_The potential economic strength and creative power of the people of Japan
may be illustrated by what they would do with the Colorado River Valley and
watershed if it were to become Japanese territory, and what we must do with
it if we are to hold our ground against their economic competition in the
eternal racial struggle for the survival of the fittest._
The Colorado River has been aptly called the Nile of America. There is a
most remarkable resemblance. In the valley of this American Nile another
Egypt could be created. All the fertility, wealth, population, products,
art, and romance of the Land of the Pharaohs could be reproduced in the
valley of this great American river. A city as large as Alexandria at Yuma,
and another as large as Cairo at Parker, are quite within reasonable
expectations whenever the resources of the Colorado River country are
comprehensively developed.
But even that comparison of possibilities gives no adequate conception of
what might be accomplished by the Japanese in the way of creative
development in the drainage basin of the Colorado River.
Another Japanese Empire could be made there, with all the vast productive
power, population, and national wealth of the present Land of Nippon. That
is what the Japanese would do with it if they had the country to develop
according to Japanese economic ideals and their methods of soil cultivation
and production. They know full well the possibilities of the Colorado River
country. Already the Japanese cultivators of the soil are at the Gateway to
this great valley, just below the international boundary line in Mexico.
They are now doing there the manual labor necessary to develop and produce
crops from Mexican lands owned by Americans in the lower delta of the
Colorado River.
The Japanese, if they had the opportunity, would give the same careful
study to every minute detail of conquesting the Colorado River Valley from
the Desert that they gave to defeating Russia in the war they fought to
save their national existence against the sea power and land power of the
Russian Empire.
They would measure the water that runs to waste, as we have done. They
would select and plat the land it should be used to irrigate, which we have
not done. They would survey every reservoir site in the Colorado Canyon and
test the foundations, which we have not done. They would calculate the
aggregate volume of electric power that could be generated by a series of
reservoirs in the Colorado Canyon, which we have not done.
They would estimate, as we have done, the total amount of sediment carried
by the river every year into the Gulf of California and wasted. They would
find that the Colorado River discharges during an average year into the
Gulf of California 338,000,000 tons of mud and silt as suspended matter,
and in addition to this 19,490,000 tons of gypsum, lime, sodium chloride
and other salts,--in all a total of 357,490,000 tons each year of
fertilizing material. It is enough to give to 3,574,900 acres an annual
fertilization of one hundred tons of this marvelously rich material that
would be annually carried by the water to the land if proper scientific
methods were adopted for the reclamation of the irrigable land located
between Needles and Yuma, which is over three and a half million acres. The
fertilization thus given to the land would be of value equal to that with
which the Nile has fertilized Egypt every year since before the dawn of
history.
They would find that the total run-off from the Colorado River watershed
that now runs to waste is enough to irrigate 5,000,000 acres of land
located in the main valley of the river between the mouth of the Colorado
Canyon and the Mexican boundary line. They would find that the area of land
so located that can be irrigated by gravity canals is 2,000,000 acres; that
1,500,000 more acres can be irrigated by pumping with electric power
generated in the river, and, from the best information now obtainable,
that the area irrigated by pumping can eventually be enlarged another
1,500,000 acres, making a total in all of 5,000,000 irrigable acres in the
main Colorado River Valley, including the Imperial Valley and the valley
above Yuma. Including the entire watershed or drainage basin of the
Colorado River, and all lands irrigable from underground supplies, and
enlarging the irrigable area to the fullest extent that it would ultimately
be enlarged by return seepage, they would find that they could eventually
irrigate more than 12,500,000 acres, which is as much land as is now
irrigated and cultivated in Japan.
They would figure on _acreculture_ rather than _agriculture_, and would
investigate to the minutest detail the problem of fertilization. They would
figure on handling the silt of the Colorado River just as the silt of the
Nile is handled in Egypt, fertilizing as large an area as possible with it.
The Colorado River carries silt that is very fine and enough of it could be
brought in the water every year to practically every irrigated field, to
maintain the incredible fertility and productiveness of the bottom lands
and increase that of the mesa lands.
They would look for phosphate, potash, and nitrogen for fertilizers. They
would find that an inexhaustible supply of potash could be manufactured
from the giant kelp beds of the Pacific Coast. They would learn that there
are in the territory included in the drainage basin of the Colorado River
unlimited deposits of phosphate rock from which all needed phosphate could
be mined. Nitrogen, they would ascertain, could be produced from the air in
immense quantities by the use of the electric power which could be
developed without limit in the canyon of the Colorado River.
They would utilize for that purpose all the vast surplus of electric power
from the Colorado River as it whirls and plunges down the most stupendous
river gorge in the world. In addition to producing all they needed to
fertilize their own lands they would produce enough nitrogen, potash and
phosphates to supply the markets of the world.
The land, the water, and the fertilizer being thus assured, they would find
the climate such that even the intensive methods of gardening now customary
in Japan, would give no idea of the possibilities of acreage production in
the Colorado River Valley. In that valley acreculture would be hothouse
culture out-of-doors. The hot climate of the country would be found, when
this economic survey of it was made, to be its greatest asset.
They would find that every product of the tropical and semi-tropical
countries of the world could be here produced to perfection. They would
find that by actual experience extending over many years, an acre of land
in such a climate, closely cultivated and abundantly fertilized, and
cropped several times a year, would produce from $1000 to $2000 net profit
annually and even more, depending on the skill of the cultivator.
They would find that the skilled soil-cultivators of Japan could by this
system of hothouse culture out-of-doors, provide all the food for an
average family for a year, and produce over and above that an average of
$1000 net profit per acre every year. This would include every product now
successfully grown in Southern California.
They would find that the Colorado River could be canalized from Yuma to the
Needles, and the Gila and Salt Rivers canalized from Yuma to Phoenix and
Florence, and a ship canal built from Yuma to the Gulf of California. Then
the products from this wonderfully prolific country could be shipped from
Yuma to every seaport of the world. Through the Panama Canal they could
reach every seaport on the Atlantic Coast. By trans-shipment at New Orleans
to canal or river steamers or barges they would connect with a river system
20,000 miles in extent for the distribution of their products to inland
territory.
They would calculate the cost of reclamation and the value of the reclaimed
land, measured by its productive power. They would figure that they could
afford to spend on the reclamation of the land at least an amount equal to
the value of one year's production from the land. That would be $1000 per
acre. Figuring only on the 5,000,000 acres that could be reclaimed in the
main lower valley of the Colorado River below the canyon, they would find
that it would justify a total expenditure of five billion dollars.
Some enterprising American Congressional Economist would then tell them
that they surely could not contemplate spending that much _on anything but
a war_. They would tell him that they were _going into a war with the
Desert_ and they proposed to triumph in it, just as they triumphed in the
war with Russia. There would be this difference: all they spent on the
Russian War was gone past recovery. They had to spend it or cease to exist
as a nation. In this war with the Desert they would spend five billion
dollars, and for it they would create a country that would produce food
worth five billion dollars a year every year through all future time.
Then the American Speculator would come on the scene with his accumulated
wisdom gained through many failures of colonization schemes because there
were no colonists or not enough to keep up with the interest on the bonds
issued. The American Speculator would warn the Japanese against such a
gigantic blunder as they were about to make in undertaking such a
stupendous colonization scheme.
And the Japanese Statesmen and Financiers would point out to him not only
that they had all the colonists they needed right at home in Japan, but
that instead of its being necessary to spend a large sum of money to induce
those colonists to emigrate to the new lands, they were having much trouble
now to keep the colonists from going to the Pacific Coast where they are
not wanted. They would explain that they are overcrowded in Japan; that
their surplus population must go somewhere; that they are the most skilled
gardeners and orchardists in the world; that the same men who would build
the irrigation works, and the power plants, would settle right down on the
reclaimed lands, glad to get an acre apiece, and live on it and cultivate
it with their families.
So the Japanese in this thorough way would go at this great work of
wresting a new Japanese Empire from the Desert. They would not do any
construction work until they had made a complete comprehensive plan of
every detail of this new empire they were starting to build. Then they
would go to the Colorado Canyon and begin by building a great diversion dam
as far down the canyon as might be practicable to lift the water high
enough to carry it in high line canal systems along both sides of the
valley, and to bring it out on the mesa lands and use it where the land
most needs the silt for a fertilizer. They would figure on first reclaiming
all the mesa land on which the water could in this way be used, and then
they would build pumping plants with which to irrigate the more elevated
lands.
They would reclaim the mesa land first because every acre of mesa land that
was reclaimed would serve as a sponge to soak up the flood water. By
carrying out that plan they would eventually relieve the lowlands in the
floor of the valley from all danger of overflow. They would not have to
spend anything to control the floods of the Colorado River. There would be
no floods. The Japanese would begin at the right end of the problem, and
build big enough at the start to solve it as a whole, comprehensively.
Their plan would be to use up every drop of the flood water by irrigating
land with it. There would never at any time of the year be any water
running to waste in the lower river. There would never be in the main river
more than enough water to supply the canals that irrigated the lowlands of
the lower delta. The ship canal from Yuma to the Gulf, and the canals from
Yuma to the Needles, Phoenix, and Florence would be not irrigating canals,
but drainage canals.
The Japanese would control and utilize all the water that now runs to waste
in the Colorado River. They would save and use, not a part of it, but every
drop of it. They would, as they have done in Japan, preserve the sources of
the water supplies from destruction by overgrazing, deforestation, and
erosion. They would build the Charleston Reservoir, on the San Pedro. They
would stop the floods that now devastate that valley and wash away and
destroy its farm lands. They would build the Verde Reservoir, the Agua Fria
Reservoir, the San Carlos Reservoir, and every other reservoir on every
tributary of the Colorado required to control for use the immense volume of
water that we now waste.
They would go into Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and do the same thing in
those States. They would build great dams and reservoirs in the Canyon of
the Colorado River, and would produce therefrom electric power enough to
furnish power for every farm and mine and city in the whole basin of the
Colorado River, and power to pump back onto the mesas water which had once
done duty by irrigating the lower lands.
They would reclaim in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River as much land
as is now cultivated in all of Japan. They would subdivide it into Garden
Homes for their industrious tillers of the soil. They would eventually put
on such Garden Homes as many of their land-cultivators and
gardener-soldiers with their families as they now have in Japan. They
would be more prosperous because the land is more fertile and the crops
would be more valuable.
Their system of land cultivation would not be farming, as we understand it.
It would be gardening, of the closest and most intensive kind. Such a
system of land cultivation in the Colorado River Valley, under their system
of development, would produce as much per acre as hothouse culture under
glass in a cold climate. Everything that can be raised in Japan they would
produce. Everything that can be raised in Egypt or Arabia, or anywhere on
the shores of the Mediterranean, they would produce.
They would make of the Colorado River Valley the greatest date-producing
country of the world. Oranges, lemons, grape-fruit, and every known
tropical and semi-tropical fruit of commerce would be raised by them in
this American Valley of the Nile. They would establish a system of land
tillage by their intensive methods which would support in comfort and
plenty a family on every acre. They would eventually, in California,
Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and on the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, put
12,500,000 acres under such cultivation and settle it with as dense a
population as they now have in Japan, where they sustain 30,000,000 rural
people on 12,500,000 acres.
That would leave them many millions of acres--of the higher, colder, and
less fertile lands on the watersheds of the tributary streams in Arizona,
Nevada, and Utah, for grazing and timber growing. The population sustained
by these industries, added to that which would be sustained by mining, and
electrical power, and the multitude of manufacturing industries which they
would establish, would bring the total population of the basin of the
Colorado River and its tributaries, under this Japanese development, up to
fifty million people. That is a population as large as that which now bears
on its shoulders all the burdens of the Japanese Empire, including its army
and navy.
The Japanese would pump from underground with electric power the last
possible drop of available water to promote surface production. The great
torrential downpours that come occasionally in that country would be
controlled by systems of embankments and soaked into the ground to
replenish the underground supplies instead of being allowed to run to
waste, carrying destruction in their path. They would from their dams in
the Colorado River Canyon develop power that would pump water high enough
to reach such vast areas of rich and fertile land as the Hualpi Valley--at
least enough to turn such lands into forest plantations where water enough
for agriculture could not be provided for the land.
Add to the wealth they would produce from their garden farms the wealth
they would dig from the mines, develop from the water power, and produce in
their factories, and they would create more annual wealth from this now
desolate and uninhabited region in the Colorado River Valley than is to-day
annually produced in the Japanese Empire. And more than that, they would be
producing a strong and virile people. Every man would be a soldier in time
of need and a Japanese army of more than five million men would be able to
take the field at a moment's warning, leaving the youths who were too young
and the men who were too old for military service, with the aid of the
women and children, to cultivate the acre garden homes.
Why is not all this done by the Caucasian race who now control this great
valley of the American Nile--the people whose flag flies over it?
Why, with all this incredible wealth lying undeveloped under our feet, do
we not seize the necessary tools and develop it ourselves?
Why indeed? The facts stated are facts, physical facts not to be denied.
Why do we leave this empire untouched?
_Because thus far our only system of development has been speculation and
human exploitation._
Because we seem to have known no way of settling a new country except to
permit a generation of speculators to skim the cream before the actual
tillers of the soil get a chance to cultivate it.
Because the agricultural immigrants from Italy--the ideal settlers for the
Colorado River Valley--are being herded in Concentration Camps in the
tenements of the congested cities. Their skill as gardeners is wasted,
their knowledge of art and handicraft lost, their children morally and
physically degenerated, and their racial strength diminished. Gunmen and
black-handers are evolved from that evil environment. We are rotting a race
of virile rural people, instead of directing the vast human power inherent
in them to creating a new Valley of the Nile, and building a new Alexandria
at Yuma and a new Cairo at Parker, and planting every family that was
located on a Garden Home in that marvelously rich country in another Garden
of Eden.
Because the railroads and the water power syndicates, with their allies the
War Department engineers, seem to have the power to perpetuate this system
of Speculation and Human Exploitation, and in consequence to dedicate the
Colorado River Valley to desolation. They apparently have the power to
inject some deadly poison into the arteries and veins of conventions and
congresses and legislative bodies that makes action impossible along any
line of constructive effort that would free the people from the thralldom
of corporate opposition to government construction.
Australia and New Zealand,--Japan, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland have
escaped from this thralldom and are a free and independent people, capable
of directing the development of their resources, _and they are doing it_.
The people of the United States have abolished human slavery, but they have
been unable as yet to free themselves from the domination of organized
capital or the influence of the aggregated appetite of an army of
speculators and exploiters of our national resources. As a nation we are
shackled by the Spirit of Speculation which insidiously opposes any
legislation that would save our resources from speculative exploitation or
directly develop them by government construction for the benefit of the
people.
Those who comprise this speculative class, which opposes all such
constructive legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the
ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army
_hired_ to defend the nation and their property from attack. They
constantly advocate increasing the $250,000,000 a year we now spend on our
army and navy. Then they cry economy when it is proposed to spend less than
half that amount every year throughout the whole United States to defend
the country against the devastating forces of Nature. As a result the
people are unable to safeguard against the recurrence of such appalling
catastrophies as the Ohio Valley floods of 1913 or the Mississippi Valley
floods of 1912 and 1913.
The creation of a new empire, more populous, and with a people living in
greater comfort and producing more wealth each year in the Colorado River
Drainage Basin than in the Japanese Empire of to-day, cannot be permitted
to be done by the Japanese because the territory belongs to the United
States. And this country cannot be allowed to do it from the viewpoint of
the speculators, unless it can be accomplished for the benefit of private
speculation. The speculators insist they must be free from any restrictions
that would prevent them from exploiting generations yet unborn who will
till the soil and use the water power in their industries.
_Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?_
Already the inconceivable fertility of this region is known to the
Japanese. Already they are quietly absorbing the opportunities to cultivate
its land, either as laborers for American Landowners below the line in
Mexico, or as tenants in the great Imperial Valley in California. They are
as familiar as we are with the Orange Groves of Sonora. They know that on
the Pacific Coast below Guaymas there are millions of acres of country just
as beautiful as Southern California, but which is now unreclaimed, where
the sparkling streams from the Sierra Madres course uselessly through
thickets of wild lemon trees on their way to the ocean.
If we wait for the speculators to do it, long before the time comes when
they can get the aid from the national government necessary to enable them
to reclaim and settle the desert lands, and develop the water power of the
Colorado River, there will be a Japanese population of many millions in the
Colorado River Delta below the line and on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
They will go to Mexico to cultivate the soil and live on it. The Caucasian
as a rule goes to Mexico to get land away from the Mexicans and speculate
on it or monopolize it. So long as that is our system of development, we
cannot complain if the industrious Japanese go there and live on the land
and produce food from it to help feed the people of all the earth. The
American goes to Mexico in the hope of making enough money to be able to
live without work. The Japanese goes there to get an opportunity to work
and to dig his living from Mother Earth by his own labor. Which will
prevail, think you, in the struggle to possess the unoccupied and untilled
lands of the Pacific shores of Mexico?
We are told we must employ more soldiers to protect us. The Japanese
colonists, wherever they go, will go with both a hoe and a gun, and will
protect themselves.
If the Colorado River Valley is to remain dedicated to speculation and
exploitation, we could not maintain upon its deserts a standing army large
enough, if we should have a war with Japan, to make even a pretense of
protecting it from invasion from the south by the Japanese after they have
settled those Mexican lands. They would not stop with taking the
Philippines and Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They would
sweep up from the south with an army of a million men from Mexico and
extend their dominion over all the arid region. From the Cascade and the
Sierra Nevada Ranges to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and from the
Canadian line to Mexico would become Japanese territory.
But that is too long a time in the future, the average self-complacent
American says, to be of any immediate interest. It would take the Japanese
more than a generation to put a million colonists in Mexico. Perhaps it
would. It will take the Japanese a generation to double the Japanese
population on the shores of the Pacific in Asia and America. Now they have
only fifty million people. In one generation more they will have a hundred
million and a goodly portion of them will be in America. Is it any too soon
for this nation to begin right now to build the safeguards against that
danger? Bear in mind that there are men and women now living who remember
Chicago when there was nothing there but Old Fort Dearborn and a few log
houses. Bear in mind that in less than ten years, from 1900 to 1908, more
than 65,000 Japanese emigrated to Hawaii, and that in a single year, 1907,
30,226 Japanese came to the United States, and that in 1909 the number of
trained and seasoned Japanese soldiers in Hawaii exceeded the entire field
army of the United States. How long would it take Japan to put a million
colonists--men of military age--on the Pacific Coast of Mexico?
In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because
it does not pay. Would that argument apply in case of a war between the
United States and Japan, with reference to the Colorado River Country and
the rest of the territory now lying in the United States between the Rocky
Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west?
In the Colorado River Valley alone the Japanese would get 5,000,000 acres
capable of being made to produce by their system of cultivation a net
profit of $1,000 an acre, over and above a living for its cultivators. That
would make a total of five billion dollars a year.
In addition they would get 12,500,000 acres in the Sacramento and San
Joaquin Valleys in California which if they produced from it only a net
profit of $500 an acre every year--would yield a total of two and a half
billion dollars annually. Oregon, Washington and Idaho would add as much
more land, making another two and a half billion dollars a year.
That is a total annual production to which the Japanese would develop this
land within a generation of Ten billion dollars a year--and very little of
the land is to-day cultivated. Most of it is unreclaimed desert.
In addition to this the mineral output of the states lying entirely within
that territory for 1913 was as follows:
Arizona $71,000,000
California 100,700,000
Idaho 24,500,000
Nevada 37,800,000
Oregon 3,500,000
Utah 53,000,000
Washington 17,500,000
Total $308,000,000
In addition, a considerable portion of the states of Colorado, New Mexico
and Wyoming lies within the territory under consideration. The mineral
output of these states for 1913 was as follows:
Colorado $54,000,000
New Mexico 17,800,000
Wyoming 12,500,000
Total $84,300,000
The total mineral production of all the above named States, and including
Montana, for the ten years ending with 1913 was $3,322,003,895.
The lands in the delta of the Colorado River where the Japanese are now
settling comprise more than a million acres of the most marvelously
fertile land in all the world.
The Japanese who are now going into the delta country of the Colorado River
are not going where they are unwelcome. The American who wants to use their
labor to cultivate his land, in order that he may get a profit from it
without working the land himself, is busy starting the Asiatic invasion
that will eventually sweep over that Land of Promise. It is an invasion
that will ultimately transfer that country from American to Asiatic
control, unless the American people wake up and decide without delay to do
_the one and only thing_ that can possibly prevent this from happening.
What is that "one and only thing" that they must do to save the Colorado
River Valley for our own people?
_Why it is to occupy, cultivate, use, and possess it ourselves, and do with
it exactly what the Japanese would do with it if they possessed it as a
part of the territory of the Empire of Japan._
What would have to be done to accomplish that has already been told.
_How is it to be done?_
By thrusting to one side the speculators and exploiters and demanding from
Congress the necessary legislative machinery and money to conquest the
Colorado River Valley from the desert, with exactly the same inexorable
insistence with which the money would be demanded if it were needed for
defense against an invading German force that had landed in New England and
was marching on New York; with exactly the same irresistible popular
cyclone that will roar about the ears of Congress in the future, if their
supine neglect now does some day actually lead to a Japanese invasion of
the United States.
If the people of the United States can get their feet out of the quicksands
of land-speculation, water-speculation, power-speculation, and the
operations of water-power syndicates, they can create a country as populous
and powerful as the Japanese Empire in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado
River. If we will eliminate that one great obstacle, we can do it
ourselves, just as well as the Japanese could do it. Our subserviency to
the Spirit of Speculation is the only thing that stands in the way of it.
Every problem involved has been solved by some other country and partly
solved by our own. There is no reason why the United States cannot adopt
the Australian and New Zealand Systems for the acquisition, reclamation,
subdivision, and settlement of land.
There is no reason why the United States should not control its water power
resources on such a stream as the Colorado River; and, when advisable,
build, own, and operate power plants and distribute power.
_Shall we admit that we cannot do what Australia, New Zealand, Norway,
Sweden, and Switzerland have done?_
Under the United States Reclamation Act we have already undertaken to
reclaim land for settlement, and to build power plants, but we have failed
to safeguard the land or the power against speculative acquisition.
However, what we have already accomplished has made for progress, and makes
it easier to do what remains to be done.
When we come to the qualifications of colonists, and the necessity that
they should be Homecrofters, the question becomes more difficult, because
the majority of the people of the United States have no conception of the
possibilities of acreproduction or acreculture by a skilled and
scientifically trained truck-gardener and fruit-grower and poultry-raiser.
There are innumerable instances where truck gardens along the Atlantic
Coast, on Long Island, and in New Jersey, Virginia, and Florida, are
producing more than a thousand dollars worth of vegetables every year. It
is a most common thing for berry-growers to realize that acreage product
from an acre of berries in Louisiana or Washington. Celery, asparagus,
lettuce, onions, and many other crops will yield as much when properly
fertilized and cultivated. Anyone who doubts this can find ample proof of
it at Duluth, Minnesota, or in California or Texas. Another thing should be
borne in mind. One acre of land in the Colorado River Valley is the
equivalent of five acres in a cold climate. Crops may be planted and
matured so rapidly in that hot climate that plant growth more resembles
hothouse forcing than ordinary out-of-door truck gardening. Another
important fact is that all the tropical and semi-tropical fruits grow to
perfection in that valley.
This whole subject is exhaustively elucidated in "Fields, Factories and
Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons of New
York. No one will form an opinion adverse to the possibilities of
acreculture after reading that book.
Successful acreculture requires, however, _a man who knows how_. The
Japanese know how. The Chinese know how. The Belgians know how. Many of the
French, Germans, and Italians know how. The Americans, with few exceptions,
do not know how, _but they can be taught_. They will seize the opportunity
to learn as soon as it is open to them as part of a large national plan.
Every Homecroft Settlement created in the Colorado River Valley should be a
great educational institution, a training school to teach men and women
how to raise fruit, vegetables, and poultry, and how to prepare their
products for market, and how to market them, and how to get their own food
from their own acre by their own labor.
_Thousands of the immigrants_ now coming to the United States from Southern
Europe already know how to do all this and would make ideal colonists for
the Colorado River Valley.
_Thousands are out of work_ who, if healthy and physically fit, could be
trained to garden in a year; to be good gardeners in three years; and to be
scientific experts in gardening in five years.
In the event of a war under existing conditions we would have to train a
million recruits to be soldiers. It is equally certain that men can be
trained to be gardeners and Homecrofters. It takes longer to train a
Homecrofter than to train a soldier, but it is only a question of time.
It can be done and it will be done by the United States as a measure of
national defense as soon as the people can be brought to realize the great
fundamental fact that the only way they can provide as many soldiers as
they might need in some great national emergency is to begin in time of
peace--and that means _now_--and train them to be both Homecrofters and
soldiers, as the Japanese are trained. The Japanese are a nation of
Homecrofters. The Homecroft Reservists who should be trained for national
defense by the United States, will get their living as gardeners and
Homecrofters when they are not needed as soldiers, or until they are needed
as soldiers, as is the case in Japan with their organized reserve of
1,170,000 men and the great majority of their unorganized reserve of
7,021,780 men.
The Drainage Basin of the Colorado River has an area of 265,000 square
miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles, less than the area of the
drainage basin of the Colorado River in Arizona and New Mexico. Arizona
alone contains 143,956 square miles, and has a population of only 204,354.
Japan has a population of 52,200,200. She now sustains in the Home Country
a standing army at peace strength of 217,032, with Reserves of 1,170,000,
making a total war strength of about 1,400,000 and she has available for
duty but unorganized a total of 7,021,780.
The same Japanese System with the same Japanese population in the Colorado
River Drainage Basin would sustain an army of the same strength. And they
can do it on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, or on the Pacific Coast of South
America, or anywhere else in as good a climate where they can get a
territory of 147,000 square miles, of which 12,500,000 acres can be
irrigated and intensively cultivated.
_Is it not evident that it is the economic potentialities of the Japanese
race that we must meet?_
We can do it in the Colorado River Country. In the main valley below the
mouth of the Colorado Canyon we can maintain a permanent reserve of
5,000,000 men, Homecrofters and gardeners in time of peace, soldiers in
time of war, and all organized, trained, and equipped--instantly ready for
any emergency. All we would have to do to accomplish that, would be to
reclaim and colonize the land, and train the colonists to be Homecrofters,
and then apply the entire Military System of Switzerland or Australia to
this one small tract of five million acres of land in the Colorado River
Valley, with conveniently adjacent territory in Arizona and California in
the drainage basin of the Colorado River.
It would be entirely practicable to do that, because the National
Government would control the School System, and would control the System of
Life of the community and adapt it to the Homecroft Reserve System. Every
one of 5,000,000 Homecrofters could leave his acre without hindrance to any
organized industry and without jeopardizing the welfare of his family. The
objections to a Reserve of Citizen Soldiery in the ordinary communities of
the United States would have no application in these communities that had
been created for the purpose of furnishing soldiers trained when needed in
time of war, as well as to develop the highest type of citizenship in time
of peace.
A start could be made with 100,000 acres; 100,000 gardeners; 100,000
soldiers. The land and water required for that could be located to-morrow
and construction work begun in a month. This number should be increased as
rapidly as the land could be reclaimed and colonized with Homecrofters in
acre homes and the organization of new communities perfected. The Reserve
composed of Homecrofters occupying these acre homes should be known as the
Homecroft Reserve.
If no extension of this proposed Homecroft Reserve System were made into
any other section of the country there would be soldiers enough in the
Colorado River Valley to defend the Mexican Border, the Pacific Coast, and
the Canadian Border from North Dakota to Seattle, at any time when the
necessity arose for such defense.
The establishment of this large Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River
Valley, fully trained and equipped for military service at a moment's
notice, exactly as the Reserves of Switzerland are trained and equipped,
would be a complete defense against any danger of Japanese invasion, which
can be safeguarded against in no other way.
_Is it not better to begin now and spend the money in conquering the Desert
than to wait and spend it conquering Japan, or Japan and China combined?_