Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

Australia and New Zealand,—Japan, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland have escaped from this thralldom and are a free and independent people, capable of directing the development of their resources, and they are doing it. The people of the United States have abolished human slavery, but they have been unable as yet to free themselves from the domination of organized capital or the influence of the aggregated appetite of an army of speculators and exploiters of our national resources. As a nation we are shackled by the Spirit of Speculation which insidiously opposes any legislation that would save our resources from speculative exploitation or directly develop them by government construction for the benefit of the people.

Those who comprise this speculative class, which opposes all such constructive legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army hired to defend the nation and their property from attack. They constantly advocate increasing the $250,000,000 a year we now spend on our army and navy. Then they cry economy when it is proposed to spend less than half that amount every year throughout the whole United States to defend the country against the devastating forces of Nature. As a result the people are unable to safeguard against the recurrence of such appalling catastrophies as the Ohio Valley floods of 1913 or the Mississippi Valley floods of 1912 and 1913.

The creation of a new empire, more populous, and with a people living in greater comfort and producing more wealth each year in the Colorado River Drainage Basin than in the Japanese Empire of to-day, cannot be permitted to be done by the Japanese because the territory belongs to the United States. And this country cannot be allowed to do it from the viewpoint of the speculators, unless it can be accomplished for the benefit of private speculation. The speculators insist they must be free from any restrictions that would prevent them from exploiting generations yet unborn who will till the soil and use the water power in their industries.

Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?

Already the inconceivable fertility of this region is known to the Japanese. Already they are quietly absorbing the opportunities to cultivate its land, either as laborers for American Landowners below the line in Mexico, or as tenants in the great Imperial Valley in California. They are as familiar as we are with the Orange Groves of Sonora. They know that on the Pacific Coast below Guaymas there are millions of acres of country just as beautiful as Southern California, but which is now unreclaimed, where the sparkling streams from the Sierra Madres course uselessly through thickets of wild lemon trees on their way to the ocean.

If we wait for the speculators to do it, long before the time comes when they can get the aid from the national government necessary to enable them to reclaim and settle the desert lands, and develop the water power of the Colorado River, there will be a Japanese population of many millions in the Colorado River Delta below the line and on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. They will go to Mexico to cultivate the soil and live on it. The Caucasian as a rule goes to Mexico to get land away from the Mexicans and speculate on it or monopolize it. So long as that is our system of development, we cannot complain if the industrious Japanese go there and live on the land and produce food from it to help feed the people of all the earth. The American goes to Mexico in the hope of making enough money to be able to live without work. The Japanese goes there to get an opportunity to work and to dig his living from Mother Earth by his own labor. Which will prevail, think you, in the struggle to possess the unoccupied and untilled lands of the Pacific shores of Mexico?

We are told we must employ more soldiers to protect us. The Japanese colonists, wherever they go, will go with both a hoe and a gun, and will protect themselves.

If the Colorado River Valley is to remain dedicated to speculation and exploitation, we could not maintain upon its deserts a standing army large enough, if we should have a war with Japan, to make even a pretense of protecting it from invasion from the south by the Japanese after they have settled those Mexican lands. They would not stop with taking the Philippines and Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They would sweep up from the south with an army of a million men from Mexico and extend their dominion over all the arid region. From the Cascade and the Sierra Nevada Ranges to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian line to Mexico would become Japanese territory.

But that is too long a time in the future, the average self-complacent American says, to be of any immediate interest. It would take the Japanese more than a generation to put a million colonists in Mexico. Perhaps it would. It will take the Japanese a generation to double the Japanese population on the shores of the Pacific in Asia and America. Now they have only fifty million people. In one generation more they will have a hundred million and a goodly portion of them will be in America. Is it any too soon for this nation to begin right now to build the safeguards against that danger? Bear in mind that there are men and women now living who remember Chicago when there was nothing there but Old Fort Dearborn and a few log houses. Bear in mind that in less than ten years, from 1900 to 1908, more than 65,000 Japanese emigrated to Hawaii, and that in a single year, 1907, 30,226 Japanese came to the United States, and that in 1909 the number of trained and seasoned Japanese soldiers in Hawaii exceeded the entire field army of the United States. How long would it take Japan to put a million colonists—men of military age—on the Pacific Coast of Mexico?

In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because it does not pay. Would that argument apply in case of a war between the United States and Japan, with reference to the Colorado River Country and the rest of the territory now lying in the United States between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west?