Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

It necessitates working out, in coöperation with the States and local municipalities and districts, a comprehensive and complete plan for water conservation, and its highest possible utilization for all the beneficial purposes to which water can be devoted.

It necessitates the preservation of the forests and woodland cover on the watersheds, the reforestation of denuded areas, and the planting of new forests on a thousand hillsides and mountains and on treeless plains where none exist to-day.

It necessitates the building of model communities on irrigated lands intensively cultivated, as object lessons, in a multitude of localities, to demonstrate the value, for many beneficial uses, of the water which now runs to waste in floods.

It necessitates the establishment and maintenance of a great system of education to train the people in the intensive cultivation of land and the use of water to produce food for mankind, and thereby transform an agency of destruction into an agency of production on a stupendous scale.

It necessitates building and operating great reservoir systems, main line canals, and engineering works, large and small, of every description that have ever been built anywhere in the world for the control of water for beneficial use, and to prevent floods and feed waterways.

To have an inland waterway system in the United States, in fact as well as in name, necessitates building on all the rivers of this country such works as have been built on every river in Germany, such works as the Grand Canal of China, and such works as the English government has built or supervised in India and Egypt, and is now planning to build to reclaim again for human habitation the once populous but now desert and uninhabited plains of Mesopotamia.

No argument ought to be needed to convince the people of the United States that this great work of national defense against Nature's forces should arouse the same patriotic inspiration and stimulate us to the same superhuman effort and energy that we would put forth to prevent any section of our country from being devastated by war. But if such an argument were needed it is found in the condition of Mesopotamia to-day, as compared with the days of Babylon's wealth and prosperity.

The people who dwelt on the Babylonian plains, and who made that empire great and populous, sustained themselves by the irrigation of the desert. The same processes of slow destruction which are now so evidently at work over a large portion of our own country, gradually overcame and destroyed the people of Mesopotamia. The floods finally destroyed the irrigation systems. The desert triumphed over man. One of the most densely populated regions of the earth became again a barren wilderness.

At the end of the Thirty Years' War Germany was a land wasted and destroyed by war, but war had not destroyed the fertility of the soil. Crops could still be raised in the fields, and trees could be planted on the mountains that would grow into forests. All this was done, and modern Germany rose out of the ruins of the Germany of three hundred years ago. War had destroyed only the surface, leaving the latent fertility of the land to be revived by indomitable human labor.

In Mesopotamia it was different. There the forces of Nature destroyed the only means of getting food from the desert. Therefore the desert prevailed and humanity migrated or became extinct. Will anyone question that the defense of Mesopotamia against the desert should have aroused the same intensity of patriotism among her people that has been aroused in past wars for the defense of Germany, or as has been aroused for the defense of Belgium and France and England in the present war?