That danger will continue until we put a population on every acre of the rich and fertile land on the Pacific Coast. On every such acre there must be an occupant who will till the land himself—not a mere owner looking for a tenant.
The Japanese know the value of water as well as the value of land. Every cultivated acre in Japan is an irrigated acre. If we are to safeguard against the menace of conflict with Japan we must not only ourselves populate and cultivate the land that the Japanese covet, but we must conserve and use the water as well. We must do with the country what the Japanese people would do with it if it were theirs. So long as it remains, from their point of view, unoccupied and unused, they will covet it, and in the end they will possess it, unless we use and possess it ourselves in advance of them.
Look at California!
In the great central valley of that State, including the foothill country, there are 12,500,000 acres of the richest land in the world. The water with which to irrigate every unirrigated acre of it runs to waste year after year. Every acre of it could be irrigated. Every acre of it would support a family. It is so sparsely settled that to the Japanese mind it is vacant and unoccupied. The greater part of it is to-day unreclaimed. Some of it is producing grain or hay. The rest is pasture—grazing ground for herds of live stock where there should be gardens intensively cultivated and homes forming closely settled communities.
In Japan, on 12,500,000 acres, the same area as in California and no better land, they have evolved a population of expert gardeners and their families of 30,000,000 rural people. There is not land enough in Japan to give back a comfortable living as the reward for their labor. The great mass of the farming people—really they are not farmers—they are gardeners—are very poor. California holds out to them a chance for every family to become rich from their point of view. Should we wonder that they come to California?
The constant pressure of the population in Japan to overflow will make a corresponding inflowing pressure upon California. It is like the pressure of air upon a vacuum. The way to relieve the pressure is to fill the vacuum. California is the vacuum. Fill it with people of the Caucasian race who will till the soil they own with their own hands, and the pressure upon this California vacuum from Asiatic peoples will cease.
If California's garden lands were as densely populated as Belgium was before the war, there would be no Japanese danger-zone, provided the California cultivators of the soil tilled their own acres, or acre, as the Japanese do in their own country and want to do in California.
It would be necessary, in order to settle the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys of California in that way, to use for the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley, all the flood water now wasted in the Sacramento Valley. That can be done. There is no question about it whatever. The first recommendation to do it was made by a Commission of eminent engineers appointed by General Grant, when President, to report on the irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley.
It would require large and comprehensive planning, and the coöperation of the State and the nation. But had not the nation better spend millions to populate the country the Japanese covet, than to spend millions to fight a war with them to keep them out of it. Is it not better to settle the country, and in that way settle the controversy, than to run the risk of losing all the precious lives and treasure that a war would cost, and the risk of having California devastated by that war in the same way that Belgium has been destroyed?
Ought not that awful possibility to be enough to awaken the people of the United States to the necessity of doing something, and doing it quick, to populate the Pacific Coast?