"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."
"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 overbefore 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 expansionand 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.
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 improvementand 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 nationsto 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 thesame 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 repaidwith 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, orCommerce 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 intoan army of trained and seasoned soldiers—soldiersthat 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 arean 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 RiverRegulation 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 beso 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 anddefending 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 andmaintenance 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 convincethe 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 destroyedby 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 oneof 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 herpeople, 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 thefarmers 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 thedeforested 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."
"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 thefarmers 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 thedeforested 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 thesame 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 thedevotion 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."
"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 privateprofit, 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 fromdeforestation,—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 getmen,—trainedmen,—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 variesfrom 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 witha 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 branchof 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, byreason 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 entireUnited 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 havebeen 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 thegreat 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 overshadowingauthority, initiative and financial resources of the national government.
The Office of Public Roads of the national government should be made a Service forConstruction, 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 forConstructionshould 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 thecountries 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 ofat 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 workof 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 lateroutlined 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 regulararmy 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 toestablish 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 theincompletenessof 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 madeimmediately 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 disturbanceor 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.
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 industrialdepression 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. Aspecial 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, andtenements 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 whitesnows 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 perpetuatethe 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 individualhome 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: