That would leave them many millions of acres—of the higher, colder, and less fertile lands on the watersheds of the tributary streams in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, for grazing and timber growing. The population sustained by these industries, added to that which would be sustained by mining, and electrical power, and the multitude of manufacturing industries which they would establish, would bring the total population of the basin of the Colorado River and its tributaries, under this Japanese development, up to fifty million people. That is a population as large as that which now bears on its shoulders all the burdens of the Japanese Empire, including its army and navy.
The Japanese would pump from underground with electric power the last possible drop of available water to promote surface production. The great torrential downpours that come occasionally in that country would be controlled by systems of embankments and soaked into the ground to replenish the underground supplies instead of being allowed to run to waste, carrying destruction in their path. They would from their dams in the Colorado River Canyon develop power that would pump water high enough to reach such vast areas of rich and fertile land as the Hualpi Valley—at least enough to turn such lands into forest plantations where water enough for agriculture could not be provided for the land.
Add to the wealth they would produce from their garden farms the wealth they would dig from the mines, develop from the water power, and produce in their factories, and they would create more annual wealth from this now desolate and uninhabited region in the Colorado River Valley than is to-day annually produced in the Japanese Empire. And more than that, they would be producing a strong and virile people. Every man would be a soldier in time of need and a Japanese army of more than five million men would be able to take the field at a moment's warning, leaving the youths who were too young and the men who were too old for military service, with the aid of the women and children, to cultivate the acre garden homes.
Why is not all this done by the Caucasian race who now control this great valley of the American Nile—the people whose flag flies over it?
Why, with all this incredible wealth lying undeveloped under our feet, do we not seize the necessary tools and develop it ourselves?
Why indeed? The facts stated are facts, physical facts not to be denied. Why do we leave this empire untouched?
Because thus far our only system of development has been speculation and human exploitation.
Because we seem to have known no way of settling a new country except to permit a generation of speculators to skim the cream before the actual tillers of the soil get a chance to cultivate it.
Because the agricultural immigrants from Italy—the ideal settlers for the Colorado River Valley—are being herded in Concentration Camps in the tenements of the congested cities. Their skill as gardeners is wasted, their knowledge of art and handicraft lost, their children morally and physically degenerated, and their racial strength diminished. Gunmen and black-handers are evolved from that evil environment. We are rotting a race of virile rural people, instead of directing the vast human power inherent in them to creating a new Valley of the Nile, and building a new Alexandria at Yuma and a new Cairo at Parker, and planting every family that was located on a Garden Home in that marvelously rich country in another Garden of Eden.
Because the railroads and the water power syndicates, with their allies the War Department engineers, seem to have the power to perpetuate this system of Speculation and Human Exploitation, and in consequence to dedicate the Colorado River Valley to desolation. They apparently have the power to inject some deadly poison into the arteries and veins of conventions and congresses and legislative bodies that makes action impossible along any line of constructive effort that would free the people from the thralldom of corporate opposition to government construction.