Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

Forestry also should be borne in mind in measuring the enlargement of the nation's economic power through the work of the National Construction Reserve, not only the perpetuation of present forests, but the establishment of new forest plantations by planting trees. The forestry resources of the nation should be administered and developed on a business basis. Forests should be planted on every acre of land better adapted to forestry than to agriculture. Forest plantations should be established and maintained near every city or town that would coöperate by maintaining a Forestry and Homecroft School as an adjunct to the forest plantation established by the national government.

The value of matured forests should be carefully estimated, and the length of time required to bring them to maturity. Forestry Construction Bonds should be issued to cover the cost of the work of the Construction Corps of the Forest Service. They should be 100 year bonds, issued under a plan that would carefully estimate the income that would be derived from the forests after they had attained to maturity. The first fifty years should be allowed for the period of growth, during which only the interest on the bonds should be payable. The second fifty year period should be the period of liquidation, during which a sinking fund would be accumulated from sales of wood and timber sufficient to cover the entire principal of the bonds, in addition to the amount paid for interest thereon during the full term of one hundred years through which the bond would run. The generations of the future, who would derive the benefit from the work of this generation, would provide for the payment of the debt from the income from the forest resources which had been created for their benefit and bequeathed to them by this generation. A hundred years is none too far ahead to plan in formulating a great national forestry policy for such a nation as the United States. The adoption of the policy of developing this branch of the country's resources and economic power by a Forestry Bond Issue relieves the plan of any difficulty that might otherwise arise if the expenditures had to be met from current revenues. There is no right reason why this generation should bear the entire burden of planting what future generations will harvest. This generation would get a large benefit, but the benefits to future generations would be far greater. They would inherit the vast resources of wood and timber which would be created by the wise forethought of the present generation.

Whenever this country has put itself on the economic basis that will be established by the adoption of the National Construction Reserve and Homecroft Reserve System, and maintains without ultimate cost to the government a system that insures to the United States greater military strength than that of any other nation, the economic currents and manifest benefits to the people created by that condition will force all other nations to abandon their systems of enormously expensive standing armies and armaments.

The final power that must be relied on to ultimately make an end of war is the drift of economic forces—a power as irresistible as the onward flow of the Gulf Stream or the Japan Current. The universal adoption of the Homecroft System of Education and Life that would eventually be brought about by the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve would vest in the United States an economic power that no other nation could stand against, unless it adopted a similar system. We would have the economic strength that China has to-day, supplemented by all the advantages of national organization and modern science and machinery. After generations of following after false gods, we would have abandoned the fallacious teachings of Adam Smith and returned to the sound principles of national and human life laid down in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin.

Kropotkin calls attention to the fact that in Great Britain alone the area under cultivation was decreased in the last fifty years more than five million acres. That land was once cultivated by human labor. The hardy yeomanry who tilled it have been forced into the congested cities or have emigrated to other lands, and the five million citizen soldiers that England might have had on those five million acres were not there when the day of her great need came.

England is now paying the penalty of her adherence to the political economy of Adam Smith instead of to that of Kropotkin. She has pursued a national policy that counts national wealth in dollars instead of in men.

Let us learn a lesson from England's mistakes, the mistakes which have brought upon her such an appalling calamity.

If the 5,000,000 acres that have been thrown out of cultivation in England in the last fifty years were now settled with 5,000,000 Homecroft Reservists, under the plan proposed for adoption in the United States, those Homecrofters could pay off the national debt of Great Britain in just two years and live comfortably the meanwhile. A total net annual production of only $500 an acre, multiplied by the labor of 5,000,000 men for one year, would amount to $2,500,000,000. That would be enough to pay off the national debt of France in less than three years, and of Russia in less than two years. It would pay off the entire war debt of the world in twenty years. That gives some idea of the economic strength of a Homecroft nation, such as we must create in the United States of America. The possibilities of acreage production are steadily increasing as our scientific knowledge of the mysteries of plant growth and methods of fertilization advances.

The United States is now at the forks of the road. Certain destruction is our fate if we continue the drift away from the land into the congested cities. If, instead of that, we become a nation of Homecrofters, no dream can picture the future strength of this country or the human advancement that its people will accomplish, to say nothing of the production of national wealth so great as to be practically inconceivable.

In the future the power of the nations of the world will be in proportion to the wise use they make of their productive resources, and the extent to which they provide opportunities for acreculture and create Homecroft Rural Settlements instead of crowding humanity into congested cities where they become consumers and cease to be producers of food.