_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 composed this 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:
"Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair?
(Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.)
The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there.
(Highlanders! March! By the right!)
There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air:
There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare;
But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare
When they hear their pipes playing.
--'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt.
"One hundred and thirty years ago the bagpipes of the
'Gay Gordons' first swirled the pibroch. Since then
they have played it in every clime and nearly every
land where British troops have fought.
"The Duke of Gordon was granted a 'Letter of Service'
in 1794 to organize a Highland infantry regiment among
his clansmen. Lady Gordon, 'The Darling Duchess,' took
charge of the enlisting. Their son, the Marquis of
Huntley, was the first colonel.
"The Gordons first saw service against the French in
Holland in 1799. Outnumbered six to one, they received
their baptism of fire in a wild charge at Egmont-op-Zee
that made all Great Britain ring with their praises.
Their first laurels, won at a bloody cost, have never
been dimmed.
"From Holland they went to Egypt, and with the Black
Watch, the Cameronians and the Perthshire Greybreeks
stormed up the shore of Aboukir Bay and later the
height of Mandora. The name of every battle of
Napoleon's futile attempt to master Egypt appears on
their battle flags.
"They came home from there to line the streets of
London at Nelson's funeral, a post of honor coveted by
every British regiment. Next they appeared in Denmark
and were at the fall of Copenhagen. Without a visit to
Scotland the Gordons went to Spain and went through the
glorious campaign of Sir John Moore. The French long
remembered them for their fight at Corunna.
"When the British were retreating, the Gordons were the
rear guard. At Elvania Sir John galloped along their
line. Ammunition was low and no supplies available.
"'My brave Highlanders! You still have your bayonets!
Remember Egypt!' the commander shouted.
"The pipers took up 'The Cock o' the North,' the
sobriquet of the Duke of Gordon, and routed the
pursuing French. The Gordons went to Portugal. Almarez
is on their flags. They followed the Duke of Wellington
back into Spain and were in the fights that sent
Joseph Bonaparte's army reeling home.
"The Gordons stood with the Black Watch at Quatre Bras,
and two days later were at Waterloo. It was the Duchess
of Richmond, a daughter of the Duchess of Gordon who
recruited the Gordons, who gave the famous ball in
Brussels the night before Waterloo. The officers of the
Gay Gordons hurried from that levee, which Lord Byron,
another Gordon, has commemorated in a poem, to the
field of battle.
"The feat of the Gordons that day, in grabbing the
stirrups of the charging Scots Greys, is one of
history's most stirring pages. It is a striking
coincidence that in the present war, just ninety-nine
years later, the Gordons swung to the Greys' stirrups
in another wild charge, this time against the Germans.
"The Gordons went to the Afghan War in 1878. In 1881
they campaigned across the veldts against the Boers.
The next year they stood at El-Teb and Tel-el-Kebir
with their old friends the Black Watch. They marched to
Khartum when their namesake, Gordon, was trapped. That
over, they went back to India for another Afghan war.
They marched by the scenes of their bloody fights when
going to the relief of Lucknow.
"In 1897 the Gordons were the heroes of all Britain.
They, and a regiment of Gurkhas, charged a hill at
Dargai in the face of almost superhuman difficulties.
Two years later the regiment went to South Africa and
fought valiantly through that war. At Eldanslaagte they
were part of the column of General French, their
present commander.
"The red uniform coat of the Gordons is lavishly
trimmed in yellow, which brought them the sobriquet of
'Gay Gordons.' Of all the Scotch regiments it has tried
the hardest to keep its ranks filled with Scotsmen,
'limbs bred in the purple heather.'
"Officially the Gordons are the Ninety-second Highland
Infantry."
England's original expeditionary force to the continent in 1914 was less
than 200,000 men. Suppose it had been 1,200,000. It might just as well have
been 1,200,000, if a Scotch Homecroft Reserve had been long ago
established, as should have been done, and gradually increased until a
million men were enlisted in it. Would any one question the fact, if there
had been another million men in England's expeditionary army when it was
first sent to the continent, that it would have completely changed the
whole current of events in this war? It would have checked the German
advance into France and Belgium. Not a foot of Belgium's territory would
have been wrested from her. Neither Brussels nor Antwerp would have been
surrendered.
That conclusion is so self-evident and conservative, and the opportunity
that England had to have such a force in reserve is so plain that it seems
hard to believe that the United States will ignore its lesson and fail to
establish a Homecroft Reserve in this country.
England had the original stock from which to breed such a brave and hardy
race of soldiers, and _they were the original Homecrofters_. There were not
a million of them, but there were many thousands of them two centuries ago.
There were so many that to-day there might easily have been a million such
Homecrofters in England's army in Europe if the Homecroft Reserve System
had been established when the trouble first began between the Homecrofters
and the Great Landlords who finally succeeded in riveting the curse of land
monopoly around Scotland's neck.
It may be argued that this suggestion is an afterthought, and that, as the
Arab saying puts it, "The ditches are full of bright afterthoughts." That
may be true as to England. But it is not true as to the United States. If
we knew that it would be two hundred years before the great final struggle
would be fought to determine whether the Pacific Coast of the United States
should be dominated by the Asiatic or Caucasian race, right now is the time
when we should begin to breed and train our millions of men who will have
to fight that battle for us whenever the time does come that it has to be
fought. It is as inevitable as fate that the conflict will come unless we
safeguard against it by peopling America with a race as hardy and virile as
the races on the Pacific shores of Asia are to-day.
The rugged physical manhood, rough daring and bravery, hardihood and
endurance, self-reliance and resourcefulness, readiness for any emergency
on land or sea, that characterized the type of men from whom the Homecroft
Reserves would have been bred, and the rough rural environment in which
they would have been reared, is strikingly described by S. R. Crockett in
his novel "The Raiders."
And in "The Dark o' the Moon," the sequel to "The Raiders," he tells of the
first of the struggles that were begun two centuries ago by the
Homecrofters of Scotland to preserve their immemorial privileges of
elbow-room and pasturage, as against the selfishness of the Landlord System
that finally prevailed. That system decimated Scotland of her bravest men
and left in their places hunting grounds and great estates to be sold or
rented to American Snobocrats, who are not fighting any of England's
battles in this war.
The early conflicts between the Landlords and the Homecrofters are referred
to, and the scene of one of these conflicts is so interestingly told by the
same author in his Book called "Raiderland," that the following quotation
is made from it:
"The water-meadows, rich with long deep grass that one
could hide in standing erect, bog-myrtle bushes,
hazelnuts, and brambles big as prize gooseberries and
black as--well, as our mouths when we had done eating
them. Woods of tall Scotch firs stood up on one hand,
oak and ash on the other. Out in the wimpling fairway
of the Black Lane, the Hollan Isle lay anchored. Such a
place for nuts! You could get back-loads and back-loads
of them to break your teeth upon in the winter
forenights. You could ferry across a raft laden with
them. Also, and most likely, you could fall off the
raft yourself and be well-nigh drowned. You might play
hide-and-seek about the Camp, which (though marked
'probably Roman' in the Survey Map) is not a Roman Camp
at all, instead only the last fortification of the
Levellers in Galloway--those brave but benighted
cottiers and crofters who rose in belated rebellion
because the lairds shut them out from their poor
moorland pasturages and peat-mosses.
"Their story is told in that more recent supplement to
'The Raiders' entitled 'The Dark o' the Moon.' There
the record of their deliberations and exploits is in
the main truthfully enough given, and the fact is
undoubted that they finished their course within their
entrenched camp upon the Duchrae bank, defying the
king's troops with their home-made pikes and rusty old
Covenanting swords.
"There is a ford (says this chronicle) over the Lane of
Grennoch, near where the clear brown stream detaches
itself from the narrows of the loch, and a full mile
before it unites its slow-moving lily-fringed stream
with the Black Water o' Dee rushing down from its
granite moorlands.
"The Lane of Grennoch seemed to that comfortable
English drover, Mr. Job Brown, like a bit of
Warwickshire let into the moory boggish desolations of
Galloway. But even as he lifted his eyes from the
lily-pools where the broad leaves were already browning
and turning up at the edges, lo! there, above him,
peeping through the russet heather of a Scottish
October, was a boulder of the native rock of the
province, lichened and water-worn, of which the poet
sings:
"'See yonder on the hillside scaur,
Up among the heather near and far,
Wha but Granny Granite, auld Granny Granite,
Girnin' wi' her grey teeth.'
"If the traveller will be at the pains to cross the
Lane of Grennoch, or, as it is now more commonly
called, the Duchrae Lane, a couple of hundred yards
north of the bridge, he will find a way past an old
cottage, the embowered pleasure-house of many a boyish
dream, out upon the craggy face of the Crae Hill. Then
over the trees and hazel bushes of the Hollan Isle, he
will have (like Captain Austin Tredennis) a view of the
entire defences of the Levellers and of the way by
which most of them escaped across the fords of the Dee
Water, before the final assault by the king's forces.
"The situation was naturally a strong one--that is, if,
as was at the time most likely, it had to be attacked
solely by cavalry, or by an irregular force acting
without artillery.
"In front the Grennoch Lane, still and deep with a
bottom of treacherous mud swamps, encircled it to the
north, while behind was a good mile of broken ground,
with frequent marshes and moss-hags. Save where the top
of the camp mound was cleared to admit of the scant
brushwood tents of the Levellers, the whole position
was further covered and defended by a perfect jungle of
bramble, whin, thorn, sloe, and hazel, through which
paths had been opened in all directions to the best
positions of defence."
"Such about the year 1723 was the place where the poor,
brave, ignorant cottiers of Galloway made their last
stand against the edict which (doubtless in the
interests of social progress and the new order of
things) drove them from their hillside holdings, their
trim patches of cleared land, their scanty rigs of corn
high in lirks of the mountain, or in blind 'hopes'
still more sheltered from the blast.
"Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod
valley, you can see when the sun is setting over
western Loch Moar and his rays run level as an ocean
floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings
of farm-steadings, the dyke-ridges that enclosed the
_Homecrofts_, small as pocket-handkerchiefs; and higher
still, ascending the mountainside, regular as the
stripes on corduroy, you can trace the ancient rigs
where the corn once bloomed bonny even in these wildest
and most remote recesses of the hills. All is now
passed away and matter for romance--but it is truth all
the same, and one may tell it without fear and without
favour.
"From the Crae Hill, especially if one continues a
little to the south till you reach the summit cairn
above the farmhouse of Nether Crae you can see many
things. For one thing you are in the heart of the
Covenant Country.
"He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the
slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white
among the darker heather--south to where on Kirkconnel
hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six
corpses--west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide
drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs
to a stake--east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and
Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of
Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea."
"Save by general direction you cannot take in all these
by the seeing of the eye from the Crae Hill. But you
are in the midst of them, and the hollows of the hills
where the men died for their 'thocht,' and the quiet
God's Acres where they lie buried, are as much of the
essence of Scotland as the red flushing of the heather
in autumn and the hill tarns and 'Dhu Lochs' scattered
like dark liquid eyes over the face of the wilds."
Well may England, as she looked over the battlefields of Belgium, and
mourned the thousands and tens of thousands of her brave men whose lives
have paid the forfeit for her heedlessness, and listened to the bombardment
of her North Sea coast towns by German battleships, and scanned the sky
watching for the coming of the aerial invasion her people so much feared,
have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:
"Of all sad things of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, it might have been."
_Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's
footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?_
The same identical influences and traits of human character that drove the
Homecrofters from Scotland will be responsible for our failure to take
warning from England's lesson, if we do so fail. It is the disposition of
intrenched interests to grasp for more and more, and constantly more, that
has imperiled England's national life. The same grasping policy of the
intrenched interests in the United States now imperils the national life of
this nation in the future by the absorption of our national resources and
what remains of our public domain into private speculative ownership while
the toiling millions are crowded into the tenements. We could survive the
loss of what the intrenched interests have already taken if they would only
let loose on what is left and let Uncle Sam have a free hand to do with his
own as is best for all his people in places like the Colorado River
country. There the greater part of the land needed is still public land,
and speculators have not as yet acquired the water rights and power
possibilities.
England could not and the United States cannot maintain a great standing
army, but England could have established and maintained a Homecroft Reserve
of a million men in Scotland, and we can do it in the Colorado River
Valley, and other places where it ought to be done in the United States,
provided the land and water power can be saved from the clutch of the
speculators before they have so complicated the proposition as to
interminably delay it while Uncle Sam is getting back from them what ought
never to have been granted away.
England had the Scotch Homecrofters, and drove them from the homes of their
forefathers to make great estates. We have got to organize our Homecroft
Reservists and locate them, and train them, but that can be done.
There are thousands of the descendants of the Scotch Homecrofters serving
England to-day in the Canadian Contingent Corps in Europe, and doubtless
more than one of the crew of the Australian Cruiser that sunk the Emden
could trace his pedigree back to a Galloway Drover, a Solway Smuggler, or a
Border Raider. From the shielings of the Scotch Homecrofters there went out
into the world a race that has made good, wherever it has gone. Would it
not be well to think of that in the United States to-day and breed some
more of the same sturdy Homecroft Stock in this country, for patriotic
service either in peace or war?
It was the active out-of-door life that made the Scotch Homecrofters
strong. It is the sedentary, indoor life, or the monotony of factory work,
that is now sapping the vitality of our people and working havoc with our
racial strength. The pity of it is that we have a country where we can
reproduce the strong races of many different countries, if we would only
recognize that the necessity for doing it is the biggest and most important
national problem we have. We can match the country and the people where
nearly every big thing for the real uplift of humanity has been done in
recent years.
The Colorado River Drainage Basin has many characteristics like Australia,
where they have adopted a very similar system of Land Reclamation and
Settlement and the plan for Universal Military Service that is advocated in
this book. We can duplicate Switzerland in West Virginia. We can match
Belgium and Holland in Louisiana. We can do in Northern Minnesota what they
have done in Denmark. We have many of the same problems in California that
they have solved in New Zealand.
The fact should be carefully borne in mind, and never for a moment lost
sight of, that everything that is advocated in the plan proposed in this
book for national defense is something that would be chosen as a thing to
be done if it had been determined to carry out the most splendid plan that
could be devised for human advancement and national welfare in time of
peace in the United States. Such a plan, having regard only to times of
peace, would embody the entire plan advocated in this book. Even the
military training of entire Homecroft communities, so as to be prepared for
that emergency in case of war, is a discipline that would be most
beneficial to physical and mental development in time of peace, without any
regard to its importance in the event of war. It is most remarkable that
all this should be true, but the basic reason for it is that, after all,
the highest ultimate objective of national existence in time of peace is to
continually lift humanity to higher and higher levels of physical and
mental development; and to persevere until we attain the highest possible
type of rugged physical and mental strength in man and woman. When war
comes, the thing most needed is men--strong, vigorous, and hardy men; and
they are the ideal at which all plans for racial development should aim in
time of peace.
The Homecroft System of Life and Education eliminates the difficulties
arising from a reliance in time of war on untrained levies in a country
like ours, where so few are physically fit, without long training, for
soldierly service. The Homecrofter, earning his living by digging it from
the ground, is always strong and instantly fit for a soldier's work. The
Homecrofter lives under conditions where he is not a cog in a wheel--not a
part of any complicated industrial machine from which no part can be
withdrawn without derangement of the whole. He is an independent unit in
industry, self-sustaining, dependent on no one and no one dependent on him
but his own family. If he is called away for military service, the family
is able to conduct and cultivate the Homecroft, and gets its living
therefrom. No one is left in need, as would so often happen in other cases,
especially when State Militia might be called into real service. The
Homecrofter earns his living in a way that makes it practicable for him to
leave his accustomed vocation for a month or two every year for a period of
military training without any prejudice or loss to him in that vocation.
The more these advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System are studied from
a military point of view, the more their value will be appreciated. A rural
nation like Servia or Montenegro can be practically a nation of soldiers.
Every man of military age is always ready for service. The Russian Cossack
System accomplishes the same result. A nation of shopkeepers, commercial
clerks, and factory employees cannot be utilized in that way for military
service. The farming and rural population of the United States furnishes a
better hope for a Citizen Soldiery in case of war than our city population,
but in these days a farm has come to be really a factory, with complicated
machinery, requiring training to operate it, and a chronic shortage of
labor in busy seasons. Furthermore, rural population is as a rule so
scattered that it would not be possible in time of peace to perfect the
organization and give the Reservists the training necessary to prepare them
for service in time of war and have them always ready for immediate action.
In the Homecroft Communities a million men may be almost as close together
all the time as though they were in a Concentration Camp in time of war.
The organization of every company and regiment would be complete, officers
and all, constantly in touch and working together to promote peace and do
the work of peace but ready to do the work of war at any time if need be.
Officers in the Homecroft Reserve should be Homecrofters, trained in all
the military knowledge necessary, but also trained as Homecrofters and
getting their living that way.
It has often been said both of this country and of England that the country
must not be turned into an armed camp, like the Continent of Europe. The
fear is well grounded that if that were done the military spirit would soon
dominate the nation and plunge it into all the evils of Militarism, with
the danger always to be feared of an ultimate military despotism.
The plan for a Homecroft Reserve entirely eliminates that objection. A
great Homecroft community comprising a million acre Homecrofts, tilled and
lived on by a million trained Homecroft Reservists, in the Colorado River
Valley, would make no militaristic impression on the character of the
people at large in the United States as a whole. And the same statement
would hold good, if another similar Homecroft Reserve of a million men on a
million acres in each State were established in the Sacramento and San
Joaquin Valleys in California, another in Louisiana, another in Minnesota,
and another in West Virginia.
And yet this immense Homecroft Reserve, aggregating an army of five
million men in time of war, and ready at any time for instant service,
would make the United States the most potentially powerful military nation
in the world.
The lesson of this last great war will be learned, before it is over, by
all the nations of the world. That lesson is that _men_, men of reckless
daring and dauntless bravery, men utterly indifferent to their own lives
when they can be sacrificed to save the nation, men like the Belgian
gardeners who have fought for their homeland in this war, men like the
Japanese gardeners who threw away their lives against Port Arthur, men like
the Scotch Homecrofters who charged with the Scots Greys at Waterloo and
have fought through the fierce carnage of a hundred bloody battlefields to
sustain and build Britain's Empire Power; such men as the Minute Men of
Concord or the Southern Chevaliers who rode with Marion; such men as those
who fought with Jackson at New Orleans, whether they were Lafitte's
smugglers and pirates from Barataria Bay or Mountaineers from other state
or planters from the great sugar plantations of Louisiana, _men who, all
of them, are fighting for their homes and their country_, constitute a
defense that rises above all others in strength and is the most powerful
mobile force in modern warfare. Armed and equipped and organized they must
be, and fired with the desperate valor that can be born only of patriotic
devotion to a great cause; but when you have such men, and enough of them,
no modern machinery of war, or engines of destruction, or fortifications
can overcome them or stand against them. They are a force as irresistible
as the eruption of a mighty volcano.
Those are some of the things to set to the credit of the plan for a
Homecroft Reserve if needed for national defense in time of war.
Now measure their value in time of peace, for national defense against the
evil forces that are gnawing at the very vitals of our national existence
by degenerating our racial strength and physical and mental power as a
people.
There is a remedy for the physical degeneracy caused by congested cities.
That remedy is that the populations of such cities shall be scattered into
the suburbs where every family can have a home in which they can live in
contact with nature. It must be a home with a garden, where they can, if
need be, get their living from their own Homecroft. The Homecroft should be
the principal source of livelihood for every family,--the factory
employment, or the wage earned from it, should be secondary. This one
condition, wherever it is brought into existence for an entire community,
will end all labor conflicts and disturbances. The most pernicious and
poisonous influence in American thought to-day starts from the minds of
employers of labor who, sometimes perhaps subconsciously, think they must
control labor by having the working people always on the edge of the
precipice of starvation. The idea that the wage earner can only be
controlled by being kept in a position of personal dependence and
subserviency is as medieval, inhuman, and barbarously wrong as was the idea
that human slavery was necessary for the control of labor.
We have achieved religious liberty, political liberty, civil liberty, and
personal liberty, but industrial liberty remains yet to be accomplished.
Industrial slavery is the corner stone of our industrial edifice. It will
continue so as long as the lives of great multitudes of wageworkers revolve
around a _job_, and they know no other way to supply human needs but a
wage. Better men will give better service, and employers will get better
results, when every wage earner is located on a Homecroft from which he can
in any hour of need provide the entire living for himself and family.
That condition is the only permanent remedy for unemployment. When all wage
earners--all men and women--in this country are trained Homecrofters, able
to build a house and furnish it themselves by their own skill and knowing
how to get their living from one acre, whenever need be, the Homecroft life
will be the universal life of the working people, _and there will be no
unemployment_.
Unemployment will continue so long as there is a great mass of floating
labor, living from day to day on a wage while it lasts, and starving when
it stops. No scheme can be devised that will end the miseries caused by
unemployment, so long as that system of a floating mass of workers is
perpetuated. Human genius cannot prevent the ebb and flow of prosperity.
Eras of depression are inevitable. When they come, thousands will be out of
employment. Labor Bureaus, private or public, will not change that
condition, because they cannot create jobs where none exist. It is
philanthropy and not business for an employer to retain men out of sympathy
for them when he does not need their labor. Philanthropy is a poor
foundation on which to try to build any economic structure. Better by far
have every workingman a Homecrofter, whose labor is needed on his
homecroft, in home-garden or home-workshop, whenever it is not needed in
some wage-earning employment.
The labor of women and children in factories, aside from all other
considerations, is an economic waste, from the broad standpoint of the
highest welfare and prosperity for all the people. Any woman who is a
trained Homecrofter is worth more in dollars and cents per day or per week
for what she can produce from that homecroft than she can earn in any
factory. The same is true of every child old enough to seek factory
employment. Homecroft women and Homecroft children will never work in
factories, and whenever their labor cannot be had the labor of men will be
substituted and the whole world will be the better for it when that time
comes.
_But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?_
It has much to do with it.
Every community of Homecrofters created to enlarge and maintain the
Homecroft Reserve, would be a training school for Homecrofters. The term of
enlistment for the educational training furnished by these great National
Institutions for the training of Homecrofters would be five years. Each
organized community would be practically a separate Homecroft village.
Every one that was organized would make it easier to organize the next.
Public interest would grow and the popular demand would force the rapid
expansion of the plan as soon as its benefits in the field of the education
of the people were realized--just as happened in the case of the rural free
mail delivery.
Whenever the nation starts, as is advocated in this book, to immediately
establish a Homecroft Reserve of 100,000 in the Colorado River Country near
Yuma; 100,000 in the San Joaquin Valley in California; 100,000 in
Louisiana; 100,000 in West Virginia; and 100,000 in Minnesota,--500,000 in
all,--and gets that part of its work for national defense done, each
100,000 will be rapidly extended to 1,000,000. That will mean that there
will be 5,000,000 enlisted Homecroft Reservists being trained as soldiers
of peace as well as soldiers for war--being trained to produce food for man
with a hoe as well as to defend their country, if need arises, with a gun.
Every Homecrofter and his entire family will be _students_, learning to be
Homecrofters, all of them, and taking a five years' course. One fifth of
the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every
year.
_What would be the result?_
Every year, year after year, 1,000,000 trained, scientific
Homecrofters--trained in home-handicraft, and in fruit-culture,
truck-gardening, berry-growing, poultry-raising, and in putting all their
products in shape for marketing, whether in their own stomachs or in the
markets of the world--would be graduated from these Homecroft villages
comprising the Homecroft Reserves. Each would have had a five years' course
in that training--a year longer than required for an ordinary college
course and of infinitely more practical value to them than a college
course.
They would pay for the use and occupancy of the Homecroft, and for the
instruction they would receive, a sum sufficient to cover all the cost of
providing the instruction, and six per cent on the value of the Homecroft,
four per cent interest and two per cent to go to a sinking fund that would
equal the value of the Homecroft in fifty years. The government would get
back every dollar it invested, with interest, and make the profit between
the cost of the Homecroft and its fixed ultimate value of $1,000. That
value would be from twenty to thirty per cent profit on the original
investment by the government.
Every one of the 1,000,000 Homecroft families that would be graduated every
year would go out into the great field of our national life and activity,
looking first for a Homecroft and second for employment in some industrial
vocation.
_Now how many of our people are there who can be induced to sit down and
hold their heads in their hands until they have stopped the whirl in which
most of their minds are involved, long enough to seriously weigh the
difference in value to the country and to every industrial and commercial
interest of 1,000,000 such trained homecrofters, compared with the
1,000,000 untrained and ignorant foreign immigrants whom we have been
swallowing up every year for so many years in the maw of our congested
cities?_
One million trained Homecrofters, with their families, coming each year
into the social and industrial life of the whole people, scattering into
every community where labor was needed, would in a comparatively few years
solve every social problem and rescue the nation from its danger of
eventual destruction by human congestion, the tenement life, and racial
degeneracy. The graduated Homecrofters could never be induced to go into
the congested tenement districts. They would insist on living in Homecrofts
in the suburbs of the cities.
The nation ought to adopt immediately the whole system of establishing
Homecroft communities as training schools for 5,000,000 Homecrofters, from
which 1,000,000 would be graduated every year, without any regard to the
value of the plan for a Reserve for national defense. It should be done, if
for nothing else, to check the congestion of humanity in cities, create
individual industrial independence, end unemployment, end woman labor in
factories, end child labor, and insure social stability and the perpetuity
of the nation.
[Illustration: THE NEW EMPIRE OF THE WEST IN THE DRAINAGE BASIN OF THE
COLORADO RIVER--THE NILE OF AMERICA
Map showing the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River and the
Corrected Boundary Line and Neutral Zone between the United States and
Mexico.
The area of the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River is 265,000 square
miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles. That is a territory
smaller than the area of the Colorado River Drainage Basin in Arizona and
New Mexico.]