_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
damage resulting 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 autocratic authority 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 stranglehold
that 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 military caste is the most serious obstacle in the way of a complete
coordination 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
construction and 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 has partially 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 and spillways, 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 that
nobody 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 improvement is 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 Stockton channel 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 reexcavate 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 farms lying 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 engineer is 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 coordinate 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 coordinated which deals with water control, or with any beneficial use
of water that 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 cooperation, support, or endorsement,
for the very simple reason that its primary object would be to remove the
original cause of war and to contribute to 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 organized for 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 a year 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 enormous
benefit 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 population and 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, _provided_ the 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, and _provided further_ that 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 to the
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.
"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that
the trees--when there are any trees--all bend away from
the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind
sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in
their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at
Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five
sloping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like
fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown
hair--bowing grievously and thrusting out arms
desperately northward as to save themselves from
falling. And they are being pursued indeed;--for the
sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of
ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's
cavalry; far out you can see, through a good glass, the
porpoises at play where of old the sugarcane shook out
its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep
water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build
dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their
battering-rams--whole forests of drift--huge trunks of
water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow
Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles
to destroy;--and amid their eternal strife the islands
and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not
less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.
"And worthy of study are those wan battle-grounds where
the woods made their last brave stand against the
irresistible invasion,--usually at some long point of
sea-marsh, widely fringed with billowing sand. Just
where the waves curl beyond such a point you may
discern a multitude of blackened, snaggy shapes
protruding above the water,--some high enough to
resemble ruined chimneys, others bearing a startling
likeness to enormous skeleton-feet and
skeleton-hands,--with crustaceous white growths
clinging to them here and there like remnants of
integument. These are bodies and limbs of drowned
oaks,--so long drowned that the shell-scurf is
inch-thick upon parts of them. Farther in upon the
beach immense trunks lie overthrown. Some look like
vast broken columns; some suggest colossal torsos
imbedded, and seem to reach out mutilated stumps in
despair from their deepening graves;--and beside these
are others which have kept their feet with astounding
obstinacy, although the barbarian tides have been
charging them for twenty years, and gradually torn away
the soil above and beneath their roots. The sand
around,--soft beneath and thinly crusted upon the
surface,--is everywhere pierced with holes made by a
beautifully mottled and semi-diaphanous crab, with
hairy legs, big staring eyes, and milk-white
claws;--while in the green sedges beyond there is a
perpetual rustling, as of some strong wind bearing
among reeds: a marvellous creeping of 'fiddlers,' which
the inexperienced visitor might at first mistake for so
many peculiar beetles, as they run about sideways, each
with his huge single claw folded upon his body like a
wing-case. Year by year that rustling strip of green
land grows narrower; the sand spreads and sinks,
shuddering and wrinkling like a living brown skin; and
the last standing corpses of the oaks, ever clinging
with naked, dead feet to the sliding beach lean more
and more out of the perpendicular. As the sands
subside, the stumps appear to creep; their intertwisted
masses of snakish roots seem to crawl, to writhe,--like
the reaching arms of cephalopods.... Grand Terre is
going: the sea mines her fort, and will before many
years carry the ramparts by storm. Grande Isle is
going,--slowly but surely: the Gulf has eaten three
miles into her meadowed land. Last Island has gone! How
it went I first heard from the lips of a veteran pilot,
while we sat one evening together on the trunk of a
drifted cypress which some high tide had pressed deeply
into the Grande Isle beach. The day had been tropically
warm; we had sought the shore for a breath of living
air. Sunset came, and with it the ponderous heat
lifted,--a sudden breeze blew,--lightnings flickered in
the darkening horizon,--wind and water began to strive
together,--and soon all the low coast boomed. Then my
companion began his story; perhaps the coming of the
storm inspired him to speak! And as I listened to him,
listening also to the clamoring of the coast, there
flashed back to me recollection of a singular Breton
fancy: that the Voice of the Sea is never one voice,
but a tumult of many voices--voices of drowned
men,--the muttering of multitudinous dead,--the
moaning of innumerable ghosts, all rising, to rage
against the living, at the great Witch-call of
storms...."
The defense of the Gulf gateway of the United States of America not only
against Nature's forces, whether coming in the form of an invasion by a
mighty flood from the North, or the invasion of a great destroying storm
wave from the South, must be accomplished by the adoption of a plan for the
protection of that country similar to that proposed for the organization of
a Homecroft Reserve in the Colorado River Valley and in the Sacramento and
San Joaquin Valleys and in the State of Nevada.
The national government should immediately acquire not less than 1,000,000
acres of land bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and lying between Bayou
Lafourche and Atchafalaya Bay and the Atchafalaya River. Then a great dike
should be built by the national government from Barataria Bay, following
the most practicable course along the shores of the Gulf to and along the
eastern shore of the Atchafalaya Bay and River to Morgan City. Thence this
great dike should skirt the northeastern shore of Grand Lake to the
northern end of that lake. From there it should be continued north to the
Mississippi River to a connection with that river near the headwaters of
the Atchafalaya River.
The material necessary for the construction of this great embankment and
protecting levee from the Gulf north to the Mississippi River should be
taken entirely from the eastern side of the embankment, and the channel
thus constructed should be enlarged sufficiently to build an adequate
protecting levee on the east bank of the channel. The artificial channel
thus constructed should be so large as to constitute a controlled outlet
and auxiliary flood channel which, with the ten mile wide Atchafalaya
wasteway, would take off all of the flood flow of the Mississippi River at
that point in excess of the high water level as it rests against the levees
in all ordinary flood years. The purpose of this outlet and wasteway would
be to make it impossible that in any year of unusual floods the levees or
banks should be subjected to any greater hydrostatic pressure than in
ordinary years. The point where this controlled outlet would leave the
river would be approximately the same place where the great Morganza
Crevasse broke through the levee and opened a way for the flood to sweep
with its devastating force through the country between the Mississippi
River and the Gulf of Mexico.
[Illustration: Map of Louisiana, showing the Great Controlled Outlet at Old
River and the Atchafalaya Wasteway, Auxiliary Flood Water Channels and
Canals; and showing also the Spillways and Controlled Wasteways from the
Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, and the Great Gulf
Coast Dike.]
Ten miles west of the great north and south embankment above described, on
a north and south line which would pass close to the town of Melville in
Louisiana and follow the west bank of the Atchafalaya River for some
distance below Melville, another great embankment should be built,
paralleling the one previously described. The material for the construction
of this second embankment should be taken from its western side, thus
forming a channel which should be used both as a drainage outlet and a
navigable canal extending from the Bayou Teche to the Red River. At the
point of its junction with the Red River, locks should be constructed which
would prevent any of the floods of the Red River from ever entering or
passing through this navigable drainage canal. From that point another
great embankment should be extended by the most practicable route to the
west or northwest, where a junction could be formed with the high land in
such a way as to turn all the surplus flood drainage from the Red River and
all other rivers to the north into the great ten-mile wide wasteway lying
between the two embankments and running south from the mouth of the Red
River or from Old River to Grand Lake.
The volume of water that would make a flood twenty feet deep in a channel a
mile wide could be carried through this wasteway with a flow of only about
two feet in depth, and two great benefits thereby attained:
First, the cutting power of the water could be controlled and its danger
from that cause obviated.
Second, the sediment carried by the water could be settled across a strip
ten miles wide, which could be thereby brought to a level and its fertility
enormously enriched by these sedimentary deposits which it would receive
only in years of great floods. In the meantime and in other years the land
could be used for meadow, or for the production of crops which could be
grown after the danger of overflow in any season had passed.
This ten-mile wide wasteway, supplemented by the auxiliary flood water
channel paralleling its eastern embankment on the east, would completely
control and carry to the Gulf all the excess flood water in years of
extreme floods, and hold the high water level of the Mississippi River from
Old River to the Gulf at an absolutely fixed level above which the river
would never rise.
The ten-mile wide wasteway could be extended north from the mouth of Red
River to the bluffs at Helena. Then from Helena south the entire
Mississippi Valley would be protected against danger from floods in the
Mississippi River in the extraordinary flood years which may come only once
in a generation, and yet may come in any two consecutive years as they did
in 1912 and 1913. If this ten-mile wide wasteway, with its auxiliary flood
water channel paralleling it, between it and the river, were constructed
from Helena to the mouth of the Red River, and thence to the Gulf of
Mexico, and in turn supplemented by source stream control of the floods of
the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers, the lowlands of the
Mississippi Valley could be made as safe from overflow or damage by
devastating floods as the highlands of the Hudson River or the dry plains
of eastern Colorado. The entire area of the Mississippi River Valley now
subject to overflow is about 29,000 square miles. This is an area one-third
larger than the entire cultivated area of the Empire of Japan, which
sustains a farming population of 30,000,000 people. The lands of the
Mississippi River Valley are infinitely richer and of greater natural
fertility than the farming lands of Japan. Every acre of the rich
sedimentary soil of the Delta of the Mississippi River would, if
intensively cultivated, produce food enough to feed a family of five, with
a large surplus over for distribution to the world's food markets.
The entire 1,000,000 acres to be acquired by the national government in
Louisiana should be immediately acquired within the area bounded on the
south by the great embankment along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico and on
the west by the great wasteway and auxiliary flood channel to be built from
the mouth of Red River to Atchafalaya Bay and on the north and east by the
Mississippi River.
This entire territory would be so absolutely and completely protected from
all possibility of overflow by the proposed system of protection from
floods or overflow and from Gulf Storms that any part of it could be safely
subdivided into acre-garden-homes or Homecrofts. Every acre would be
adequate for the support of a family when properly reclaimed, fertilized,
and intensively cultivated. The variety of food that would be available for
the people living on these one million Homecrofts would be greater probably
than would be within the reach of people living in any other section of
the world. The mild and equable climate would make practicable a successful
growth of every possible product of garden, orchard, or vineyard, including
oranges and grape-fruit. Proximity to the Gulf and a network of canals that
would lace and interlace the country in every direction would furnish them,
at trifling cost or none at all, with the most delicious sea-foods, fish,
crabs, shrimps, crayfish, and oysters without limit. Every canal and bayou
would furnish its quota of fish and the oyster beds of the Louisiana coast
are capable of almost limitless extension.
In addition to the cultivation of their Homecrofts for food from the
ground, the Homecrofters enlisted in the Louisiana Homecroft Reserve would
be afforded abundant occupation in catching or producing sea-food for
themselves as well as for export. Anyone not familiar with the country can
form no adequate conception of the stupendous possibilities of this bayou
and Gulf coast country along this line of production and development.
More than this, the luggermen of the bayous and the Gulf are the best
coast-wise and shallow sea sailors in the world, and the bays and bayous of
Louisiana, if inhabited by a dense population, would once again breed a
race of seafaring people--sailors and fishermen--to man our navy or
merchant marine.
The complete adoption of the plan advocated for the reclamation and
settlement of these swamp and overflowed lands, and the establishment there
of a perpetual reserve available for military service whenever needed of a
million seasoned and hardened citizen soldiers, involves doing nothing that
has not already been done by other nations of the world.
Holland has built dikes as defenses against the inroads of the ocean
greater even than those proposed in Louisiana, and the plans of Holland for
reclaiming for agriculture vast areas of land now buried beneath the waters
of the Zuyder Zee are much bolder in conception and more difficult of
accomplishment.
Australia and New Zealand have both demonstrated the practicability and
proved the success of a national policy of land acquisition and
colonization. What Australia has done in the reclamation and settlement of
her deserts, we can do not only on our deserts but also in our swamps.
Switzerland and Australia have both proved the practicability of a military
system similar to that which it is proposed to establish for the defense of
the Gulf Gateway of this nation. The plan urged for Louisiana would in many
respects be an improvement upon a plan which made it necessary to call men
from commercial or industrial employment for military service.