Part 15 (1/2)
That conclusion is so self-evident and conservative, and the opportunity that England had to have such a force in reserve is so plain that it seems hard to believe that the United States will ignore its lesson and fail to establish a Homecroft Reserve in this country.
England had the original stock from which to breed such a brave and hardy race of soldiers, and _they were the original Homecrofters_. There were not a million of them, but there were many thousands of them two centuries ago.
There were so many that to-day there might easily have been a million such Homecrofters in England's army in Europe if the Homecroft Reserve System had been established when the trouble first began between the Homecrofters and the Great Landlords who finally succeeded in riveting the curse of land monopoly around Scotland's neck.
It may be argued that this suggestion is an afterthought, and that, as the Arab saying puts it, ”The ditches are full of bright afterthoughts.” That may be true as to England. But it is not true as to the United States. If we knew that it would be two hundred years before the great final struggle would be fought to determine whether the Pacific Coast of the United States should be dominated by the Asiatic or Caucasian race, right now is the time when we should begin to breed and train our millions of men who will have to fight that battle for us whenever the time does come that it has to be fought. It is as inevitable as fate that the conflict will come unless we safeguard against it by peopling America with a race as hardy and virile as the races on the Pacific sh.o.r.es of Asia are to-day.
The rugged physical manhood, rough daring and bravery, hardihood and endurance, self-reliance and resourcefulness, readiness for any emergency on land or sea, that characterized the type of men from whom the Homecroft Reserves would have been bred, and the rough rural environment in which they would have been reared, is strikingly described by S. R. Crockett in his novel ”The Raiders.”
And in ”The Dark o' the Moon,” the sequel to ”The Raiders,” he tells of the first of the struggles that were begun two centuries ago by the Homecrofters of Scotland to preserve their immemorial privileges of elbow-room and pasturage, as against the selfishness of the Landlord System that finally prevailed. That system decimated Scotland of her bravest men and left in their places hunting grounds and great estates to be sold or rented to American Sn.o.bocrats, who are not fighting any of England's battles in this war.
The early conflicts between the Landlords and the Homecrofters are referred to, and the scene of one of these conflicts is so interestingly told by the same author in his Book called ”Raiderland,” that the following quotation is made from it:
”The water-meadows, rich with long deep gra.s.s that one could hide in standing erect, bog-myrtle bushes, hazelnuts, and brambles big as prize gooseberries and black as--well, as our mouths when we had done eating them. Woods of tall Scotch firs stood up on one hand, oak and ash on the other. Out in the wimpling fairway of the Black Lane, the Hollan Isle lay anch.o.r.ed. Such a place for nuts! You could get back-loads and back-loads of them to break your teeth upon in the winter forenights. You could ferry across a raft laden with them. Also, and most likely, you could fall off the raft yourself and be well-nigh drowned. You might play hide-and-seek about the Camp, which (though marked 'probably Roman' in the Survey Map) is not a Roman Camp at all, instead only the last fortification of the Levellers in Galloway--those brave but benighted cottiers and crofters who rose in belated rebellion because the lairds shut them out from their poor moorland pasturages and peat-mosses.
”Their story is told in that more recent supplement to 'The Raiders' ent.i.tled 'The Dark o' the Moon.' There the record of their deliberations and exploits is in the main truthfully enough given, and the fact is undoubted that they finished their course within their entrenched camp upon the Duchrae bank, defying the king's troops with their home-made pikes and rusty old Covenanting swords.
”There is a ford (says this chronicle) over the Lane of Grennoch, near where the clear brown stream detaches itself from the narrows of the loch, and a full mile before it unites its slow-moving lily-fringed stream with the Black Water o' Dee rus.h.i.+ng down from its granite moorlands.
”The Lane of Grennoch seemed to that comfortable English drover, Mr. Job Brown, like a bit of Warwicks.h.i.+re let into the moory boggish desolations of Galloway. But even as he lifted his eyes from the lily-pools where the broad leaves were already browning and turning up at the edges, lo! there, above him, peeping through the russet heather of a Scottish October, was a boulder of the native rock of the province, lichened and water-worn, of which the poet sings:
”'See yonder on the hillside scaur, Up among the heather near and far, Wha but Granny Granite, auld Granny Granite, Girnin' wi' her grey teeth.'
”If the traveller will be at the pains to cross the Lane of Grennoch, or, as it is now more commonly called, the Duchrae Lane, a couple of hundred yards north of the bridge, he will find a way past an old cottage, the embowered pleasure-house of many a boyish dream, out upon the craggy face of the Crae Hill. Then over the trees and hazel bushes of the Hollan Isle, he will have (like Captain Austin Tredennis) a view of the entire defences of the Levellers and of the way by which most of them escaped across the fords of the Dee Water, before the final a.s.sault by the king's forces.
”The situation was naturally a strong one--that is, if, as was at the time most likely, it had to be attacked solely by cavalry, or by an irregular force acting without artillery.
”In front the Grennoch Lane, still and deep with a bottom of treacherous mud swamps, encircled it to the north, while behind was a good mile of broken ground, with frequent marshes and moss-hags. Save where the top of the camp mound was cleared to admit of the scant brushwood tents of the Levellers, the whole position was further covered and defended by a perfect jungle of bramble, whin, thorn, sloe, and hazel, through which paths had been opened in all directions to the best positions of defence.”
”Such about the year 1723 was the place where the poor, brave, ignorant cottiers of Galloway made their last stand against the edict which (doubtless in the interests of social progress and the new order of things) drove them from their hillside holdings, their trim patches of cleared land, their scanty rigs of corn high in lirks of the mountain, or in blind 'hopes'
still more sheltered from the blast.
”Opposite Glenhead, at the uppermost end of the Trod valley, you can see when the sun is setting over western Loch Moar and his rays run level as an ocean floor, the trace of walled enclosures, the outer rings of farm-steadings, the d.y.k.e-ridges that enclosed the _Homecrofts_, small as pocket-handkerchiefs; and higher still, ascending the mountainside, regular as the stripes on corduroy, you can trace the ancient rigs where the corn once bloomed bonny even in these wildest and most remote recesses of the hills. All is now pa.s.sed away and matter for romance--but it is truth all the same, and one may tell it without fear and without favour.
”From the Crae Hill, especially if one continues a little to the south till you reach the summit cairn above the farmhouse of Nether Crae you can see many things. For one thing you are in the heart of the Covenant Country.
”He pointed north to where on Auchencloy Moor the slender shaft of the Martyrs' Monument gleamed white among the darker heather--south to where on Kirkconnel hillside Grier of Lag found six living men and left six corpses--west towards Wigton Bay, where the tide drowned two of the bravest of womankind, tied like dogs to a stake--east to the kirkyards of Balmaghie and Cross-michael, where under the trees the martyrs of Scotland lie thick as gowans on the lea.”
”Save by general direction you cannot take in all these by the seeing of the eye from the Crae Hill. But you are in the midst of them, and the hollows of the hills where the men died for their 'thocht,' and the quiet G.o.d's Acres where they lie buried, are as much of the essence of Scotland as the red flus.h.i.+ng of the heather in autumn and the hill tarns and 'Dhu Lochs' scattered like dark liquid eyes over the face of the wilds.”
Well may England, as she looked over the battlefields of Belgium, and mourned the thousands and tens of thousands of her brave men whose lives have paid the forfeit for her heedlessness, and listened to the bombardment of her North Sea coast towns by German battles.h.i.+ps, and scanned the sky watching for the coming of the aerial invasion her people so much feared, have reflected on the pathos of those lines so often quoted:
”Of all sad things of tongue or pen, The saddest are these, it might have been.”
_Shall we learn by their experience, or shall we follow in England's footsteps and have the same sort of an awakening?_
The same identical influences and traits of human character that drove the Homecrofters from Scotland will be responsible for our failure to take warning from England's lesson, if we do so fail. It is the disposition of intrenched interests to grasp for more and more, and constantly more, that has imperiled England's national life. The same grasping policy of the intrenched interests in the United States now imperils the national life of this nation in the future by the absorption of our national resources and what remains of our public domain into private speculative owners.h.i.+p while the toiling millions are crowded into the tenements. We could survive the loss of what the intrenched interests have already taken if they would only let loose on what is left and let Uncle Sam have a free hand to do with his own as is best for all his people in places like the Colorado River country. There the greater part of the land needed is still public land, and speculators have not as yet acquired the water rights and power possibilities.
England could not and the United States cannot maintain a great standing army, but England could have established and maintained a Homecroft Reserve of a million men in Scotland, and we can do it in the Colorado River Valley, and other places where it ought to be done in the United States, provided the land and water power can be saved from the clutch of the speculators before they have so complicated the proposition as to interminably delay it while Uncle Sam is getting back from them what ought never to have been granted away.
England had the Scotch Homecrofters, and drove them from the homes of their forefathers to make great estates. We have got to organize our Homecroft Reservists and locate them, and train them, but that can be done.
There are thousands of the descendants of the Scotch Homecrofters serving England to-day in the Canadian Contingent Corps in Europe, and doubtless more than one of the crew of the Australian Cruiser that sunk the Emden could trace his pedigree back to a Galloway Drover, a Solway Smuggler, or a Border Raider. From the s.h.i.+elings of the Scotch Homecrofters there went out into the world a race that has made good, wherever it has gone. Would it not be well to think of that in the United States to-day and breed some more of the same st.u.r.dy Homecroft Stock in this country, for patriotic service either in peace or war?