Now I saw my first national service in connection with the Interstate Commerce Commission and I was much impressed by the theory that the railroad men had, which was a very natural theory, arising out of their own experience and out of the fact that there was a new force in the world with which they were playing. Their conception was that the highway was a mere means of getting from the farm to the railroad; that the waterway was a mere means of carrying off the surplus waters from the hills to the oceans. The statement has often been made to me that there would never be an occasion when it would be necessary or possible to put into competition with the railroads the waterways of this country; that it would cost more to use those waterways or to use highways than it would to do the same transportation work by railroad. And they had obtained figures to show that under conditions of unlimited competition the Illinois Central, for instance, paralleling the Mississippi River, could do business at a cheaper rate than it could be transported by water, considering the cost of bringing it to the water station and unloading it at the other end. Now, as Mr. Chapin has said, a larger conception has come into the American mind—the conception of the utilization of all our resources. While the railroad has a great burden cast upon it; while it is the strong right arm in this work, still we must remember that the strong right arm must have fingers, and that there should be in a complete physical system a good left arm.
The highways that you are interested in are more than interesting to me for another reason.
I have thought of the men who will come back after the war. Every nation has had a problem to deal with the returning soldier. If you read Ferraro's history of Rome, you will find that one of the chief reasons why the republic of Rome went out of existence and the empire of Rome came into existence was because of the returned soldiers. They looked to their general to take care of them on their return, and their general found that the way to take care of them was to give them, as they said in those days, "bread and circuses," and so they reached over into Egypt, got the great wheat supply of that country, and provided the great circuses that are historical for the amusement of those people.
The Emperor of Germany 10 years ago was asked why he was unwilling to agree to a demobilization of his forces or to a reduction of his army and he said because it would demoralize the industries of Germany. They could not reabsorb so many men without reducing wages and throwing upon the country so many unemployed that it would make against the welfare of the land. We will have that problem to deal with.
The firm, strong position taken by the President in his note published yesterday indicates that he is ready to fight this thing out to a finish and that he will show to those on the other side that America has a determination to win, and that it is not a determination that fades quickly. If the Emperor of Germany has ever had a good look at a photograph of Woodrow Wilson, he has seen a prolongation of a chin that must have confirmed him in the belief that America does not take up a fight unless it puts it through; and we are to reach a military determination by whipping them until they say they have had enough.
Now, when this thing is over, our men will begin to come back into the United States. But not all at once. We won't have three or four million men to deal with in a single month. We will have them slowly returning to us through a year or a year and a half. As those men come filtering in through our ports we ought to be able to meet every man at every port with the statement that he does not have to lie idle one single day. We ought to be able to say to the man, "Here is something that you can do at once. If your old position is not vacant, if you can not go home to the old place and take up the work that you were in, then the Government of the United States, in its wisdom, has provided something which you can do at wages upon which you can live well."
And what should that be? The greatest problem that any country has, to my mind, is its own self-support. We have come to be independent in our resources, to be strong, and be respected. So long as we are industrially dependent, agriculturally dependent, somebody has a lever that he can use in a time of crisis, as against this nation. Long years ago we were the greatest of all agricultural people, and Thomas Jefferson wanted us to remain in that position. He thought that the safety and security of the United States lay in the fact that we would live on farms. When De Toquevile came over here in 1830 he said the reason democracy was a success in this country was because we were all practically living on farms, living on what we raised ourselves, and standing equally.
To-day the tendency is away from the farm toward the city, toward industrial life, toward aggregations of people, away from the small town to the larger town, and from the larger town to the metropolis. People are being drawn from the farms, so that one-half of the arable land this side of the Mississippi is unused to-day; so that between here and New Orleans there are 40,000,000 acres of land privately owned and unused; so that in the great Northwest, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, etc., there are 100,000,000 acres of cut-over lands that are practically unused; and we have a new nation practically in the undrained lands of our rivers and our bays and inlets, lands that are as rich as any that lie out of doors, as rich as the valley of the Nile or of the Euphrates. In the far western country, there are at least 15,000,000 acres of land that we can put under water. Under water, that land produces more than one crop a year, and that an exceptionally rich crop.
We have been extending ourselves because of war in a great many different directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedented and unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. I say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters of the Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in the Grand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at the right times on that desert so as to raise cotton and cantaloupes and alfalfa. Then come east and take the stumps from these cut-over lands. Do it not as a private enterprise, because that is a slow, slow process. Men are discouraged and disheartened when they look at the problem of pulling an Oregon fir stump out of the ground. It really requires large capital. Then come farther east and take these lands that are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes and put these lands into the service of America. This is what I call the making of the nation.
That land should tie up with all other land. Means of communication should be a part of that general scheme. We should have as good roads between the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or in Northern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is a work—the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a small and tentative appropriation—the work of surveying this country and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these men who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. There is a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to have small communities in which men have small acreages of land, not to speculate with but to cultivate; and these acreages are to center in small communities where men can talk together and profit by their own mistakes and their own successes and where those small communities will be tied up with all neighboring communities, so that there will be easy access between all parts of the country. Good roads and a rural express must be had. If you can help the Government in building good roads for little money or show how a rural express can be most profitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a new America.