Part 13 (1/2)
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 Was.h.i.+ngton. 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?