Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The Forest Service is now absurdly and pitifully inadequate to the needs of the country. With the exception of small areas recently acquired in the White Mountain and Appalachian regions, its work is chiefly in the western half of the United States.

The work of the Forest Service should be enlarged to meet the needs of the entire country. They should reforest every denuded mountain side, and plant millions upon millions of acres of forests in every State in the United States. That work should go on until in every State the matured forests are ample to provide for all its needs for wood or timber.

The work of the Reclamation Service, instead of being confined to the West only, should be extended to the entire United States. It should be made to include reclamation by drainage and by protection from overflow just as it now includes reclamation by irrigation. Irrigation systems should be constructed and maintained for the purpose of demonstrating the value of water to increase plant growth, not only in the arid regions, but in every State, East as well as West.

Every acre reclaimed should bear the burden of the benefit it received from the work of the national government and pay its proportion of the cost of reclamation. The entire investment of the government should be repaid with interest. The annual charge should include interest and a sinking fund that would return the capital invested, with interest, within fifty years. The original plan of the National Reclamation Act for a repayment in ten years without interest was wrong. It placed an immediate burden on the settler that was too heavy to be practicable. The Extension Amendment was likewise wrong, because no provision was made for interest. The indebtedness should have been capitalized at a very low rate of interest under some plan similar to the British System in India. The future success of reclamation work by the national government requires that the investment shall be returned with interest.

In every State the works should be built, in coöperation with the States, municipalities, and local districts, that are necessary to extend to the people of every valley, from Maine to California, from Washington to Florida, and from Montana to Texas, complete assurance of protection from the flood menace in all years. The floods which have in the past brought such appalling catastrophes upon whole valleys and communities, at a cost of millions if not billions of dollars, should be harnessed and controlled and turned from demons of destruction into food-producers and commerce-carriers.

If Japan should land an army on the Pacific Coast would we leave it to future generations to defend us against that invasion? It is equally monstrous and wrong for this generation to leave to future generations the building of the great works of defense necessary to check the invasion of our valleys by disastrous floods, or the destruction of our forests by the ravages of fire.

Whenever a forest fire breaks out anywhere, there should be an adequate force of men enlisted in Uncle Sam's service for that purpose, to promptly extinguish it. It is as wrong to leave such work wholly to local initiative or action as it would be wrong to leave to the States the question of national defense from possible attack by other nations. Coöperation with the States there should always be, and this the States will willingly extend. Of that we need have no fear. But the initiative must be taken, and the basic plans made and furnished, by the national government. Otherwise the work will never be done that is necessary to defend the nation against Nature's invasions—against forest fires and floods, against drouth and overflow, against denudation and erosion, and against the slow but inexorable encroachments of the Desert in the arid region. The States will not and cannot do it. It requires the overshadowing authority, initiative and financial resources of the national government.

The Office of Public Roads of the national government should be made a Service for Construction, like the Forest Service and the Reclamation Service. Whatever the national government does to aid in the construction of highways it should do by building them itself, whether they be built as models, to stimulate local interest, or as object lessons to the States through which they run, or as great national highways of travel, linking the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Great Lakes to the Gulf in a continuous system of roads as magnificent as those of ancient Rome. In time of war they would be military highways. In time of peace they would be national highways that would be traveled by multitudes of our people.

A Waterway Service for Construction should be created, wholly separate and apart from the War Department or any of its engineers or employees, to build for this country as complete a system of waterways as now exists in any of the countries of Europe—real waterways, waterways built to float boats on and to carry inland commerce. Waterways must be built for commerce and to constitute a national waterway system. The false pretense must stop of spending money on waterways merely as a club to lower railroad rates. That policy of indirection and sham has prompted the waste of too many millions of dollars of the people's money in this country.

In this one great interrelated and interdependent work of forest and water conservation, of reclaiming land by irrigation, drainage, and protection from overflow, of regulating and developing the flow of rivers for power development and navigation, and doing everything necessary for the protection of every flood-menaced community and valley, enough men should be enlisted in the different services through which the work is to be done, to do this work with all the expedition required by the welfare of the people at large of this generation.