Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 22

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 acc.u.mulated from sales of wood and timber sufficient to cover the entire princ.i.p.al 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 j.a.pan 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 G.o.ds, 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._"