Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

When we come to the qualifications of colonists, and the necessity that they should be Homecrofters, the question becomes more difficult, because the majority of the people of the United States have no conception of the possibilities of acreproduction or acreculture by a skilled and scientifically trained truck-gardener and fruit-grower and poultry-raiser. There are innumerable instances where truck gardens along the Atlantic Coast, on Long Island, and in New Jersey, Virginia, and Florida, are producing more than a thousand dollars worth of vegetables every year. It is a most common thing for berry-growers to realize that acreage product from an acre of berries in Louisiana or Washington. Celery, asparagus, lettuce, onions, and many other crops will yield as much when properly fertilized and cultivated. Anyone who doubts this can find ample proof of it at Duluth, Minnesota, or in California or Texas. Another thing should be borne in mind. One acre of land in the Colorado River Valley is the equivalent of five acres in a cold climate. Crops may be planted and matured so rapidly in that hot climate that plant growth more resembles hothouse forcing than ordinary out-of-door truck gardening. Another important fact is that all the tropical and semi-tropical fruits grow to perfection in that valley.

This whole subject is exhaustively elucidated in "Fields, Factories and Workshops," by Prince Kropotkin, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons of New York. No one will form an opinion adverse to the possibilities of acreculture after reading that book.

Successful acreculture requires, however, a man who knows how. The Japanese know how. The Chinese know how. The Belgians know how. Many of the French, Germans, and Italians know how. The Americans, with few exceptions, do not know how, but they can be taught. They will seize the opportunity to learn as soon as it is open to them as part of a large national plan. Every Homecroft Settlement created in the Colorado River Valley should be a great educational institution, a training school to teach men and women how to raise fruit, vegetables, and poultry, and how to prepare their products for market, and how to market them, and how to get their own food from their own acre by their own labor.

Thousands of the immigrants now coming to the United States from Southern Europe already know how to do all this and would make ideal colonists for the Colorado River Valley.

Thousands are out of work who, if healthy and physically fit, could be trained to garden in a year; to be good gardeners in three years; and to be scientific experts in gardening in five years.

In the event of a war under existing conditions we would have to train a million recruits to be soldiers. It is equally certain that men can be trained to be gardeners and Homecrofters. It takes longer to train a Homecrofter than to train a soldier, but it is only a question of time.

It can be done and it will be done by the United States as a measure of national defense as soon as the people can be brought to realize the great fundamental fact that the only way they can provide as many soldiers as they might need in some great national emergency is to begin in time of peace—and that means now—and train them to be both Homecrofters and soldiers, as the Japanese are trained. The Japanese are a nation of Homecrofters. The Homecroft Reservists who should be trained for national defense by the United States, will get their living as gardeners and Homecrofters when they are not needed as soldiers, or until they are needed as soldiers, as is the case in Japan with their organized reserve of 1,170,000 men and the great majority of their unorganized reserve of 7,021,780 men.

The Drainage Basin of the Colorado River has an area of 265,000 square miles. Japan has an area of 147,655 square miles, less than the area of the drainage basin of the Colorado River in Arizona and New Mexico. Arizona alone contains 143,956 square miles, and has a population of only 204,354. Japan has a population of 52,200,200. She now sustains in the Home Country a standing army at peace strength of 217,032, with Reserves of 1,170,000, making a total war strength of about 1,400,000 and she has available for duty but unorganized a total of 7,021,780.

The same Japanese System with the same Japanese population in the Colorado River Drainage Basin would sustain an army of the same strength. And they can do it on the Pacific Coast of Mexico, or on the Pacific Coast of South America, or anywhere else in as good a climate where they can get a territory of 147,000 square miles, of which 12,500,000 acres can be irrigated and intensively cultivated.

Is it not evident that it is the economic potentialities of the Japanese race that we must meet?