Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The lesson of this last great war will be learned, before it is over, by all the nations of the world. That lesson is that men, men of reckless daring and dauntless bravery, men utterly indifferent to their own lives when they can be sacrificed to save the nation, men like the Belgian gardeners who have fought for their homeland in this war, men like the Japanese gardeners who threw away their lives against Port Arthur, men like the Scotch Homecrofters who charged with the Scots Greys at Waterloo and have fought through the fierce carnage of a hundred bloody battlefields to sustain and build Britain's Empire Power; such men as the Minute Men of Concord or the Southern Chevaliers who rode with Marion; such men as those who fought with Jackson at New Orleans, whether they were Lafitte's smugglers and pirates from Barataria Bay or Mountaineers from other state or planters from the great sugar plantations of Louisiana, men who, all of them, are fighting for their homes and their country, constitute a defense that rises above all others in strength and is the most powerful mobile force in modern warfare. Armed and equipped and organized they must be, and fired with the desperate valor that can be born only of patriotic devotion to a great cause; but when you have such men, and enough of them, no modern machinery of war, or engines of destruction, or fortifications can overcome them or stand against them. They are a force as irresistible as the eruption of a mighty volcano.

Those are some of the things to set to the credit of the plan for a Homecroft Reserve if needed for national defense in time of war.

Now measure their value in time of peace, for national defense against the evil forces that are gnawing at the very vitals of our national existence by degenerating our racial strength and physical and mental power as a people.

There is a remedy for the physical degeneracy caused by congested cities. That remedy is that the populations of such cities shall be scattered into the suburbs where every family can have a home in which they can live in contact with nature. It must be a home with a garden, where they can, if need be, get their living from their own Homecroft. The Homecroft should be the principal source of livelihood for every family,—the factory employment, or the wage earned from it, should be secondary. This one condition, wherever it is brought into existence for an entire community, will end all labor conflicts and disturbances. The most pernicious and poisonous influence in American thought to-day starts from the minds of employers of labor who, sometimes perhaps subconsciously, think they must control labor by having the working people always on the edge of the precipice of starvation. The idea that the wage earner can only be controlled by being kept in a position of personal dependence and subserviency is as medieval, inhuman, and barbarously wrong as was the idea that human slavery was necessary for the control of labor.

We have achieved religious liberty, political liberty, civil liberty, and personal liberty, but industrial liberty remains yet to be accomplished. Industrial slavery is the corner stone of our industrial edifice. It will continue so as long as the lives of great multitudes of wageworkers revolve around a job, and they know no other way to supply human needs but a wage. Better men will give better service, and employers will get better results, when every wage earner is located on a Homecroft from which he can in any hour of need provide the entire living for himself and family.

That condition is the only permanent remedy for unemployment. When all wage earners—all men and women—in this country are trained Homecrofters, able to build a house and furnish it themselves by their own skill and knowing how to get their living from one acre, whenever need be, the Homecroft life will be the universal life of the working people, and there will be no unemployment.

Unemployment will continue so long as there is a great mass of floating labor, living from day to day on a wage while it lasts, and starving when it stops. No scheme can be devised that will end the miseries caused by unemployment, so long as that system of a floating mass of workers is perpetuated. Human genius cannot prevent the ebb and flow of prosperity. Eras of depression are inevitable. When they come, thousands will be out of employment. Labor Bureaus, private or public, will not change that condition, because they cannot create jobs where none exist. It is philanthropy and not business for an employer to retain men out of sympathy for them when he does not need their labor. Philanthropy is a poor foundation on which to try to build any economic structure. Better by far have every workingman a Homecrofter, whose labor is needed on his homecroft, in home-garden or home-workshop, whenever it is not needed in some wage-earning employment.

The labor of women and children in factories, aside from all other considerations, is an economic waste, from the broad standpoint of the highest welfare and prosperity for all the people. Any woman who is a trained Homecrofter is worth more in dollars and cents per day or per week for what she can produce from that homecroft than she can earn in any factory. The same is true of every child old enough to seek factory employment. Homecroft women and Homecroft children will never work in factories, and whenever their labor cannot be had the labor of men will be substituted and the whole world will be the better for it when that time comes.

But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?

It has much to do with it.