Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The military caste in this and every country is trained to regard its profession as one whose duty it is to accomplish results by brute force and human slaughter. Its only conception of a soldier is a man-killing machine, whose chief use in time of peace is to serve as a basis for appropriations to sustain a military establishment with all its multitudinous expenditures. Their conception of war is that it is an inevitable orgy of human slaughter, against which humanity is powerless to protect itself.

That a great force should be organized for patriotic service under civil control instead of military domination, to battle against the destroying forces of Nature, and subjugate and control them for the advancement of humanity and all the arts and victories of peace, runs counter to every fiber of being of the military caste. And yet, none but the most superficial student of history and humanity can fail to realize the necessity for such an army of peace in this country. It is certainly true that wars will never cease until the inspiration and patriotism and national ideals developed by such a peaceful conquest of the forces of Nature has been substituted for the tremendous stimulus which the human race has in the past drawn from armed conflicts between nations. And the fact must be clearly recognized that in this way a force can be provided that will be instantly available to take the place of seasoned soldiers at any moment in the event that this nation should be drawn into a war of defense or for the maintenance of any great principle of human rights or justice to humanity.

We might be forced into a war within a year and we might succeed in preserving the peace forever. No man can tell, because no human mind can forecast the future or predict what events may occur that may be beyond our power to control, and which might force us into a war. We do know, however, that the fight against the floods of the Mississippi River, and the fight against the great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, must go on year after year through all the centuries to come during which man continues to inhabit the Delta of the Mississippi River.

The memory of the great disaster to the city of Galveston, and the memory of the great floods of the Mississippi River in 1912 and 1913, are still fresh in the minds of the people. The defense of that part of our common country against such catastrophes in the future is worthy of the same patriotic energy and the same adequate expenditure that would be necessary to defend them against an armed invasion from Mexico or by any nation of the world.

Were such defense afforded, results would be obtained of such enormous benefit to the United States in time of peace, without any regard to its relation to national defense in time of war, that to fail to do it would be as stupid as it would have been to fail to take the gold from the placer mines of California.

The gateway from the Gulf of Mexico to the great central valley of this country opens into a region so vast that the area comprised within the watershed of the Mississippi and its tributaries embraces 41 per cent of the entire United States. This gateway opens into a great waterway system capable of being made continuously navigable all the year around through 20,000 miles of navigable waterways and commerce-carriers.

The gateway from the Gulf opens to a country of greater potential agricultural wealth than any other section of the earth's surface of the same area. The lower Mississippi Valley has well been styled the "Sugar-Bowl" of the continent. The State of Louisiana alone is larger in area by 10,000 square miles than the combined area of Belgium, Holland, and Denmark. It is capable of sustaining a larger population and producing vastly more wealth than those three countries combined.

If you draw a line straight north from the southernmost point of Texas to the northern line of Oklahoma, and then turn and go straight east, projecting the northern line of Oklahoma past Cairo, Illinois, to the Tennessee River, following up the Tennessee River to the northeast corner of Mississippi, and then follow the eastern boundary line of Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, you have included within these extreme boundaries a territory as large as the whole German Empire. It is a territory possessing greater natural wealth and possibility of development than the German Empire, provided the great problems of water control and river regulation are solved in such a way as to promote the highest development of this region for the benefit of humanity, and provided further that the Coast region of this territory is protected not only from the floods of the river, but from the storms originating in the Gulf of Mexico. Protection from those storms requires the construction of a great dike similar to the dikes of Holland that will hold out the waters of the Gulf not only at their normal height, but will also hold them back when they attain the abnormal height which at rare intervals results from the hurricanes or great storms from the Gulf of Mexico, such as that which overwhelmed Galveston.

Lafcadio Hearn, in "Chita," has described a Gulf Storm better than it will ever again be described. He prefaced the story of that storm with a picture of the havoc wrought by Nature's forces—the ceaseless charging of the "Ocean's Cavalry," that is quoted because it so clearly portrays the necessity for bulwarks of defense built in the spirit of military defenses.

"On the Gulf side of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five sloping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately northward as to save themselves from falling. And they are being pursued indeed;—for the sea is devouring the land. Many and many a mile of ground has yielded to the tireless charging of Ocean's cavalry; far out you can see, through a good glass, the porpoises at play where of old the sugarcane shook out its million bannerets; and shark-fins now seam deep water above a site where pigeons used to coo. Men build dikes; but the besieging tides bring up their battering-rams—whole forests of drift—huge trunks of water-oak and weighty cypress. Forever the yellow Mississippi strives to build; forever the sea struggles to destroy;—and amid their eternal strife the islands and the promontories change shape, more slowly, but not less fantastically, than the clouds of heaven.