Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

And in order to save the enormous expense and waste that would result from increasing the standing army, and, in addition, to achieve the stupendous benefits that would result from the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, it is only necessary that the same common sense business methods and principles should be applied to the operations of the government that any large corporation would adopt if it had the financial resources, of the United States.

Why should anyone be staggered at the proposition for the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, or balk at it because it is big?

When the national government owns 29,600,000 acres of national forests in the drainage basin of the Colorado River, is there any reason why it cannot reclaim and settle in one-acre garden homes, the comparatively small area of 1,000,000 acres which is only a part of what it owns in the main valley of the Colorado River between Needles and Yuma?

If it can do that in the Colorado River Country is there any reason why it should not take a million acres of land in northern Minnesota, which it now owns, and reclaim it and settle it in one-acre garden homes? The government now owns, in addition to that land, 987,000 acres of national forest in Minnesota.

If the government can acquire by purchase, as is now being done, another million acres of forest lands in the Appalachian Mountains under the Appalachian National Forest Act, is there any reason why it should not acquire a million acres of land in West Virginia and irrigate it and subdivide it into one-acre garden homes, and put Homecrofters on it to intensively cultivate the land?

If it can do that in West Virginia, is there any reason why it should not be done in Louisiana or in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley in California?

In the case of the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements the government will see to it, itself, that its work does in fact result in actual home making, whereas speculators get the ultimate benefit of much of the other work that it does.

If the government can maintain a Department of Agriculture at an expense of $20,000,000 in one year, for the instruction of farmers in agriculture, who get the benefit of that service without paying for it, is there any reason why it should not maintain educational institutions to train Homecroft Reservists in Acreculture, if they pay for the cost of that instruction and all the expenses of maintaining the necessary educational institutions?

If the government can enlist men in the regular army for national defense and put them in camps and barracks in time of peace to waste their time in idleness, is there any reason why it should not enlist men in a Reserve and put them in Homecrofts, where their labor will be utilized in production, and the elevating influence of family and community life be substituted for the demoralizing influences of the life of the camp or barracks?

There is no more reason why the government should not build and perpetually own the Homecrofts used for this national purpose of education and defense than there is that it should not own the Military Academy at West Point or the Naval Academy at Annapolis, or any land used by the Agricultural Department for any of its work, which is educational, or by the War Department, which is for national defense. The Homecrofts used to train and maintain in the service the Homecroft Reserves would be used for a combination of both purposes, and their cost would be just as properly classified as an expenditure for national defense as the cost of any existing camp, barracks, or army post now owned by the government.