Part 7 (1/2)

The work of the Reclamation Service should be done, not by hired contractors, but by a Construction Corps of men enlisted in that Service.

They should be set to work building all the works necessary to reclaim every acre of desert land and every acre of swamp or overflow land that can be reclaimed in the United States.

The cost of all reclamation work done by the national government should be charged against the land and repaid with interest from the date of the investment. The interest charge should be no more than the government would have to pay on the capital invested, with an additional annual charge sufficient to form a sinking fund that would repay the princ.i.p.al in fifty years.

The work of the Forest Service as well as that of the Reclamation Service should be put on a business basis. New forests should be planted where their value when matured will equal the investment in their creation, with interest and cost of maintenance.

The same system of enlisting a Construction Corps to do all construction work should be adopted in every department of the national government which is doing or should be doing the vast volume of construction work which stands waiting at every hand. Each branch should have its regularly enlisted Construction Corps.

All the different branches of the government dealing in any way with forestry or with the conservation, use, or control of water, in the War Department, Interior Department, Agricultural Department, or Commerce Department, should be coordinated and brought together in a Board of River Regulation. The coordination of their work should be made mandatory by law through that organization. All the details of perfecting the formation of the Construction Reserve and its organization for constructive service in time of peace and for military service in time of war should be worked out through this coordinating Board of River Regulation.

The duty of the men enlisted in the National Construction Reserve would be not only to do the work allotted to them, but to do it in such a way as to dignify labor in all the works of peace. It should show the patriotic spirit with which work in the public service can be done to protect the country from Nature's devastations. It should demonstrate that such work can be done in time of peace, with the same energy and enthusiasm that prevail in time of war.

_But in case of war_, the National Construction Reserve must be so organized that it can be instantly transformed into _an army of trained and seasoned soldiers_--soldiers that can beat their plowshares into swords at a day's notice, and as quickly beat the swords back into plowshares when weapons are no longer needed.

In the development of this idea lies the a.s.sured safety of this nation against the dangers of unpreparedness in the event of war. There will be more than work enough for such a Construction Reserve to do in time of peace for generations yet to come.

Such floods as those which swept through the Mississippi Valley in 1912 and 1913 are _an invasion by Nature's forces_. They bring ruin to thousands and devastate vast areas. They overwhelm whole communities with losses as great as the destruction which would be caused by the invasion of an armed force.

Floods of that character are national catastrophes, as are likewise such floods as that which devastated the Ohio Valley in 1913, and the more recent floods in Southern California and Texas. Floods should be safeguarded against by an organized national system for flood protection.

That National System for River Regulation and Flood Control should be brought into being and impelled to action by an overwhelming mental force, generated in the minds of the whole people. It should be a power as irresistible as that which projected us into the war with Spain, after the Maine was blown up in Havana harbor.

The ungoverned floods which for years have periodically devastated the Great Central Valley of the United States can never be wholly safeguarded against by any sort of local defense. They must be controlled at their sources. The problem is interstate and national. Works to prevent floods in the Lower Mississippi Valley from Cairo to the Gulf of Mexico, must be constructed, maintained, and operated on every tributary of the Ohio, the Upper Mississippi, and the Missouri Rivers--a stupendous project but entirely practicable.

The water must be conserved and controlled where it originally falls. It must be held back on the watershed of every source stream. If this were done, the floods of the Ohio River Valley could be so reduced, and the flow of the river so regulated, as never in the future to cause damage or destruction.

The same is true of the Missouri and the Upper Mississippi Rivers. If the floods were controlled on the source streams and upper tributaries, the floods of the Lower Mississippi could be protected against by levees, supplemented by controlled outlets and spillways as additional safeguards.

Millions of garden homes could in that way be made as safe in the delta of the Mississippi River now annually menaced by overflow as anywhere on the high bench lands or plateaus of the Missouri Valley.

To do this work would be to defend a territory twice as large as the entire cultivated area of the Empire of j.a.pan against the annual menace of destruction by Nature's forces.

Is not that a national work that is worth doing? Is not that the right sort of national defense? Is it not an undertaking large enough to arouse and inspire the whole people of this great nation to demand its accomplishment?

To do it right, and to do it thoroughly and effectively, necessitates the systematic organization of a Construction Corps under national direction for that work. It would require that we should put forth national energy as powerful, and mental and physical effort as vigorously effective, as that demanded by war.

Why then should not a National Construction Reserve be organized to do that work as efficiently in time of peace as it could be done by a military organization in time of war, if the doing of it were a war necessity instead of a peace measure?

If we ever succeed in safeguarding this and other nations against war, it will be because we have learned to do the work of peace with the same energy, efficiency, patriotism, and individual self-sacrifice that is now given to the work of war. It is because Germany learned this lesson three centuries ago with reference to her forests and her waterways that she now has a system of forests and waterways built by the hand of man and built better than those of any other nation of the world.

This great work of safeguarding and defending the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the Missouri Valley from flood invasion, if done by the United States for those valleys, must, in the same way and to the same extent, be done by the nation for all other flood-menaced valleys throughout the country.

It necessitates working out, in cooperation with the States and local munic.i.p.alities and districts, a comprehensive and complete plan for water conservation, and its highest possible utilization for all the beneficial purposes to which water can be devoted.

It necessitates the preservation of the forests and woodland cover on the watersheds, the reforestation of denuded areas, and the planting of new forests on a thousand hillsides and mountains and on treeless plains where none exist to-day.

It necessitates the building of model communities on irrigated lands intensively cultivated, as object lessons, in a mult.i.tude of localities, to demonstrate the value, for many beneficial uses, of the water which now runs to waste in floods.

It necessitates the establishment and maintenance of a great system of education to train the people in the intensive cultivation of land and the use of water to produce food for mankind, and thereby transform an agency of destruction into an agency of production on a stupendous scale.

It necessitates building and operating great reservoir systems, main line ca.n.a.ls, and engineering works, large and small, of every description that have ever been built anywhere in the world for the control of water for beneficial use, and to prevent floods and feed waterways.

To have an inland waterway system in the United States, in fact as well as in name, necessitates building on all the rivers of this country such works as have been built on every river in Germany, such works as the Grand Ca.n.a.l of China, and such works as the English government has built or supervised in India and Egypt, and is now planning to build to reclaim again for human habitation the once populous but now desert and uninhabited plains of Mesopotamia.