Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

Some enterprising American Congressional Economist would then tell them that they surely could not contemplate spending that much on anything but a war. They would tell him that they were going into a war with the Desert and they proposed to triumph in it, just as they triumphed in the war with Russia. There would be this difference: all they spent on the Russian War was gone past recovery. They had to spend it or cease to exist as a nation. In this war with the Desert they would spend five billion dollars, and for it they would create a country that would produce food worth five billion dollars a year every year through all future time.

Then the American Speculator would come on the scene with his accumulated wisdom gained through many failures of colonization schemes because there were no colonists or not enough to keep up with the interest on the bonds issued. The American Speculator would warn the Japanese against such a gigantic blunder as they were about to make in undertaking such a stupendous colonization scheme.

And the Japanese Statesmen and Financiers would point out to him not only that they had all the colonists they needed right at home in Japan, but that instead of its being necessary to spend a large sum of money to induce those colonists to emigrate to the new lands, they were having much trouble now to keep the colonists from going to the Pacific Coast where they are not wanted. They would explain that they are overcrowded in Japan; that their surplus population must go somewhere; that they are the most skilled gardeners and orchardists in the world; that the same men who would build the irrigation works, and the power plants, would settle right down on the reclaimed lands, glad to get an acre apiece, and live on it and cultivate it with their families.

So the Japanese in this thorough way would go at this great work of wresting a new Japanese Empire from the Desert. They would not do any construction work until they had made a complete comprehensive plan of every detail of this new empire they were starting to build. Then they would go to the Colorado Canyon and begin by building a great diversion dam as far down the canyon as might be practicable to lift the water high enough to carry it in high line canal systems along both sides of the valley, and to bring it out on the mesa lands and use it where the land most needs the silt for a fertilizer. They would figure on first reclaiming all the mesa land on which the water could in this way be used, and then they would build pumping plants with which to irrigate the more elevated lands.

They would reclaim the mesa land first because every acre of mesa land that was reclaimed would serve as a sponge to soak up the flood water. By carrying out that plan they would eventually relieve the lowlands in the floor of the valley from all danger of overflow. They would not have to spend anything to control the floods of the Colorado River. There would be no floods. The Japanese would begin at the right end of the problem, and build big enough at the start to solve it as a whole, comprehensively. Their plan would be to use up every drop of the flood water by irrigating land with it. There would never at any time of the year be any water running to waste in the lower river. There would never be in the main river more than enough water to supply the canals that irrigated the lowlands of the lower delta. The ship canal from Yuma to the Gulf, and the canals from Yuma to the Needles, Phoenix, and Florence would be not irrigating canals, but drainage canals.

The Japanese would control and utilize all the water that now runs to waste in the Colorado River. They would save and use, not a part of it, but every drop of it. They would, as they have done in Japan, preserve the sources of the water supplies from destruction by overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion. They would build the Charleston Reservoir, on the San Pedro. They would stop the floods that now devastate that valley and wash away and destroy its farm lands. They would build the Verde Reservoir, the Agua Fria Reservoir, the San Carlos Reservoir, and every other reservoir on every tributary of the Colorado required to control for use the immense volume of water that we now waste.

They would go into Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and do the same thing in those States. They would build great dams and reservoirs in the Canyon of the Colorado River, and would produce therefrom electric power enough to furnish power for every farm and mine and city in the whole basin of the Colorado River, and power to pump back onto the mesas water which had once done duty by irrigating the lower lands.

They would reclaim in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River as much land as is now cultivated in all of Japan. They would subdivide it into Garden Homes for their industrious tillers of the soil. They would eventually put on such Garden Homes as many of their land-cultivators and gardener-soldiers with their families as they now have in Japan. They would be more prosperous because the land is more fertile and the crops would be more valuable.

Their system of land cultivation would not be farming, as we understand it. It would be gardening, of the closest and most intensive kind. Such a system of land cultivation in the Colorado River Valley, under their system of development, would produce as much per acre as hothouse culture under glass in a cold climate. Everything that can be raised in Japan they would produce. Everything that can be raised in Egypt or Arabia, or anywhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, they would produce.

They would make of the Colorado River Valley the greatest date-producing country of the world. Oranges, lemons, grape-fruit, and every known tropical and semi-tropical fruit of commerce would be raised by them in this American Valley of the Nile. They would establish a system of land tillage by their intensive methods which would support in comfort and plenty a family on every acre. They would eventually, in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and on the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, put 12,500,000 acres under such cultivation and settle it with as dense a population as they now have in Japan, where they sustain 30,000,000 rural people on 12,500,000 acres.