Every community of Homecrofters created to enlarge and maintain the Homecroft Reserve, would be a training school for Homecrofters. The term of enlistment for the educational training furnished by these great National Institutions for the training of Homecrofters would be five years. Each organized community would be practically a separate Homecroft village. Every one that was organized would make it easier to organize the next. Public interest would grow and the popular demand would force the rapid expansion of the plan as soon as its benefits in the field of the education of the people were realized—just as happened in the case of the rural free mail delivery.
Whenever the nation starts, as is advocated in this book, to immediately establish a Homecroft Reserve of 100,000 in the Colorado River Country near Yuma; 100,000 in the San Joaquin Valley in California; 100,000 in Louisiana; 100,000 in West Virginia; and 100,000 in Minnesota,—500,000 in all,—and gets that part of its work for national defense done, each 100,000 will be rapidly extended to 1,000,000. That will mean that there will be 5,000,000 enlisted Homecroft Reservists being trained as soldiers of peace as well as soldiers for war—being trained to produce food for man with a hoe as well as to defend their country, if need arises, with a gun. Every Homecrofter and his entire family will be students, learning to be Homecrofters, all of them, and taking a five years' course. One fifth of the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every year.
What would be the result?
Every year, year after year, 1,000,000 trained, scientific Homecrofters—trained in home-handicraft, and in fruit-culture, truck-gardening, berry-growing, poultry-raising, and in putting all their products in shape for marketing, whether in their own stomachs or in the markets of the world—would be graduated from these Homecroft villages comprising the Homecroft Reserves. Each would have had a five years' course in that training—a year longer than required for an ordinary college course and of infinitely more practical value to them than a college course.
They would pay for the use and occupancy of the Homecroft, and for the instruction they would receive, a sum sufficient to cover all the cost of providing the instruction, and six per cent on the value of the Homecroft, four per cent interest and two per cent to go to a sinking fund that would equal the value of the Homecroft in fifty years. The government would get back every dollar it invested, with interest, and make the profit between the cost of the Homecroft and its fixed ultimate value of $1,000. That value would be from twenty to thirty per cent profit on the original investment by the government.
Every one of the 1,000,000 Homecroft families that would be graduated every year would go out into the great field of our national life and activity, looking first for a Homecroft and second for employment in some industrial vocation.
Now how many of our people are there who can be induced to sit down and hold their heads in their hands until they have stopped the whirl in which most of their minds are involved, long enough to seriously weigh the difference in value to the country and to every industrial and commercial interest of 1,000,000 such trained homecrofters, compared with the 1,000,000 untrained and ignorant foreign immigrants whom we have been swallowing up every year for so many years in the maw of our congested cities?
One million trained Homecrofters, with their families, coming each year into the social and industrial life of the whole people, scattering into every community where labor was needed, would in a comparatively few years solve every social problem and rescue the nation from its danger of eventual destruction by human congestion, the tenement life, and racial degeneracy. The graduated Homecrofters could never be induced to go into the congested tenement districts. They would insist on living in Homecrofts in the suburbs of the cities.
The nation ought to adopt immediately the whole system of establishing Homecroft communities as training schools for 5,000,000 Homecrofters, from which 1,000,000 would be graduated every year, without any regard to the value of the plan for a Reserve for national defense. It should be done, if for nothing else, to check the congestion of humanity in cities, create individual industrial independence, end unemployment, end woman labor in factories, end child labor, and insure social stability and the perpetuity of the nation.