"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 orlegs 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]
"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 orlegs 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]
[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."
[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 inherentlyimprobable 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 ColoradoRiver 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.
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 conquestingthe 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 of357,490,000 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 nowobtainable, 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 onacreculturerather thanagriculture, 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 maintainthe 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 familyfor 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 ofone 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 muchon anything but a war. They would tell him that they weregoing into a war with the Desertand 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 ofcolonization 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 waywould 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 thefloods 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 thatnow 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 withtheir 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 wouldeventually, 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 surfaceproduction. 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 Japanesearmy 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 immigrantsfrom 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 conventionsand 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 constructivelegislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an armyhiredto 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 canget 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 takethe 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 argumentapply 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 theland 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$71,000,000California100,700,000Idaho24,500,000Nevada37,800,000Oregon3,500,000Utah53,000,000Washington17,500,000Total$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$54,000,000New Mexico17,800,000Wyoming12,500,000Total$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 themost 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 dothe one and only thingthat 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 theSpirit 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 beplanted 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 teachmen 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 immigrantsnow 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 workwho, 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 bebrought 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 meansnow—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 sustainsin 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. Allwe 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 ofJapanese 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?
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 composedthis 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: