+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.
+
+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:
+
+     "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 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.
+
+_What are we going to do about it?_
+
+That is the question that stares every citizen of the United States
+straight in the face.
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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.
+
+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, 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 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 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 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_.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+_They tried that once with the Chinese, with what result?_
+
+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.
+
+_But what happened?_
+
+The Chinese were not only faithful and 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, and food producer, were
+gradually surrendering to and being eliminated by the economic competition
+of the Chinese.
+
+So we excluded 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 _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 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 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 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.
+
+But where shall they go?
+
+_To the Philippines?_
+
+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 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.
+
+_Shall they go to Manchuria?_
+
+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.
+
+The Japanese will not go to Manchuria for another reason.
+
+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 binding the colonies of Japan to the mother country.
+
+Where then will they go?
+
+_To South America?_
+
+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.
+
+_Will they go to Mexico?_
+
+Yes, they will go to Mexico, and the 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 Mexico, will be harnessed to irrigate
+the orchards and gardens of the Japanese and an Asiatic and not a Caucasian
+race will possess Mexico.
+
+"_Why?_" some one asks.
+
+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._
+
+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 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]
+
+[Footnote 1: "The Mexicans are descended, on the one side," says Mr.
+Cunningham Graham, "from the most bloodthirsty race of Indians that the
+Spanish Conquerors came across, and on the other side from the very
+fiercest elements of the Spanish race itself--elements which had just
+emerged from eight hundred years of warfare with the Moors."]
+
+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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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.
+
+_Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?_
+
+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 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, 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 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 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 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:
+
+            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
+
+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:
+
+            Colorado      $54,000,000
+            New Mexico     17,800,000
+            Wyoming        12,500,000
+
+            Total         $84,300,000
+
+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 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._
+
+What would have to be done to accomplish that has already been told.
+
+_How is it to be done?_
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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._
+
+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.
+
+_We are doing the same with reference to Japan._
+
+The English with stolid, self-satisfied complacency pinned their faith
+entirely on their navy as a national defense.
+
+_We are doing practically the same thing, with reference to Japan._
+
+And now the English have been awakened by an appalling national catastrophe
+which was preventable.
+
+_Must we be awakened in the same way?_
+
+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 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:
+
+    "Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?
+      (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.)
+    The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there.
+      (Highlanders! March! By the right!)
+    There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air:
+      There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare;
+    But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
+      When they hear their pipes playing.
+
+              --'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt.
+
+     "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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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
+     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 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 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 aerial invasion her people so much feared,
+have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:
+
+    "Of all sad things of tongue or pen,
+    The saddest are these, it might have been."
+
+_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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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.
+
+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 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 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.
+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.
+
+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, 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 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.
+
+_But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?_
+
+It has much to do with it.
+
+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 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 of
+the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every
+year.
+
+_What would be the result?_
+
+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 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE
+COLORADO RIVER--THE NILE OF AMERICA
+
+Map showing the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River and the
+Corrected Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico.
+
+The area of the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River is 265,000 square
+miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles. That is a territory
+smaller than the area of the Colorado River Drainage Basin in Arizona and
+New Mexico.]
+
+
+
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. Cooperative 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 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, 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 cooperate
+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 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 public lands an area of
+grazing lands which they could use through the formation of a cooperative
+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 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 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
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+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 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._
+
+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 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 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 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?
+
+The California and Oregon from the north.
+
+The Southern Pacific from the south.
+
+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 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 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.
+
+_The Japanese do not want a war with the United States._
+
+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
+Pelee, 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 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 reenforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same
+steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, aeroplanes, 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 "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 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_.
+
+What would the California Militia be doing all this time?
+
+_It is better not to dwell on unpleasant subjects._
+
+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.
+
+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 aeroplane 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 aeroplane 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 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 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 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 canyons 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 Canyons, 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 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.
+
+_What should the United States do to prevent all this?_
+
+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 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 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
+earned by the furnishing of water to other lands under the canal in the
+Sacramento and also in the San Joaquin Valley.
+
+The cooperation 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
+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
+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
+
+[Illustration: Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to
+Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the
+North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany;
+2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston.]
+
+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 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 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
+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 caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete
+coordination 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 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 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 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
+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 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 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 reexcavate 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 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 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 coordinate 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 coordinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use
+of water 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 cooperation, support, or endorsement,
+for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the
+original cause of war and to contribute 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 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 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
+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 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 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 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
+     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
+     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
+     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 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.
+
+[Illustration: Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old
+River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and
+Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the
+Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf
+Coast Dike.]
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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_.
+
+_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 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:
+
+    _Every child in a Garden,
+    Every mother in a Homecroft, and
+    Individual Industrial Independence
+    For every worker in a
+    Home of his own on the Land._
+
+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:
+
+_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 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, 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 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 Aeroplane Service in the present war? And yet, all
+that has so far been done is only a forecast of greater development in
+aerial 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 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 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 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 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.
+
+_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 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.
+
+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 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 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:
+
+      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
+
+That amount of money for one year would complete most of the above
+projects.
+
+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 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 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, cooperative
+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 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 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 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 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 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._
+
+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 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 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
+$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 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 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
+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 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.
+
+Now put the two propositions side by side and look at them.
+
+An increase of 100,000 men in the Standing Army would mean in fifty years:
+
+1. An expense of $5,000,000,000 for maintenance.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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._
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: Map showing Territorial Divisions and Locations of the
+Departments of the National Homecroft Reserves. Also showing the Corrected
+Mexican Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
+Mexico, and the New State of South California.]
+
+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 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.
+
+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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 cooperate by maintaining a
+Forestry and Homecroft 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 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 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 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.
+
+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 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 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
+
+    WE DARE NOT FAIL
+    THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN--Poem
+    CHARITY--Poem
+    CHARITY THAT IS EVERLASTING
+    THE SECRET OF NIPPON'S POWER
+    COMMERCIAL COMPETITION OF JAPAN
+    A WARNING FROM ENGLAND
+    THE GARDEN SCHOOL IS THE OPEN SESAME
+    THE LESSON OF A GREAT CALAMITY
+    OUR MOTTO--"DROIT AU TRAVAIL"
+    THE SIGN OF A THOUGHT--THE SWASTIKA
+    THE CREED AND PLATFORM OF THE HOMECROFTERS
+    "HOMECROFT"--THE MAKING OF A WORD
+
+Price $1.00
+Including Postage
+
+May be ordered by mail from
+
+RURAL SETTLEMENTS ASSOCIATION
+COTTON EXCHANGE BUILDING, NEW ORLEANS, LA.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Our National Defense:, by George Hebard Maxwell
+
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