Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

"The Gordons went to the Afghan War in 1878. In 1881 they campaigned across the veldts against the Boers. The next year they stood at El-Teb and Tel-el-Kebir with their old friends the Black Watch. They marched to Khartum when their namesake, Gordon, was trapped. That over, they went back to India for another Afghan war. They marched by the scenes of their bloody fights when going to the relief of Lucknow.

"In 1897 the Gordons were the heroes of all Britain. They, and a regiment of Gurkhas, charged a hill at Dargai in the face of almost superhuman difficulties. Two years later the regiment went to South Africa and fought valiantly through that war. At Eldanslaagte they were part of the column of General French, their present commander.

"The red uniform coat of the Gordons is lavishly trimmed in yellow, which brought them the sobriquet of 'Gay Gordons.' Of all the Scotch regiments it has tried the hardest to keep its ranks filled with Scotsmen, 'limbs bred in the purple heather.'

"Officially the Gordons are the Ninety-second Highland Infantry."

England's original expeditionary force to the continent in 1914 was less than 200,000 men. Suppose it had been 1,200,000. It might just as well have been 1,200,000, if a Scotch Homecroft Reserve had been long ago established, as should have been done, and gradually increased until a million men were enlisted in it. Would any one question the fact, if there had been another million men in England's expeditionary army when it was first sent to the continent, that it would have completely changed the whole current of events in this war? It would have checked the German advance into France and Belgium. Not a foot of Belgium's territory would have been wrested from her. Neither Brussels nor Antwerp would have been surrendered.

That conclusion is so self-evident and conservative, and the opportunity that England had to have such a force in reserve is so plain that it seems hard to believe that the United States will ignore its lesson and fail to establish a Homecroft Reserve in this country.

England had the original stock from which to breed such a brave and hardy race of soldiers, and they were the original Homecrofters. There were not a million of them, but there were many thousands of them two centuries ago. There were so many that to-day there might easily have been a million such Homecrofters in England's army in Europe if the Homecroft Reserve System had been established when the trouble first began between the Homecrofters and the Great Landlords who finally succeeded in riveting the curse of land monopoly around Scotland's neck.

It may be argued that this suggestion is an afterthought, and that, as the Arab saying puts it, "The ditches are full of bright afterthoughts." That may be true as to England. But it is not true as to the United States. If we knew that it would be two hundred years before the great final struggle would be fought to determine whether the Pacific Coast of the United States should be dominated by the Asiatic or Caucasian race, right now is the time when we should begin to breed and train our millions of men who will have to fight that battle for us whenever the time does come that it has to be fought. It is as inevitable as fate that the conflict will come unless we safeguard against it by peopling America with a race as hardy and virile as the races on the Pacific shores of Asia are to-day.

The rugged physical manhood, rough daring and bravery, hardihood and endurance, self-reliance and resourcefulness, readiness for any emergency on land or sea, that characterized the type of men from whom the Homecroft Reserves would have been bred, and the rough rural environment in which they would have been reared, is strikingly described by S. R. Crockett in his novel "The Raiders."

And in "The Dark o' the Moon," the sequel to "The Raiders," he tells of the first of the struggles that were begun two centuries ago by the Homecrofters of Scotland to preserve their immemorial privileges of elbow-room and pasturage, as against the selfishness of the Landlord System that finally prevailed. That system decimated Scotland of her bravest men and left in their places hunting grounds and great estates to be sold or rented to American Snobocrats, who are not fighting any of England's battles in this war.