Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

"Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod valley, you can see when the sun is setting over western Loch Moar and his rays run level as an ocean floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings of farm-steadings, the dyke-ridges that enclosed the Homecrofts, small as pocket-handkerchiefs; and higher still, ascending the mountainside, regular as the stripes on corduroy, you can trace the ancient rigs where the corn once bloomed bonny even in these wildest and most remote recesses of the hills. All is now passed away and matter for romance—but it is truth all the same, and one may tell it without fear and without favour.

"From the Crae Hill, especially if one continues a little to the south till you reach the summit cairn above the farmhouse of Nether Crae you can see many things. For one thing you are in the heart of the Covenant Country.

"He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white among the darker heather—south to where on Kirkconnel hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six corpses—west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs to a stake—east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea."

"Save by general direction you cannot take in all these by the seeing of the eye from the Crae Hill. But you are in the midst of them, and the hollows of the hills where the men died for their 'thocht,' and the quiet God's Acres where they lie buried, are as much of the essence of Scotland as the red flushing of the heather in autumn and the hill tarns and 'Dhu Lochs' scattered like dark liquid eyes over the face of the wilds."

Well may England, as she looked over the battlefields of Belgium, and mourned the thousands and tens of thousands of her brave men whose lives have paid the forfeit for her heedlessness, and listened to the bombardment of her North Sea coast towns by German battleships, and scanned the sky watching for the coming of the aërial invasion her people so much feared, have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:

"Of all sad things of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these, it might have been."

Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?

The same identical influences and traits of human character that drove the Homecrofters from Scotland will be responsible for our failure to take warning from England's lesson, if we do so fail. It is the disposition of intrenched interests to grasp for more and more, and constantly more, that has imperiled England's national life. The same grasping policy of the intrenched interests in the United States now imperils the national life of this nation in the future by the absorption of our national resources and what remains of our public domain into private speculative ownership while the toiling millions are crowded into the tenements. We could survive the loss of what the intrenched interests have already taken if they would only let loose on what is left and let Uncle Sam have a free hand to do with his own as is best for all his people in places like the Colorado River country. There the greater part of the land needed is still public land, and speculators have not as yet acquired the water rights and power possibilities.

England could not and the United States cannot maintain a great standing army, but England could have established and maintained a Homecroft Reserve of a million men in Scotland, and we can do it in the Colorado River Valley, and other places where it ought to be done in the United States, provided the land and water power can be saved from the clutch of the speculators before they have so complicated the proposition as to interminably delay it while Uncle Sam is getting back from them what ought never to have been granted away.

England had the Scotch Homecrofters, and drove them from the homes of their forefathers to make great estates. We have got to organize our Homecroft Reservists and locate them, and train them, but that can be done.