Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 13

They would go into Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and do the same thing in those States. They would build great dams and reservoirs in the Canyon of the Colorado River, and would produce therefrom electric power enough to furnish power for every farm and mine and city in the whole basin of the Colorado River, and power to pump back onto the mesas water which had once done duty by irrigating the lower lands.

They would reclaim in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River as much land as is now cultivated in all of j.a.pan. They would subdivide it into Garden Homes for their industrious tillers of the soil. They would eventually put on such Garden Homes as many of their land-cultivators and gardener-soldiers with their families as they now have in j.a.pan. They would be more prosperous because the land is more fertile and the crops would be more valuable.

Their system of land cultivation would not be farming, as we understand it.

It would be gardening, of the closest and most intensive kind. Such a system of land cultivation in the Colorado River Valley, under their system of development, would produce as much per acre as hothouse culture under gla.s.s in a cold climate. Everything that can be raised in j.a.pan they would produce. Everything that can be raised in Egypt or Arabia, or anywhere on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, they would produce.

They would make of the Colorado River Valley the greatest date-producing country of the world. Oranges, lemons, grape-fruit, and every known tropical and semi-tropical fruit of commerce would be raised by them in this American Valley of the Nile. They would establish a system of land tillage by their intensive methods which would support in comfort and plenty a family on every acre. They would eventually, in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and on the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, put 12,500,000 acres under such cultivation and settle it with as dense a population as they now have in j.a.pan, where they sustain 30,000,000 rural people on 12,500,000 acres.

That would leave them many millions of acres--of the higher, colder, and less fertile lands on the watersheds of the tributary streams in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, for grazing and timber growing. The population sustained by these industries, added to that which would be sustained by mining, and electrical power, and the mult.i.tude of manufacturing industries which they would establish, would bring the total population of the basin of the Colorado River and its tributaries, under this j.a.panese development, up to fifty million people. That is a population as large as that which now bears on its shoulders all the burdens of the j.a.panese Empire, including its army and navy.

The j.a.panese would pump from underground with electric power the last possible drop of available water to promote surface production. The great torrential downpours that come occasionally in that country would be controlled by systems of embankments and soaked into the ground to replenish the underground supplies instead of being allowed to run to waste, carrying destruction in their path. They would from their dams in the Colorado River Canyon develop power that would pump water high enough to reach such vast areas of rich and fertile land as the Hualpi Valley--at least enough to turn such lands into forest plantations where water enough for agriculture could not be provided for the land.

Add to the wealth they would produce from their garden farms the wealth they would dig from the mines, develop from the water power, and produce in their factories, and they would create more annual wealth from this now desolate and uninhabited region in the Colorado River Valley than is to-day annually produced in the j.a.panese Empire. And more than that, they would be producing a strong and virile people. Every man would be a soldier in time of need and a j.a.panese army of more than five million men would be able to take the field at a moment's warning, leaving the youths who were too young and the men who were too old for military service, with the aid of the women and children, to cultivate the acre garden homes.

Why is not all this done by the Caucasian race who now control this great valley of the American Nile--the people whose flag flies over it?

Why, with all this incredible wealth lying undeveloped under our feet, do we not seize the necessary tools and develop it ourselves?

Why indeed? The facts stated are facts, physical facts not to be denied.

Why do we leave this empire untouched?

_Because thus far our only system of development has been speculation and human exploitation._

Because we seem to have known no way of settling a new country except to permit a generation of speculators to skim the cream before the actual tillers of the soil get a chance to cultivate it.

Because the agricultural immigrants from Italy--the ideal settlers for the Colorado River Valley--are being herded in Concentration Camps in the tenements of the congested cities. Their skill as gardeners is wasted, their knowledge of art and handicraft lost, their children morally and physically degenerated, and their racial strength diminished. Gunmen and black-handers are evolved from that evil environment. We are rotting a race of virile rural people, instead of directing the vast human power inherent in them to creating a new Valley of the Nile, and building a new Alexandria at Yuma and a new Cairo at Parker, and planting every family that was located on a Garden Home in that marvelously rich country in another Garden of Eden.

Because the railroads and the water power syndicates, with their allies the War Department engineers, seem to have the power to perpetuate this system of Speculation and Human Exploitation, and in consequence to dedicate the Colorado River Valley to desolation. They apparently have the power to inject some deadly poison into the arteries and veins of conventions and congresses and legislative bodies that makes action impossible along any line of constructive effort that would free the people from the thralldom of corporate opposition to government construction.

Australia and New Zealand,--j.a.pan, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland have escaped from this thralldom and are a free and independent people, capable of directing the development of their resources, _and they are doing it_.

The people of the United States have abolished human slavery, but they have been unable as yet to free themselves from the domination of organized capital or the influence of the aggregated appet.i.te of an army of speculators and exploiters of our national resources. As a nation we are shackled by the Spirit of Speculation which insidiously opposes any legislation that would save our resources from speculative exploitation or directly develop them by government construction for the benefit of the people.

Those who comprise this speculative cla.s.s, which opposes all such constructive legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army _hired_ to defend the nation and their property from attack. They constantly advocate increasing the $250,000,000 a year we now spend on our army and navy. Then they cry economy when it is proposed to spend less than half that amount every year throughout the whole United States to defend the country against the devastating forces of Nature. As a result the people are unable to safeguard against the recurrence of such appalling catastrophies as the Ohio Valley floods of 1913 or the Mississippi Valley floods of 1912 and 1913.

The creation of a new empire, more populous, and with a people living in greater comfort and producing more wealth each year in the Colorado River Drainage Basin than in the j.a.panese Empire of to-day, cannot be permitted to be done by the j.a.panese because the territory belongs to the United States. And this country cannot be allowed to do it from the viewpoint of the speculators, unless it can be accomplished for the benefit of private speculation. The speculators insist they must be free from any restrictions that would prevent them from exploiting generations yet unborn who will till the soil and use the water power in their industries.

_Let the Speculators have their way and what will happen?_

Already the inconceivable fertility of this region is known to the j.a.panese. Already they are quietly absorbing the opportunities to cultivate its land, either as laborers for American Landowners below the line in Mexico, or as tenants in the great Imperial Valley in California. They are as familiar as we are with the Orange Groves of Sonora. They know that on the Pacific Coast below Guaymas there are millions of acres of country just as beautiful as Southern California, but which is now unreclaimed, where the sparkling streams from the Sierra Madres course uselessly through thickets of wild lemon trees on their way to the ocean.

If we wait for the speculators to do it, long before the time comes when they can get the aid from the national government necessary to enable them to reclaim and settle the desert lands, and develop the water power of the Colorado River, there will be a j.a.panese population of many millions in the Colorado River Delta below the line and on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

They will go to Mexico to cultivate the soil and live on it. The Caucasian as a rule goes to Mexico to get land away from the Mexicans and speculate on it or monopolize it. So long as that is our system of development, we cannot complain if the industrious j.a.panese go there and live on the land and produce food from it to help feed the people of all the earth. The American goes to Mexico in the hope of making enough money to be able to live without work. The j.a.panese goes there to get an opportunity to work and to dig his living from Mother Earth by his own labor. Which will prevail, think you, in the struggle to possess the unoccupied and untilled lands of the Pacific sh.o.r.es of Mexico?

We are told we must employ more soldiers to protect us. The j.a.panese colonists, wherever they go, will go with both a hoe and a gun, and will protect themselves.

If the Colorado River Valley is to remain dedicated to speculation and exploitation, we could not maintain upon its deserts a standing army large enough, if we should have a war with j.a.pan, to make even a pretense of protecting it from invasion from the south by the j.a.panese after they have settled those Mexican lands. They would not stop with taking the Philippines and Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They would sweep up from the south with an army of a million men from Mexico and extend their dominion over all the arid region. From the Cascade and the Sierra Nevada Ranges to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian line to Mexico would become j.a.panese territory.

But that is too long a time in the future, the average self-complacent American says, to be of any immediate interest. It would take the j.a.panese more than a generation to put a million colonists in Mexico. Perhaps it would. It will take the j.a.panese a generation to double the j.a.panese population on the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific in Asia and America. Now they have only fifty million people. In one generation more they will have a hundred million and a goodly portion of them will be in America. Is it any too soon for this nation to begin right now to build the safeguards against that danger? Bear in mind that there are men and women now living who remember Chicago when there was nothing there but Old Fort Dearborn and a few log houses. Bear in mind that in less than ten years, from 1900 to 1908, more than 65,000 j.a.panese emigrated to Hawaii, and that in a single year, 1907, 30,226 j.a.panese came to the United States, and that in 1909 the number of trained and seasoned j.a.panese soldiers in Hawaii exceeded the entire field army of the United States. How long would it take j.a.pan to put a million colonists--men of military age--on the Pacific Coast of Mexico?

In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because it does not pay. Would that argument apply in case of a war between the United States and j.a.pan, with reference to the Colorado River Country and the rest of the territory now lying in the United States between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west?

In the Colorado River Valley alone the j.a.panese would get 5,000,000 acres capable of being made to produce by their system of cultivation a net profit of $1,000 an acre, over and above a living for its cultivators. That would make a total of five billion dollars a year.

In addition they would get 12,500,000 acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California which if they produced from it only a net profit of $500 an acre every year--would yield a total of two and a half billion dollars annually. Oregon, Washington and Idaho would add as much more land, making another two and a half billion dollars a year.

That is a total annual production to which the j.a.panese would develop this land within a generation of Ten billion dollars a year--and very little of the land is to-day cultivated. Most of it is unreclaimed desert.

In addition to this the mineral output of the states lying entirely within that territory for 1913 was as follows:

Arizona $71,000,000 California 100,700,000 Idaho 24,500,000 Nevada 37,800,000 Oregon 3,500,000 Utah 53,000,000 Washington 17,500,000

Total $308,000,000

In addition, a considerable portion of the states of Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming lies within the territory under consideration. The mineral output of these states for 1913 was as follows:

Colorado $54,000,000 New Mexico 17,800,000 Wyoming 12,500,000

Total $84,300,000

The total mineral production of all the above named States, and including Montana, for the ten years ending with 1913 was $3,322,003,895.

The lands in the delta of the Colorado River where the j.a.panese are now settling comprise more than a million acres of the most marvelously fertile land in all the world.

The j.a.panese who are now going into the delta country of the Colorado River are not going where they are unwelcome. The American who wants to use their labor to cultivate his land, in order that he may get a profit from it without working the land himself, is busy starting the Asiatic invasion that will eventually sweep over that Land of Promise. It is an invasion that will ultimately transfer that country from American to Asiatic control, unless the American people wake up and decide without delay to do _the one and only thing_ that can possibly prevent this from happening.

What is that "one and only thing" that they must do to save the Colorado River Valley for our own people?

_Why it is to occupy, cultivate, use, and possess it ourselves, and do with it exactly what the j.a.panese would do with it if they possessed it as a part of the territory of the Empire of j.a.pan._

What would have to be done to accomplish that has already been told.

_How is it to be done?_

By thrusting to one side the speculators and exploiters and demanding from Congress the necessary legislative machinery and money to conquest the Colorado River Valley from the desert, with exactly the same inexorable insistence with which the money would be demanded if it were needed for defense against an invading German force that had landed in New England and was marching on New York; with exactly the same irresistible popular cyclone that will roar about the ears of Congress in the future, if their supine neglect now does some day actually lead to a j.a.panese invasion of the United States.

If the people of the United States can get their feet out of the quicksands of land-speculation, water-speculation, power-speculation, and the operations of water-power syndicates, they can create a country as populous and powerful as the j.a.panese Empire in the Drainage Basin of the Colorado River. If we will eliminate that one great obstacle, we can do it ourselves, just as well as the j.a.panese could do it. Our subserviency to the Spirit of Speculation is the only thing that stands in the way of it.

Every problem involved has been solved by some other country and partly solved by our own. There is no reason why the United States cannot adopt the Australian and New Zealand Systems for the acquisition, reclamation, subdivision, and settlement of land.

There is no reason why the United States should not control its water power resources on such a stream as the Colorado River; and, when advisable, build, own, and operate power plants and distribute power.

_Shall we admit that we cannot do what Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland have done?_

Under the United States Reclamation Act we have already undertaken to reclaim land for settlement, and to build power plants, but we have failed to safeguard the land or the power against speculative acquisition.

However, what we have already accomplished has made for progress, and makes it easier to do what remains to be done.

When we come to the qualifications of colonists, and the necessity that they should be Homecrofters, the question becomes more difficult, because the majority of the people of the United States have no conception of the possibilities of acreproduction or acreculture by a skilled and scientifically trained truck-gardener and fruit-grower and poultry-raiser.

There are innumerable instances where truck gardens along the Atlantic Coast, on Long Island, and in New Jersey, Virginia, and Florida, are producing more than a thousand dollars worth of vegetables every year. It is a most common thing for berry-growers to realize that acreage product from an acre of berries in Louisiana or Washington. Celery, asparagus, lettuce, onions, and many other crops will yield as much when properly fertilized and cultivated. Anyone who doubts this can find ample proof of it at Duluth, Minnesota, or in California or Texas. Another thing should be borne in mind. One acre of land in the Colorado River Valley is the equivalent of five acres in a cold climate. Crops may be planted and matured so rapidly in that hot climate that plant growth more resembles hothouse forcing than ordinary out-of-door truck gardening. Another important fact is that all the tropical and semi-tropical fruits grow to perfection in that valley.