Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

Second: It will further demonstrate that the physical and mental deterioration, poverty, disease, crime, human degeneracy, and racial decay now being caused by the tenement life can be prevented by the Homecroft Life.

Third: Child labor and Woman labor in factories will be proved to be economic waste because of the larger value of that labor at home devoted to producing food for the family from garden and poultry yard, and preparing and preserving it for home consumption. It will be demonstrated that no child or woman can be spared from a Homecroft for work in a factory.

Fourth: The fact will be established that the remedy for unemployment is universal Homecroft Training in the public schools, the establishment of all wageworkers in Suburban Homecrofts or Homecroft Villages, and that every unemployed man or woman shall be set to work learning to be a Homecrofter.

Fifth: One million scientifically trained Homecrofters would be graduated annually from the National Homecroft Reserve System,—ten million every ten years,—with their families. These would scatter into every section of the United States and would leaven a large loaf. They would be a tremendous force to counteract the evil influences generated in the tenements. No Homecrofter's family would ever be content to live in a flat or a tenement. They would have learned the productive value of a Homecroft—a home with a piece of ground that will produce food for the family.

Sixth: The demonstration of the value of the Homecroft Life spread throughout the United States by the millions of Homecroft Reserve graduates would lead to a complete reconstruction of the Public School System of every State. The year would be divided into two terms—one, a six months' term from fall until spring, during which the courses of study now pursued would be continued; the other, a six months' term from spring until fall, covering the entire growing season, during which fruit-growing, truck-gardening, berry-culture, poultry raising, home making, home-keeping, and home-handicraft would be taught. In the cities these Summer Homecroft Schools would be in the suburbs and would give every city child a chance to spend its days in the sunshine and fresh air, among the trees, birds, fields, and flowers, for six months of every year.

Every great institution must have a gradual growth. The Homecroft Reserve System should be started on a comparatively small scale in places where the immediate need of the practical benefits it will accomplish are most manifest. Its enlargement will follow as a natural evolution. Once well under way, it will grow by leaps and bounds, like the rural mail service or the Agricultural Department of the national government.

When the electric light was first demonstrated to be a scientific success, few realized in how short a time electricity would light the world. The development of electric transportation and of the automobile are familiar illustrations. Only a few years have elapsed since Kipling wrote "Across the Atlantic with the Irish Mail." How many would then have believed possible the work of the Aëroplane Service in the present war? And yet, all that has so far been done is only a forecast of greater development in aërial navigation in the near future. The original inventor of the telephone has seen the evolution of its vast utilization and recently was the first to talk over a wire across the continent.

No one would for a moment question that the national government could establish an educational institution in which one thousand men with their families could be located in a cottage on an acre of ground, and the men trained in truck-gardening and poultry raising, and the women trained to cook the products of the garden and poultry yard for the family table. That is all there is to it; and to train a thousand men in that way is no more difficult than to take a thousand raw recruits and transform them into a regiment of trained soldiers. It is likewise beyond question that the same man can be trained for both vocations, and every Homecroft Reservist would be so trained. Gardeners make ideal soldiers. The Japanese proved that.

No one familiar with the multitude of cases where it has been done, would have any doubt that a man and woman who know how to intensively cultivate an acre can produce from it what that man and that woman need for their own family to eat, and a surplus product worth from five hundred to a thousand dollars a year or more. Neither would they doubt that a thousand could do the same thing. Nor, again, would they doubt that one thousand men and women of average intelligence and industry, who did not know how, could learn the way to do it from competent instructors.

If that can be done with one thousand it can be done with ten thousand; and if it can be done with ten thousand it can be done with one hundred thousand, or one million, or five million. It would indeed be strange if this nation could not train five million families so they would be competent truck-gardeners, when that vocation has been mastered by thirty million of Japan's rural population.