Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

This necessity for men, trained and hardened men, men inured to the hardships of military service, would be even greater in this country in the event of a war than in any European country, because of the more primitive condition of the country. Vast areas of the United States are uninhabited and waterless. The climate varies from the intolerable heat, to those not accustomed to it, of the southwestern deserts, to the freezing blizzards of the North.

How are we to supply this need for men trained and toughened to every hardship that must be borne by a soldier fighting under our flag in time of war? The answer is, by enlisting them under the same flag to do the arduous work of peace, which will harden them for the work of war, if they are ever needed in that field of action.

How many of our people are there who realize the work that is being done for Uncle Sam, every day in the year, by the few men who are giving themselves, in a spirit of patriotism equal to that of any soldier, to the field work of the Forest Service, to building forest fire trails, to fighting forest fires. They give warning nowadays of a forest fire, as the people of the Scottish border gave warning of an invasion in the Olden days. When an invading force was coming up from the South a warning was flashed across Scotland from the Solway to the Tweed with a line of balefires that flamed into the night from the turrets of their castles. It was a call to conflict. It put men on their mettle. So a call to fight a forest fire is a call to conflict and puts men on their mettle for a combat with the oncoming sweep of the devouring fire.

Would not the men who are inured to the work of making surveys across rugged mountains, and to quarrying the rock, laying the stone, digging the canals, and doing all the hard physical work that must be done by the men who have built the great reservoirs and canals constructed by the Reclamation Service, be toughened and hardened by it and fitted to dig trenches in actual warfare, as they have been digging them in Belgium, France, Prussia, and Poland?

For the hard and trying physical work of war there could be no better training than to do the labor for which the Reclamation Service has paid out millions of dollars in the last ten years.

The surveyors of the Land Department, the topographers of the Geological Survey, the men in the field in every branch of Uncle Sam's service, who are winning for this nation its greatest victories, the victories of peace, are by that work physically developed into the very best and most efficient type of strong and rugged manhood—the stuff of which soldiers must be made.

As a nation we must recognize this all important fact, and avail ourselves of it. We must build at least one branch of a Reserve that would constitute an adequate organized system of national defense on this foundation:

That all government work shall be done by day's work and none by contract.

That every dollar that is paid out by Uncle Sam for the doing of constructive government work, which could be temporarily suspended in time of war, shall be paid to a man who had been regularly enlisted in a Construction Reserve for the purpose of doing this work. That those men shall be trained to do that work, and paid for doing it, exactly as though no other object existed. And that every man so enlisted shall be liable instantly to military service if the need should arise, by reason of our country being involved in war with any other nation.

Every man employed in that service should be enlisted for a term of from three to five years and trained in every way necessary to fit him to perform the duties of a soldier and to endure the hardships of a soldier's life in the event of war.