Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 8

That comes largely from the physical vigor and endurance developed by the daily labor of the gardeners who till the soil. They have the land to cultivate because the devotion of the people to the good of all has led them to preserve their forests and water supplies. Where would they be to-day if the same spirit of selfish individualism, and apathy and indifference to the national welfare, and to the preservation of the nation's resources, had dominated j.a.pan, that has dominated China for centuries, and that now dominates the United States of America?

In "The Valor of Ignorance," the author, Homer Lea, most truly says:

"No national ideals could be more ant.i.thetic than are the ethical and civic ideals of j.a.pan to those existent in this Republic. One nation is a militant paternalism, where aught that belongs to man is first for the use of the State, the other an individualistic emporium where aught that belongs to man is for sale. In one is the complete subordination of the individual, in the other his supremacy."

The author might with equal truth have added that from the standpoint of the intrenched interests which control capital in the United States, and undertake to control legislation, Humanity and Mother Earth exist only for exploitation for private profit, and that the campaign to preserve and perpetuate our natural resources and regulate our rivers and build waterways and stop the ravages of Nature's devastating forces has not as yet succeeded only because it proposes to put the general welfare above speculation and exploitation.

This condition will continue until the ma.s.s of the people of the United States have a great patriotic awakening and take hold of the duty of perpetuating the country's natural resources, with the same patriotic enthusiasm that they would fight a foreign invader.

Let us not deceive ourselves. The majority of the people of the United States are as apathetic and indifferent to the great national questions involved in the preservation of our forests and water supplies, and of the fertility of our fields,--in the protection of our river valleys from floods,--in the defense of the whole Western half of the United States against the inroads of the desert,--in the protection of the mountain ridges of the Eastern half of the United States from deforestation,--and in the protection of our valleys from the fate which has befallen the valleys of China, as were the Chinese through the long centuries during which the grinding, destructive forces of Nature were devastating their country and bringing famine and ruin to millions of the people.

Let us heed the lesson of China, and before it is too late enlist the National Construction Reserve to combat this menace which threatens the welfare of our people--grapple with floods in the lower valleys and with floods in the mountain valleys; with forest fires and with forest denudation; with blighting drouth and with desert sands.

Let us recognize that our first duty to ourselves and to our country is to preserve the nation by preserving the resources within the nation, without which the human race must perish from the surface of the earth.

Once this great fundamental need is recognized for protecting the nation's resources and protecting the people by preserving the means whereby the people live, a national system for bringing into action concerted human effort and constructive energy will be organized.

It will be a system that will subst.i.tute for the patriotism, the inspiration, and the victories of war a higher patriotism, a more splendid inspiration, and a more glorious victory. That victory of peace which the people of the United States will finally win will be a greater achievement than anything which ever has or ever can be accomplished by warfare.

This nation can readily manufacture for itself, and store away in its a.r.s.enals and warehouses, all the arms and equipment, all the munitions of war that we would need to conduct a victorious war against any nation of the world. It could train sufficient officers, without any increase of our military expenditures, to lead an army large enough to successfully repel any invasion that might ever be attempted in any part of the United States.

In the event of a foreign invasion, what would we need that we would not have, _and could not get_, at least, _not quick enough to save ourselves from a stupendous disaster_?

We would need and could not get _men_,--trained _men_,--men hardened and inured to the demands of military service in the field. That is the one and only thing we would lack. All the rest of the problem would be easy of solution.

To undertake to enlist a militia of a million men in the United States would not supply this need. The most vital of all the many elements of weakness in militia, especially in this country to-day, would be the total lack of physical stamina and hardihood in the men themselves. Of what use are soldiers who can shoot, in these days of modern warfare, unless they can also dig trenches and endure hardships which are to the ordinary man impossible and inconceivable of being borne?

This necessity for men, _trained and hardened men_, men inured to the hardships of military service, would be even greater in this country in the event of a war than in any European country, because of the more primitive condition of the country. Vast areas of the United States are uninhabited and waterless. The climate varies from the intolerable heat, to those not accustomed to it, of the southwestern deserts, to the freezing blizzards of the North.

How are we to supply this need for men trained and toughened to every hardship that must be borne by a soldier fighting under our flag in time of war? The answer is, by enlisting them under the same flag to do the arduous work of peace, which will harden them for the work of war, if they are ever needed in that field of action.

How many of our people are there who realize the work that is being done for Uncle Sam, every day in the year, by the few men who are giving themselves, in a spirit of patriotism equal to that of any soldier, to the field work of the Forest Service, to building forest fire trails, to fighting forest fires. They give warning nowadays of a forest fire, as the people of the Scottish border gave warning of an invasion in the Olden days. When an invading force was coming up from the South a warning was flashed across Scotland from the Solway to the Tweed with a line of balefires that flamed into the night from the turrets of their castles. It was a call to conflict. It put men on their mettle. So a call to fight a forest fire is a call to conflict and puts men on their mettle for a combat with the oncoming sweep of the devouring fire.

Would not the men who are inured to the work of making surveys across rugged mountains, and to quarrying the rock, laying the stone, digging the ca.n.a.ls, and doing all the hard physical work that must be done by the men who have built the great reservoirs and ca.n.a.ls constructed by the Reclamation Service, be toughened and hardened by it and fitted to dig trenches in actual warfare, as they have been digging them in Belgium, France, Prussia, and Poland?

For the hard and trying physical work of war there could be no better training than to do the labor for which the Reclamation Service has paid out millions of dollars in the last ten years.

The surveyors of the Land Department, the topographers of the Geological Survey, the men in the field in every branch of Uncle Sam's service, who are winning for this nation its greatest victories, the victories of peace, are by that work physically developed into the very best and most efficient type of strong and rugged manhood--the stuff of which soldiers must be made.

As a nation we must recognize this all important fact, and avail ourselves of it. We must build at least one branch of a Reserve that would const.i.tute an adequate organized system of national defense on this foundation:

That all government work shall be done by day's work and none by contract.

That every dollar that is paid out by Uncle Sam for the doing of constructive government work, which could be temporarily suspended in time of war, shall be paid to a man who had been regularly enlisted in a Construction Reserve for the purpose of doing this work. That those men shall be trained to do that work, and paid for doing it, exactly as though no other object existed. And that every man so enlisted shall be liable instantly to military service if the need should arise, by reason of our country being involved in war with any other nation.

Every man employed in that service should be enlisted for a term of from three to five years and trained in every way necessary to fit him to perform the duties of a soldier and to endure the hardships of a soldier's life in the event of war.

The Forest Service is now absurdly and pitifully inadequate to the needs of the country. With the exception of small areas recently acquired in the White Mountain and Appalachian regions, its work is chiefly in the western half of the United States.

The work of the Forest Service should be enlarged to meet the needs of the entire country. They should reforest every denuded mountain side, and plant millions upon millions of acres of forests in every State in the United States. That work should go on until in every State the matured forests are ample to provide for all its needs for wood or timber.

The work of the Reclamation Service, instead of being confined to the West only, should be extended to the entire United States. It should be made to include reclamation by drainage and by protection from overflow just as it now includes reclamation by irrigation. Irrigation systems should be constructed and maintained for the purpose of demonstrating the value of water to increase plant growth, not only in the arid regions, but in every State, East as well as West.

Every acre reclaimed should bear the burden of the benefit it received from the work of the national government and pay its proportion of the cost of reclamation. The entire investment of the government should be repaid with interest. The annual charge should include interest and a sinking fund that would return the capital invested, with interest, within fifty years. The original plan of the National Reclamation Act for a repayment in ten years without interest was wrong. It placed an immediate burden on the settler that was too heavy to be practicable. The Extension Amendment was likewise wrong, because no provision was made for interest. The indebtedness should have been capitalized at a very low rate of interest under some plan similar to the British System in India. The future success of reclamation work by the national government requires that the investment shall be returned with interest.

In every State the works should be built, in cooperation with the States, munic.i.p.alities, and local districts, that are necessary to extend to the people of every valley, from Maine to California, from Washington to Florida, and from Montana to Texas, complete a.s.surance of protection from the flood menace in all years. The floods which have in the past brought such appalling catastrophes upon whole valleys and communities, at a cost of millions if not billions of dollars, should be harnessed and controlled and turned from demons of destruction into food-producers and commerce-carriers.

If j.a.pan should land an army on the Pacific Coast would we leave it to future generations to defend us against that invasion? It is equally monstrous and wrong for this generation to leave to future generations the building of the great works of defense necessary to check the invasion of our valleys by disastrous floods, or the destruction of our forests by the ravages of fire.

Whenever a forest fire breaks out anywhere, there should be an adequate force of men enlisted in Uncle Sam's service for that purpose, to promptly extinguish it. It is as wrong to leave such work wholly to local initiative or action as it would be wrong to leave to the States the question of national defense from possible attack by other nations. Cooperation with the States there should always be, and this the States will willingly extend. Of that we need have no fear. But the initiative must be taken, and the basic plans made and furnished, by the national government. Otherwise the work will never be done that is necessary to defend the nation against Nature's invasions--against forest fires and floods, against drouth and overflow, against denudation and erosion, and against the slow but inexorable encroachments of the Desert in the arid region. The States will not and cannot do it. It requires the overshadowing authority, initiative and financial resources of the national government.

The Office of Public Roads of the national government should be made a Service for _Construction_, like the Forest Service and the Reclamation Service. Whatever the national government does to aid in the construction of highways it should do by building them itself, whether they be built as models, to stimulate local interest, or as object lessons to the States through which they run, or as great national highways of travel, linking the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Great Lakes to the Gulf in a continuous system of roads as magnificent as those of ancient Rome. In time of war they would be military highways. In time of peace they would be national highways that would be traveled by mult.i.tudes of our people.

A Waterway Service for _Construction_ should be created, wholly separate and apart from the War Department or any of its engineers or employees, to build for this country as complete a system of waterways as now exists in any of the countries of Europe--real waterways, waterways built to float boats on and to carry inland commerce. Waterways must be built for commerce and to const.i.tute a national waterway system. The false pretense must stop of spending money on waterways merely as a club to lower railroad rates.

That policy of indirection and sham has prompted the waste of too many millions of dollars of the people's money in this country.

In this one great interrelated and interdependent work of forest and water conservation, of reclaiming land by irrigation, drainage, and protection from overflow, of regulating and developing the flow of rivers for power development and navigation, and doing everything necessary for the protection of every flood-menaced community and valley, enough men should be enlisted in the different services through which the work is to be done, to do this work with all the expedition required by the welfare of the people at large of this generation.

This would necessitate the employment of an ultimate total of a million men, scattered throughout every State of the Union. Every dollar paid to them in wages, and every dollar expended in connection with their work, would prevent devastation or create values for the nation immensely larger than the total expenditure. The values created and benefits a.s.sured in time of peace would alone justify the expenditure. The value to the nation of such a great Reserve Force of trained and hardened men in time of war would again justify the expenditure. But in the initial expenditure both ends would be attained.

What we pay out from year to year for the support of our Standing Army and our Navy, after each year has pa.s.sed, is wasted and gone. It is too high a rate to pay for insurance, which in fact is no insurance at all against a possible war. If such a war should come, the Standing Army and the Navy would be hopelessly inadequate for our protection.

The system must be changed. The Standing Army, without any increased expenditure, must be made a training school for all the officers needed for a Reserve of at least a million men. This should be done immediately! The day is at hand when the nation must take time by the forelock and in time of peace prepare for war, in a sane, intelligent, adequate, and effective way. If it is not done we run the grave risk, with the possibility of war always facing us, of being subjected by our national indifference to the fearful cost of such a conflict if we were forced into it unprepared.

Shall we do this, and get back the full value of every dollar expended, or shall we face the ever growing possibility of a war of one or two or three years duration, costing us in cash outlay two or three billion dollars a year?

It will be argued against this plan for an enlisted National Construction Reserve that the men would have no military training in the event that the need should instantly arise for utilizing them as soldiers. That objection should be removed, by applying to the entire Construction Service, the Swiss system of military training for a fixed period during each year, long enough to train a man for the work of a soldier, but not long enough to demoralize or ruin him as a man or as a citizen by the life of the barracks or the camp.

The men enlisted in the Construction Service, and entirely under civil control in all the work they would do for ten months of the year, could be given military instruction during the remaining two months. That would not bring upon the people of this country any of the evils that would result from maintaining a standing army large enough to serve as an army of defense in the event of a foreign invasion. And yet, with such a trained Reserve Force already enlisted, the United States would be prepared to instantly put into the field an army of trained and hardened soldiers. Its Reserve Force would be so large that the mere existence of that force would make this nation one of the strongest nations of the world in any military contest. We might then rest a.s.sured that other nations would hesitate to attack us or invade our territory. That possibility of danger would be absolutely removed if the plan which will be later outlined for the creation of a National Homecroft Reserve were adopted as an additional means of national defense.

It will again be argued that we have no system of training officers for an army of any such magnitude. This is quite true. It is an objection that must be met and overcome. The War Department should be required to train and provide these officers. The military posts on which such great sums have been spent for political reasons, and so few of which are located where they should be for real military reasons, should be turned into military training schools for officers.

The rank and file of the regular army should be drawn from a cla.s.s of men who could be trained in those schools in all the necessary knowledge of military science to qualify them to be officers. They might be private soldiers in the regular army, and at the same time commissioned or non-commissioned officers in the Reserve. A regular army of 50,000, if established on a proper basis, would be able to supply officers for a Reserve of 1,000,000 men.

Every private soldier in the regular army should be a man fit to become an officer, and in process of training with that object in view. And when that training had been completed, he should be a.s.signed to his detail or his command in the Reserve. A private soldier in time of peace in the regular army, he would instantly become an officer in the Reserve in time of war.

The system should contemplate the retention in the government service, in some constructive capacity, of every man once trained as an officer and capable of rendering service as such in case of war. It is wrong to expect such men to return to private life with a military string tied to them, and take up the complicated duties of a commercial career, with the family obligations that they ought to a.s.sume resting upon them, without providing for the contingencies that a call for an immediate return to active service would create.

Every soldier trained as an officer should be retained in the government service, either civil or military, under conditions which would make it possible for him to establish a family and a home, and at the same time be certain that his family would suffer no privation if he were called to active service in the event of war. This is not the place to work out the details of such a plan, but it is entirely practicable. The details should be worked out by the War Department.

If the people will provide a Reserve of enlisted men under civil control, doing the work of peace in time of peace, and ready for the work of war in time of war, it would be a confession of incompetence for the War Department to question their capacity to train officers for this reserve.

Doubtless, however, some of the present regular army idols would have to be shattered.

One of the most serious aspects of our unpreparedness for any military conflict lies in the _incompleteness_ of the present system. As the author of "The Valor of Ignorance" well says, we have no military system. We have no means of training an adequate number of officers or holding them in readiness for service during a long period of peace. Provision should be made immediately for the War Department to train these officers.

The plan outlined would eliminate the element of weakness that would result from an effort to utilize for national defense officers having no training except that acquired in the State militia. In the plan advocated, every officer needed for an army of a million men in the field would be ready at any moment to step into the service and would have been trained in the work by the military machine of which he would by that act become a part.

The army should be cut away entirely from all partic.i.p.ation in the civil affairs of the country, and should devote itself to its legitimate field of getting ready for a possible war and fighting it for us if it should ever come. Instead of blocking the way for the adoption of a comprehensive plan for river regulation and flood protection throughout the country for fear of interference with their existing privileges and authority, their work should be concentrated on the field they are created to fill. That field is the protection of the country from internal disturbance or external invasion. The civil affairs of the country should be conducted through organized machinery created for civil purposes, and not complicated with the red tape and rule of thumb methods of the War Department. For this work, initiative, constructive imagination and scientific genius must be evoked, and these the Army has not. So long as they cling to this field of work, just that long will progress be delayed, and the legitimate work of the Army be neglected.