The accompanying map illustrates the lines which should be the boundary lines of the States of California, South California and Nevada. The North and South line between California and Nevada, running from Oregon to Lake Tahoe, should be continued south until it strikes the crest of the Pacific Watershed; thence it should follow the crest of that watershed southeast, south and southwest, until it joins the Pacific Ocean between Santa Barbara and Ventura. The southern boundary line of Utah should be extended until it intersects the line last described at the crest of the Pacific Watershed. The land north of the line so extended to the west and draining into Nevada, formerly in California, and comprising Mono and part of Inyo Counties should go to Nevada and all south of this east and west line should go to South California. Nevadawould gain by the exchange and so would South California. A glance at the map will satisfy anyone of the advantages to all the sections affected which would accrue from this correction of present boundaries, and the creation of the new State of South California.
California is a remote Insular Province of the United States—just as much an island as Hawaii, to all practical intents and purposes. It would be more easily accessible from Japan by sea, in case of war, than from the United States by land. It is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, now nothing more than a large lake in these days of modern steamships. It is bounded on the east and south by mountain ranges from which a thousand miles of desert and the Rocky Mountains intervene before the populous sections of the United States are reached. On the north inaccessible mountains separate California from the plains and valleys of Oregon. There are hundreds of places on its coast where an army could be landed. To reach it from the north, mountains must be crossed. From the east, mountains must be crossed. From the south, mountains must be crossed. From the west, the gentle waves of the Pacific, in all ordinary weather, lap the sloping sands which for nearly a thousand miles tempt a landing on so fair a shore.
All this is true of Southern California, so far as its inaccessibility from the east is concerned, but it is more essentially true of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. There you have a great bowl, fashioned by Nature in such a way as to open invitingly to the warm and equable winds that come from the Pacific and the Japan current, while on the north, west, and south are high mountain ranges that protect from the blizzards that come out of the north or the hot desert blasts from the south.
This peculiar conformation of the great central valley of California makes its defense in case of war with any maritime nation a most difficult problem.
The idea that the Pacific Coast of the United States or the coast of California can be protected by a navy seems so utterly without foundation that it is difficult to treat it seriously. Do those who delude themselves with that mistaken dream recall that Cervera steamed infrom the sea and slipped into Santiago Harbor when practically the whole American Navy was searching and watching for him?
If England cannot protect two hundred miles of seacoast from the raids of German battleships, can we protect two thousand miles? Does anyone doubt that if Germany had been so disposed, and her battleships had been convoying fast transports laden with soldiers, she easily could have landed them at Scarborough or anywhere along that part of the English Coast? Does anyone doubt that Japan could do the same thing anywhere along the Pacific Coast, particularly when the fact is borne in mind that in the summer, often for weeks at a time, the Pacific Coast is enveloped in dense fogs that are almost continuous?
Does anyone question that the instant war was declared Japan would seize Alaska and the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands, and cut off all possibility of our navy operating anywhere except close to our few coaling stations on the mainland? If so, they should surely read "The Valorof Ignorance" by Homer Lea, not for the author's opinions, but just to get the cold hard facts which our national heedlessness makes it so difficult to get the people of this country to realize.
In "The Valor of Ignorance" the fact is pointed out with the most specific detail that the number of transports Japan had, when that book was published—1909—was a transport fleet of 95 steamers with a troop capacity of 199,526 as against ten American transports. The author makes this further comment:
"Should Japan embark on these two fleets an average of two Japanese to the space and tonnage ordinarily deemed necessary for one American, then the troop capacity on a single voyage of these fleets would exceed three hundred thousand officers and men together with their equipment and supplies. That this would be easily possible and would work no hardship on the men was demonstrated by the Japanese winter quarters in Manchuria during the Russian War."
"Should Japan embark on these two fleets an average of two Japanese to the space and tonnage ordinarily deemed necessary for one American, then the troop capacity on a single voyage of these fleets would exceed three hundred thousand officers and men together with their equipment and supplies. That this would be easily possible and would work no hardship on the men was demonstrated by the Japanese winter quarters in Manchuria during the Russian War."
Is there anyone so blind as to believe that if such an army of invasion was started from Japan, convoyed by theJapanese navy, that we could find and destroy that entire navy and then find and destroy ninety-five transports before they could land their soldiers on the beaches along the peaceful shores of California, Oregon, and Washington? The greater part of every year theyarepeaceful shores. That is why the name Pacific was chosen for that great ocean.
The unique feature about this whole subject is that while the American people are utterly indifferent, Japan, in an incredibly short space of time, has equipped herself with everything needful for such an invasion,—Navy, Transports, and Soldiers, probably the most perfectly organized army in the world.
That is the situation of California from the side of the Pacific Ocean. What is it from the land side?
If Japan contemplated an invasion of our territory, how many are there who realize that just five dynamite bombs exploded in the right places would block a tunnel on every one of the railroads leading into the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley?
The California and Oregon from the north.
The Southern Pacific from the south.
The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Central Pacific and the Western Pacific from the east.
Blow up one tunnel on each line and do the job thoroughly and well as the Japanese would do it,—that's the Japanese way,—and it would be weeks and perhaps months before one single train could be got in or out of California.
We may rest assured also that the Japanese, when they undertook that job, would not stop with blowing up one tunnel. They would blow up a dozen on every one of the railroads mentioned, and bridges and culverts and trestles. With a little dynamite, mixed with the reckless daring of the Japanese, California could be made inaccessible to an army from the east, except by sea, for a longer time than it would take to transport an army from Asia to America.
No doubt the idea will occur to some that soldiers could be transported from the Atlantic Coast to California throughthe Panama Canal in time to meet such an emergency. But what would we transport them in? We have no ships. And it is no sure thing that the Japanese would not get the Panama Canal blown up and stop that channel of transportation, if war was begun between them and the United States. It would require nothing more desperate to accomplish it than we know the Japanese are ready for at any time the opportunity offered—nothing more desperate than Hobson's feat at Santiago.
The Japanese are a farsighted people and war with them is an exact science. They master every detail in advance. They proved that in their war with Russia. There can be no doubt—not because they have any hostile intentions towards the United States, but merely because it is a part of the duty of their professional military scientists—that the plans are now made in the war office at Tokio, for every detail of the whole project outlined above for dynamiting every railroad into California and blowing up the Panama Canal, in the event of war between theUnited States and Japan. And it is quite probable that the men are detailed for the job and the dynamite carefully stored away with which to do the job, if the necessity arose for it.
The Japanese do not want a war with the United States.
Neither did they want a war with Russia. But it is a part of their religion to be prepared for war. It is the thorough Japanese way. Their way is not our way. They take no chances. We do nothing else but take chances. Because what we are doing or have done for national defense is as nothing.
All we spend on our navy is wasted, so far as any possible trouble with Japan is concerned. If war came, it would come like the eruption of Mont Pelée, so unexpectedly and quickly that escape was impossible. The people of the United States, if we have a war with Japan, will awaken some morning and read in all their morning papers that the Panama Canal has been blown up, and that tunnels on all the railroads into California and the Colorado River Bridges at Yuma and Needles have been blown up; that the 50,000 or moreJapanese soldiers in California have mobilized and intrenched themselves in impregnable positions in the mountains of the coast range near the ocean; that Japanese steamers have landed 10,000 more Japanese soldiers to reënforce the 50,000 already in California; that those same steamers have brought arms, ammunition, field artillery, aëroplanes, and a complete equipment for a field campaign by this Japanese army of 60,000 men; that those Japanese steamers have landed at some entirely unfortified roadstead in California: Bodega Bay or Tomales Bay or Purissima or Pescadero or Santa Cruz or Monterey or Port Harford or any one of a dozen other places where they could land between San Diego and Point Arena.
The Japanese making this landing would within two days make a junction with the Japanese already in California. Then an army of occupation of 60,000 veteran soldiers is in military control of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley.
How surprised the good people would be who have been so anxious to get enough of the "inferior people" who are willing to do"squat labor" for the Americanowners of the country, which had just been taken away from them by the Japanese. Does it make any American proud to contemplate that the whole situation above outlined is not only possible but that it is the exact thing that would happen if we had a war with Japan?
Soldiers for defense? We could not get them there in time, and we cannot maintain a soldier in idleness in a barracks in California for every Japanese who is industriously earning his living in a potato field, doing "squat labor" and thinking the while that he wishes his country would make it possible, as she could so easily do, for him to own a potato patch himself. Let no one imagine he is not thinking about it. The Japanese are a farsighted and subtle people, with brains four thousand years old.
And with this army of occupation of 60,000 Japanese veterans in possession of the great central valley of California, what would the Japanese do with our coast fortifications and the big guns that cost so much money and were designedto riddle Japanese battleships miles at sea?
Why, the Japanese would just laugh at them. They would not be worth taking. If they thought they were they would take them, just as they took Port Arthur and Tsing Tau. But they would not try to do that until they had landed a couple of hundred thousand more veteran Japanese troops on the Pacific Coast. Then they would take our coast fortifications from the land side not so much by storm as byswarm.
What would the California Militia be doing all this time?
It is better not to dwell on unpleasant subjects.
Most probably they would be defending San Francisco or Sacramento from invasion while the Japs were intrenching themselves in the appropriate places to control every pass across the Siskiyous or the Sierras or the Tehachapi Mountains, making it impossible to get across those mountains with an army, even though the army could first be got across the deserts to the mountains.
In winter the Siskiyous and the Sierras would be made impassible by Nature's snow and ice and avalanches, without any other defenses being built by the Japanese.
But one of the first things the Japanese would do would be to organize a force of aëroplane scouts with bombs to swoop out and down from their mountain aeries and dynamite culverts and bridges on every railroad approaching the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. They could make it impossible to keep open railroad communication in any way other than by an adequate force to repel an aëroplane attack stationed at every bridge and culvert across a thousand miles of desert. Once the bridges across the Colorado River at the Needles and Yuma were blown up, the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe would be out of commission for months.
What it would mean to get an army across the mountains into the great central valley of California cannot be appreciated by anyone who is unfamiliar with the stupendous canyons and chasms and the towering peaks of the Siskiyou and Sierra Nevada Mountains. Thosewho toiled over them with the Donner party could have told the tale to those who calculate on scaling those mountains with an army in the face of Japanese batteries defending every pass. It would be a task greater than the capture of Port Arthur to capture one pass and get it away from the Japanese after we had got into motion and started in with the job of reconquering California.
The difficulty of getting an American army into Southern California after the Japanese had once occupied it, is described by Homer Lea in "The Valor of Ignorance" in the following warning words:
"Entrance into southern California is gained by three passes—the San Jacinto, Cajon and Saugus, while access to the San Joaquin Valley and central California is by the Tehachapi. It is in control of these passes that determines Japanese supremacy on the southern flank of the Pacific coast, and it is in their adaptability to defence that determines the true strategic value of southern California to the Japanese."Los Angeles forms the main centre of these three passes, and lies within three hours byrail of each of them, while San Bernardino, forming the immediate base of forces defending Cajon and San Jacinto passes, is within one hour by rail of both passes."The mountain-chains encompassing the inhabited regions of southern California might be compared to a great wall thousands of feet in height, within whose enclosures are those fertile regions which have made the name of this state synonymous with all that is abundant in nature. These mountains, rugged and inaccessible to armies from the desert side, form an impregnable barrier except by the three gateways mentioned."Standing upon Mt. San Gorgonio or San Antonio one can look westward and southward down upon an endless succession of cultivated fields, towns and hamlets, orchards, vineyards and orange groves; upon wealth amounting to hundreds of millions; upon as fair and luxuriant a region as is ever given man to contemplate; a region wherein shall be based the Japanese forces defending these passes. To the north and east across the top of this mountain-wall are forests, innumerable streams, and abundance of forage. But suddenly at the outward rim all vegetation ceases; there is a drop—the desert begins."The Mojave is not a desert in the ordinary sense of the word, but a region with all thecharacteristics of other lands, only here Nature is dead or in the last struggle against death. Its hills are volcanic scoria and cinders, its plains bleak with red dust; its meadows covered with a desiccated and seared vegetation; its springs, sweet with arsenic, are rimmed, not by verdure, but with the bones of beast and man. Its gaunt forests of yucca bristle and twist in its winds and brazen gloom. Its mountains, abrupt and bare as sun-dried skulls, are broken with cañons that are furnaces and gorges that are catacombs. Man has taken cognizance of this deadness in his nomenclature. There are Coffin Mountains, Funeral Ranges, Death Valleys, Dead Men's Cañons, dead beds of lava, dead lakes, and dead seas. All here is dead. This is the ossuary of Nature; yet American armies must traverse it and be based upon it whenever they undertake to regain southern California. To attack these fortified places from the desert side is a military undertaking pregnant with greater difficulties than any ever attempted in all the wars of the world."
"Entrance into southern California is gained by three passes—the San Jacinto, Cajon and Saugus, while access to the San Joaquin Valley and central California is by the Tehachapi. It is in control of these passes that determines Japanese supremacy on the southern flank of the Pacific coast, and it is in their adaptability to defence that determines the true strategic value of southern California to the Japanese.
"Los Angeles forms the main centre of these three passes, and lies within three hours byrail of each of them, while San Bernardino, forming the immediate base of forces defending Cajon and San Jacinto passes, is within one hour by rail of both passes.
"The mountain-chains encompassing the inhabited regions of southern California might be compared to a great wall thousands of feet in height, within whose enclosures are those fertile regions which have made the name of this state synonymous with all that is abundant in nature. These mountains, rugged and inaccessible to armies from the desert side, form an impregnable barrier except by the three gateways mentioned.
"Standing upon Mt. San Gorgonio or San Antonio one can look westward and southward down upon an endless succession of cultivated fields, towns and hamlets, orchards, vineyards and orange groves; upon wealth amounting to hundreds of millions; upon as fair and luxuriant a region as is ever given man to contemplate; a region wherein shall be based the Japanese forces defending these passes. To the north and east across the top of this mountain-wall are forests, innumerable streams, and abundance of forage. But suddenly at the outward rim all vegetation ceases; there is a drop—the desert begins.
"The Mojave is not a desert in the ordinary sense of the word, but a region with all thecharacteristics of other lands, only here Nature is dead or in the last struggle against death. Its hills are volcanic scoria and cinders, its plains bleak with red dust; its meadows covered with a desiccated and seared vegetation; its springs, sweet with arsenic, are rimmed, not by verdure, but with the bones of beast and man. Its gaunt forests of yucca bristle and twist in its winds and brazen gloom. Its mountains, abrupt and bare as sun-dried skulls, are broken with cañons that are furnaces and gorges that are catacombs. Man has taken cognizance of this deadness in his nomenclature. There are Coffin Mountains, Funeral Ranges, Death Valleys, Dead Men's Cañons, dead beds of lava, dead lakes, and dead seas. All here is dead. This is the ossuary of Nature; yet American armies must traverse it and be based upon it whenever they undertake to regain southern California. To attack these fortified places from the desert side is a military undertaking pregnant with greater difficulties than any ever attempted in all the wars of the world."
Now after so easily taking California away from us because we stolidly refused, like the English people, to heed repeated warnings, what would the Japanese do? Southern California they would simplyoccupy with a military force and continue to occupy it. Its irrigable lands in the coast basin are already all reclaimed and densely populated.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys would be the paradise that they would develop into a new Japan.
Already we have shown how they could duplicate the 12,500,000 acres of irrigated and cultivated land in Japan in the drainage Basin of the Colorado River.
They could do it again in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California. There are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world in those valleys and within two years after they had taken possession of it they would have several million Japanese reclaiming and cultivating it. They would bring their people over as fast as all the steamers of Japan could carry them. And long before we had got real good and ready to reconquer California they would have peopled its great central valley with a dense Japanese population who would fight us, the original owners of the country, to defend their homes from invasion.
What should the United States do to prevent all this?
It shouldimmediately, with just the same energy and expedition that it would act if an invading Armada had actually sailed from Japan, buy 100,000 acres of land in the San Joaquin Valley that can be irrigated from the Calaveras River and from the Calaveras Reservoir if it were built. It should subdivide that tract into one acre Homecrofts and put 100,000 Homecroft Reservists on it. It should go to work and build, right now and without any dilly-dallying or delay, the Calaveras Reservoir. Those 100,000 Homecroft Reservists should be set to work to build the Calaveras Reservoir and the irrigation system necessary to irrigate that particular Homecroft Reserve tract, and all the works necessary to protect the entire delta of the San Joaquin River from overflow and protect the channel of the river and broaden it below Stockton—"open the neck of the bottle" as they say in that locality.
The government should go over onto the west side of the Sacramento Valley andbuy another 100,000 acres, and subdivide it into one acre Homecrofts and enlist another corps of 100,000 Homecroft Reservists and put them on that land. Then it should set them to work to build a great wasteway, to temporarily carry off the flood waters of the Sacramento River—one that will not split the Sacramento River but that will safeguard Sacramento from that catastrophe. That work should be continued until it is finished.
Another 100,000 acres in the neighborhood of Fresno should be likewise bought and another 100,000 Homecroft Reservists enlisted and located on it. They should be set to work to open a navigable waterway to Fresno and dig a great drainage canal that would also be a navigable canal, from Suisun Bay to Tulare Lake.
Another 100,000 acres in the upper end of the west side of the Sacramento Valley should be acquired and settled with 100,000 Homecrofters who would work on the construction of the Iron Canyon Reservoir and other reservoirs on the Sacramento River and its tributaries, and on a greatmain line West Side Canal from the Sacramento River to the Straits of Carquinez.
Another 100,000 acres on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley should be acquired and settled with 100,000 Homecrofters who would work on the construction of the lower section of the West Side Canal from the Straits of Carquinez to the lower end of the San Joaquin Valley.
The government should not stop there. It should, as soon as the necessary legislative machinery can be evolved, go into the extreme southern end of the San Joaquin Valley and acquire 500,000 acres of land for a Homecroft Reserve of 500,000 families. It should build the works necessary to bring the water to irrigate this land from the Sacramento River by the great main-line canal from the river to the straits of Carquinez. Those straits should be crossed on a viaduct and the canal carried on down the west side of the valley, starting at an elevation high enough to cover the land to be irrigated in the lower valley. The increased value of the million acres would cover the entire cost of the works. Additional revenue could beearned by the furnishing of water to other lands under the canal in the Sacramento and also in the San Joaquin Valley.
The coöperation of the State of California would be gladly extended and complete plans carried out for the reclamation of the San Joaquin Valley by a great canal on the east side of the valley heading in the Sacramento River near Redding, or at the Iron Canyon, and extending to the extreme southern end of the valley, as recommended by the Commission appointed by General Grant when President of the United States. That Commission was composed of General Alexander, Colonel Mendel, and Professor Davidson, three of the most eminent engineers and scientists of those days.
An aggregate area of 12,500,000 acres would, as the result of this policy, be reclaimed and settled in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys. Having created a dense population ourselves in that country there would be no unoccupied land to tempt the Japanese. And with 1,000,000 Homecroft Reservists ready at any time to meet and repel an invasion, our occupancyof the country would be assured forever.
There would not be room left for many Japanese immigrants, and if some of them did come they would be in such a hopeless minority that no danger would result from their being here. No condition could then be imagined in the future that would create a possibility of Japan, even with all the countless millions of China combined with her, being able to land on the Pacific Coast an army large enough to stand a moment against a Homecroft Reserve of a million soldiers from the Colorado River Valley and another million from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys.
Whether it would be advisable to establish other Homecroft Reserves in Oregon and Washington would depend largely on the attitude of mind of the people of those States. If a few connecting railroad lines were built, troops could be transported by railroads running north across Southern California and Nevada to a connection with the railroads running down the Columbia River to Portland. These railroads would all be east of themountains until they connected with the Columbia River Railroad and would be free from danger of being destroyed by the blowing up of tunnels.
Of course it is a remote contingency that such a thing should ever become necessary, but if it ever did, the Canadian border could be defended with troops brought north through Nevada and Utah from the Colorado River Valley to great concentration camps at Chehalis and Spokane, in Washington, Havre in Montana, and Williston in North Dakota. As a matter of military precaution, the necessary connecting links should be built as military railroads, if nothing else,—such links as from Yuma to Cadiz, Pioche to Ely, Tonopah to Austin, Indian Springs to Eureka, and from Battle Mountain or Winnemucca as well as from Cobre on the Central Pacific line north to a connection with the Oregon Short Line. The ease with which these connections could be made, and the facility, in that event, with which troops from the Colorado River Valley could be transported to any point in North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, or Oregon, as well as their
Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany; 2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston.Map showing Routes of Railway Transportation to Concentration Centers for Troops of the Reserves for the defense of the North Pacific Coast and Northern Boundary of the United States: 1, Albany; 2, Chehalis; 3, Spokane; 4, Havre; 5, Williston.
proximity when at home in the Colorado Valley, to any point where they might be needed along the Mexican border or in Southern California, emphasizes the advantages of the Colorado River Valley as a location for the first great Homecroft Reserve force of 1,000,000 men, supplemented by another force of an equal number of men in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California. Once that was done, the question of the defense of the Pacific Coast would be settled for all time, so long as this Homecroft Reserve force was maintained and kept always in readiness for immediate service.
The most dangerous aspect of the awakening of the people of the United States to a realization of their unpreparedness for war, and the appalling national disasters that might ensue from it, is the danger of creating a military caste which would gradually absorb to itself an undue control of Governmental authority and power, leading in the end to a military despotism.
Already the danger of this is seen in the assumption of the arbitrary power over inland waterway development now exercised by the corps of Army engineers and the Board of Army engineers, and the strong opposition emanating from them against the adoption of any improved system of river control that would protect the people from such appalling disasters as those which overtook the Mississippi Valley in 1912 and again in 1913.
It is a fact capable of absolute demonstration that a large portion of the damageresulting from those floods was due to the stubborn refusal of the Army engineers to approve or adopt any plan for flood control that would supplement the levee system by source stream control of the floods on the upper tributaries, and by controlled outlets and spillways and auxiliary flood water channels in the lower valley. It is very doubtful whether the people of the delta of the Mississippi River will ever succeed in getting protection against the recurrence of devastating floods until this baleful influence of the Army engineers can be eliminated.
There are several reasons why this military control of inland waterways is detrimental to the country. The military caste in the United States has developed remarkable capacity for turning to their own advantage the influence which their control over appropriations for river and harbor improvements has centered in them. The Army engineers are wedded to the present piecemeal system of appropriations, popularly known as the "Pork Barrel" System. The reason for this is that it practically vests in them the autocraticauthority to determine whether the demands of the constituents of any Senator or Congressman for some local river or harbor improvement shall or shall not be granted. The representatives of the people, whether they be Congressmen or Senators, must humbly bow to a higher power and secure its gracious grant of consent or face the disappointment of their constituents. It ought not to be difficult for anyone with common sense, and with the most superficial knowledge of the manipulation of social and political influences in shaping legislation to understand the evils of this system, or the influence exerted through it by the military caste which is adverse to the best interest of the people at large.
The "Pork Barrel" System, with its piecemeal appropriations for local improvements, without any underlying comprehensive plan, as long as it prevails, will block the way to all efficient waterway development, or protection from periodical damage by devastating floods. And it will never be changed until popular indignation and protest breaks the strangleholdthat the military caste now has upon this class of legislation in Congress.
Their attitude in this whole field of public development is in humiliating contrast with that of the Samurai of Japan when the whole system of government of that nation was reconstructed and reorganized. The Samurai, actuated by a patriotic and self-sacrificing desire to promote the general welfare, surrendered entirely the privileges and prerogatives that they held as a military class, and accepted a system which took from them all power and submerged them in the mass of the people.
The military caste of this country apparently think only of their own aggrandizement, and persistently oppose any modifications of an evil system which would in the slightest degree involve a surrender of their autocratic authority or official prestige and power for the general welfare.
In this stupendous field of national development, where immediate progress is so vital to the people of the entire country, the stubborn opposition of the militarycaste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete coördination of all the departments of the government in the solution of the whole problem of river regulation and flood control and the upbuilding of a great inland waterway system.
Aside from that, there is an additional reason why the present system can never be relied upon for a complete solution of the problem of river regulation. This further difficulty lies in the system under which the military caste is organized. The military system which prevails in all matters administered through the Army, strangles all individual initiative and opinion. It automatically subordinates every engineer in the military service to the mental and personal domination of the chief of the Army engineers, whoever he may be. All original and creative engineering genius is muzzled or chloroformed as soon as it is born. If by any Caesarian operation it chances to come into being it is promptly strangled.
Another incurable defect in the military system when applied to civil constructionand internal development of the resources of the country, lies in the transfer of engineers from one assignment of duty to another after brief periods of service. This plan is no doubt advisable and possibly necessary in the military service. Its tendency is to bring all Army engineers up to a common general level of ability and experience. It destroys the peculiar originality and genius which can only result from long experience and training in one of the many special fields for which engineers must be developed in civil life.
This Army system might not work so badly if applied only to harbors and harbor improvement work, but it destroys efficiency when applied to such problems as those presented by a great river system like the Mississippi River and its tributaries. An army engineer in charge of the Lower Mississippi River district may have learned something of that problem, but by the time he has learned it he is transferred to some other part of the country and given a different problem to study. Another engineer is put in his place, and by the time he in his turn haspartially familiarized himself with the problem he is likewise transferred. And so it goes on, ignorance succeeds ignorance as fast as knowledge can be obtained.
A martinet at the head of the Army Engineering corps can stifle and render useless to the country the most brilliant engineering genius if it blossoms forth with any new theory or original suggestion. The Army engineer corps is bound hand and foot by prejudice and pride of caste. The engineering corps is a unit, arbitrarily dominated, intellectually and professionally, by the chief of the corps. Nothing original can develop under such an atmosphere of mental repression. The best engineering talent in the world is suppressed and rendered valueless by that system of organization. It can never solve the intricate and novel hydraulic problems presented by the Mississippi River which, with all its tributaries, must be treated as a unit in order to control its floods.
The people of the lower Mississippi Valley have for years endeavored to secure the construction of controlled outlets andspillways, but their most urgent efforts have fallen dead at the door of the Army engineers or their associates or subordinates. The contractors profit financially by the "Levees Only" system. The politicians share the power developed by the local political machines which control the huge expenditures for levee construction and maintenance. Both are ardent advocates and devotees of the military caste system which perpetuates their powers, privileges, and perquisites. The rest of the people, wherever they dare to entertain an independent opinion, recognize that the Mississippi Valley can never be rightly developed so long as the present "Levees Only" system continues to prevail.
An engineering service composed entirely of engineers in civil life should be created to take over all the work relating to river regulation, flood control, and inland waterway construction, operation, and maintenance. The opposition to such a system for the administration of civil affairs by civil officials, instead of by the Army, has been based upon the plea thatnobody but army officers can be trusted to be honest in the expenditure of the funds of the national government. Such an opposition is an insult to the civil engineering profession of the United States and is completely refuted by the splendid constructive accomplishments of the United States Reclamation Service. No one questions the personal honesty of the Army engineers, but their methods are enormously wasteful and without results anywhere near commensurate to the amount of their expenditures. The system championed and supported by them has resulted in the waste of about $200,000,000. That vast sum, if it had been wisely and economically expended, would have gone a long way towards creating conditions on our river systems in which the water that now runs to waste in devastating floods would have been put into the river at the low water season to float boats on that would carry our inland commerce.
There never can be any escape from this carnival of waste and extravagance and impotent and useless expenditure until the whole system of river control and improvementis changed. Control of it must be taken away from the Army and vested in civil control. Another reason for divorcing the Army entirely from control of river work is that it seems impossible for an Army engineer to recognize or reason back to original causes. He can see in a flood only something against which he must build a fortification after the flood has been formed. This is well illustrated by the blind adherence of the Army engineers, or at least of their chiefs, to the delusion that floods of the lower Mississippi Valley can be safeguarded against by the "Levees Only" system of flood protection in that valley. They utterly ignore the cause of the floods and therefore refuse to consider any system of source stream control or of controlled outlets, spillways, and wasteways.
Another illustration of this persistent adherence to mere local protection, instead of safeguarding against an original cause, is furnished by the work of the Army engineers in building the Stockton cut-off canal in California. This canal was built ostensibly to prevent the Stocktonchannel from being filled with sediment to the detriment of navigation. In fact it was built to protect the city of Stockton from overflow and flood damage.
The first big flood that came filled up the cut-off canal and it is now useless. It would be clearly unavailing to reëxcavate it, because it would fill up again with the next big flood. The sediment which filled the canal was gathered by the river after it left the foothills and tore its way as a raging torrent through farms and fertile fields. It washed or caved them into the river and carried down and deposited the earth material in the cut-off canal.
The Army engineers, however, or at least their chiefs, had steadfastly set their faces against reservoir construction for flood control. But for this they might have built the great Calaveras Reservoir which would have afforded complete protection for the city of Stockton against floods. By controlling the flood at its source, storing the flood waters, and letting them into the river below only in a volume not larger than the channel would carry, all damage to the valley and to farmslying between the foothills and the city of Stockton would have been avoided. No sediment would have been carried into the Stockton channel to impede navigation. The surplus flood water instead of running to waste would have been conserved and held back until needed for beneficial use.
Any such plan as this would have been contrary to all the precedents and theories of the military engineers. All the damages resulting from failure to adopt it merely illustrate the necessity of escaping from those precedents and theories, and the pride of opinion which clings to them with such desperate tenacity. That escape must be accomplished, if we are ever to get river regulation and flood protection in this country. Stockton will never get it until the Calaveras Reservoir has been built, and no flood-menaced section of the country will get protection until it is afforded to it by engineering and constructive forces dominated by the civil and not by the military authority of the Government.
The whole training of an Army engineeris wrong, when it comes to dealing with river problems and the control of floods which can only be safeguarded against by controlling the remote causes which result in the formation of the flood. The idea of preventing the formation of floods by controlling those original causes, preserving forest and woodland cover, preserving the porosity of the soil, slowing up the run-off from the watershed, or holding back the flood waters in reservoirs or storage basins, seems to be beyond the scope of the powers of conception and construction of the military engineers of the United States Army. They see only results, and seem unable to comprehend original causes. Not only this, but they also oppose, by all the political arts in which the Army engineers are so well versed, every proposition to coördinate the work of the Army engineers in the field of channel work and local flood defense, with the work of other departments of the national government. Every department of the national government must be coördinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use of waterthat would check rapid run off and hold back the flood water on the watershed where it originated, and in that way prevent the formation of a destructive flood.
The entire willingness of the Army engineers to subordinate the welfare of the people in every flood-menaced valley to the stubborn determination of the military caste to retain and broaden their own powers and privileges in this one field of action, shows what might be expected from any increase in the members of that caste, or any enlargement of their control over the civil affairs of the country.
The military caste in the United States will never approve any plan for national defense that does not center in and radiate from them. They will oppose it unless it broadens their influence and power, and imbeds it more strongly in the foundations of the Government. A plan such as is advocated in this book, will never have their coöperation, support, or endorsement, for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the original cause of war and to contributeto the lessening of the power and prestige of the Army. The fact that it would at the same time supply the first and greatest need in the event of war—the need for toughened and trained men who could and would fight and dig trenches as well as seasoned soldiers—would gain no favor for the plan in the eyes of our military caste. The development of that system and the expenditures to be made for that purpose and the control of the men enlisted in it would not be vested in the War Department.
The military caste in this and every country is trained to regard its profession as one whose duty it is to accomplish results by brute force and human slaughter. Its only conception of a soldier is a man-killing machine, whose chief use in time of peace is to serve as a basis for appropriations to sustain a military establishment with all its multitudinous expenditures. Their conception of war is that it is an inevitable orgy of human slaughter, against which humanity is powerless to protect itself.
That a great force should be organizedfor patriotic service under civil control instead of military domination, to battle against the destroying forces of Nature, and subjugate and control them for the advancement of humanity and all the arts and victories of peace, runs counter to every fiber of being of the military caste. And yet, none but the most superficial student of history and humanity can fail to realize the necessity for such an army of peace in this country. It is certainly true that wars will never cease until the inspiration and patriotism and national ideals developed by such a peaceful conquest of the forces of Nature has been substituted for the tremendous stimulus which the human race has in the past drawn from armed conflicts between nations. And the fact must be clearly recognized that in this way a force can be provided that will be instantly available to take the place of seasoned soldiers at any moment in the event that this nation should be drawn into a war of defense or for the maintenance of any great principle of human rights or justice to humanity.
We might be forced into a war within ayear and we might succeed in preserving the peace forever. No man can tell, because no human mind can forecast the future or predict what events may occur that may be beyond our power to control, and which might force us into a war. We do know, however, that the fight against the floods of the Mississippi River, and the fight against the great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, must go on year after year through all the centuries to come during which man continues to inhabit the Delta of the Mississippi River.
The memory of the great disaster to the city of Galveston, and the memory of the great floods of the Mississippi River in 1912 and 1913, are still fresh in the minds of the people. The defense of that part of our common country against such catastrophes in the future is worthy of the same patriotic energy and the same adequate expenditure that would be necessary to defend them against an armed invasion from Mexico or by any nation of the world.
Were such defense afforded, results would be obtained of such enormousbenefit to the United States in time of peace, without any regard to its relation to national defense in time of war, that to fail to do it would be as stupid as it would have been to fail to take the gold from the placer mines of California.
The gateway from the Gulf of Mexico to the great central valley of this country opens into a region so vast that the area comprised within the watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries embraces 41 per cent of the entire United States. This gateway opens into a great waterway system capable of being made continuously navigable all the year around through 20,000 miles of navigable waterways and commerce-carriers.
The gateway from the Gulf opens to a country of greater potential agricultural wealth than any other section of the earth's surface of the same area. The lower Mississippi Valley has well been styled the "Sugar-Bowl" of the continent. The State of Louisiana alone is larger in area by 10,000 square miles than the combined area of Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. It is capable of sustaining a larger populationand producing vastly more wealth than those three countries combined.
If you draw a line straight north from the southernmost point of Texas to the northern line of Oklahoma, and then turn and go straight east, projecting the northern line of Oklahoma past Cairo, Illinois, to the Tennessee River, following up the Tennessee River to the northeast corner of Mississippi, and then follow the eastern boundary line of Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, you have included within these extreme boundaries a territory as large as the whole German Empire. It is a territory possessing greater natural wealth and possibility of development than the German Empire,providedthe great problems of water control and river regulation are solved in such a way as to promote the highest development of this region for the benefit of humanity, andprovided furtherthat the Coast region of this territory is protected not only from the floods of the river, but from the storms originating in the Gulf of Mexico. Protection from those storms requires the construction of a great dike similar tothe dikes of Holland that will hold out the waters of the Gulf not only at their normal height, but will also hold them back when they attain the abnormal height which at rare intervals results from the hurricanes or great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, such as that which overwhelmed Galveston.
Lafcadio Hearn, in "Chita," has described a Gulf Storm better than it will ever again be described. He prefaced the story of that storm with a picture of the havoc wrought by Nature's forces—the ceaseless charging of the "Ocean's Cavalry," that is quoted because it so clearly portrays the necessity for bulwarks of defense built in the spirit of military defenses.