Part 15 (2/2)
It was the active out-of-door life that made the Scotch Homecrofters strong. It is the sedentary, indoor life, or the monotony of factory work, that is now sapping the vitality of our people and working havoc with our racial strength. The pity of it is that we have a country where we can reproduce the strong races of many different countries, if we would only recognize that the necessity for doing it is the biggest and most important national problem we have. We can match the country and the people where nearly every big thing for the real uplift of humanity has been done in recent years.
The Colorado River Drainage Basin has many characteristics like Australia, where they have adopted a very similar system of Land Reclamation and Settlement and the plan for Universal Military Service that is advocated in this book. We can duplicate Switzerland in West Virginia. We can match Belgium and Holland in Louisiana. We can do in Northern Minnesota what they have done in Denmark. We have many of the same problems in California that they have solved in New Zealand.
The fact should be carefully borne in mind, and never for a moment lost sight of, that everything that is advocated in the plan proposed in this book for national defense is something that would be chosen as a thing to be done if it had been determined to carry out the most splendid plan that could be devised for human advancement and national welfare in time of peace in the United States. Such a plan, having regard only to times of peace, would embody the entire plan advocated in this book. Even the military training of entire Homecroft communities, so as to be prepared for that emergency in case of war, is a discipline that would be most beneficial to physical and mental development in time of peace, without any regard to its importance in the event of war. It is most remarkable that all this should be true, but the basic reason for it is that, after all, the highest ultimate objective of national existence in time of peace is to continually lift humanity to higher and higher levels of physical and mental development; and to persevere until we attain the highest possible type of rugged physical and mental strength in man and woman. When war comes, the thing most needed is men--strong, vigorous, and hardy men; and they are the ideal at which all plans for racial development should aim in time of peace.
The Homecroft System of Life and Education eliminates the difficulties arising from a reliance in time of war on untrained levies in a country like ours, where so few are physically fit, without long training, for soldierly service. The Homecrofter, earning his living by digging it from the ground, is always strong and instantly fit for a soldier's work. The Homecrofter lives under conditions where he is not a cog in a wheel--not a part of any complicated industrial machine from which no part can be withdrawn without derangement of the whole. He is an independent unit in industry, self-sustaining, dependent on no one and no one dependent on him but his own family. If he is called away for military service, the family is able to conduct and cultivate the Homecroft, and gets its living therefrom. No one is left in need, as would so often happen in other cases, especially when State Militia might be called into real service. The Homecrofter earns his living in a way that makes it practicable for him to leave his accustomed vocation for a month or two every year for a period of military training without any prejudice or loss to him in that vocation.
The more these advantages of the Homecroft Reserve System are studied from a military point of view, the more their value will be appreciated. A rural nation like Servia or Montenegro can be practically a nation of soldiers.
Every man of military age is always ready for service. The Russian Cossack System accomplishes the same result. A nation of shopkeepers, commercial clerks, and factory employees cannot be utilized in that way for military service. The farming and rural population of the United States furnishes a better hope for a Citizen Soldiery in case of war than our city population, but in these days a farm has come to be really a factory, with complicated machinery, requiring training to operate it, and a chronic shortage of labor in busy seasons. Furthermore, rural population is as a rule so scattered that it would not be possible in time of peace to perfect the organization and give the Reservists the training necessary to prepare them for service in time of war and have them always ready for immediate action.
In the Homecroft Communities a million men may be almost as close together all the time as though they were in a Concentration Camp in time of war.
The organization of every company and regiment would be complete, officers and all, constantly in touch and working together to promote peace and do the work of peace but ready to do the work of war at any time if need be.
Officers in the Homecroft Reserve should be Homecrofters, trained in all the military knowledge necessary, but also trained as Homecrofters and getting their living that way.
It has often been said both of this country and of England that the country must not be turned into an armed camp, like the Continent of Europe. The fear is well grounded that if that were done the military spirit would soon dominate the nation and plunge it into all the evils of Militarism, with the danger always to be feared of an ultimate military despotism.
The plan for a Homecroft Reserve entirely eliminates that objection. A great Homecroft community comprising a million acre Homecrofts, tilled and lived on by a million trained Homecroft Reservists, in the Colorado River Valley, would make no militaristic impression on the character of the people at large in the United States as a whole. And the same statement would hold good, if another similar Homecroft Reserve of a million men on a million acres in each State were established in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California, another in Louisiana, another in Minnesota, and another in West Virginia.
And yet this immense Homecroft Reserve, aggregating an army of five million men in time of war, and ready at any time for instant service, would make the United States the most potentially powerful military nation in the world.
The lesson of this last great war will be learned, before it is over, by all the nations of the world. That lesson is that _men_, men of reckless daring and dauntless bravery, men utterly indifferent to their own lives when they can be sacrificed to save the nation, men like the Belgian gardeners who have fought for their homeland in this war, men like the j.a.panese gardeners who threw away their lives against Port Arthur, men like the Scotch Homecrofters who charged with the Scots Greys at Waterloo and have fought through the fierce carnage of a hundred b.l.o.o.d.y battlefields to sustain and build Britain's Empire Power; such men as the Minute Men of Concord or the Southern Chevaliers who rode with Marion; such men as those who fought with Jackson at New Orleans, whether they were Lafitte's smugglers and pirates from Barataria Bay or Mountaineers from other state or planters from the great sugar plantations of Louisiana, _men who, all of them, are fighting for their homes and their country_, const.i.tute a defense that rises above all others in strength and is the most powerful mobile force in modern warfare. Armed and equipped and organized they must be, and fired with the desperate valor that can be born only of patriotic devotion to a great cause; but when you have such men, and enough of them, no modern machinery of war, or engines of destruction, or fortifications can overcome them or stand against them. They are a force as irresistible as the eruption of a mighty volcano.
Those are some of the things to set to the credit of the plan for a Homecroft Reserve if needed for national defense in time of war.
Now measure their value in time of peace, for national defense against the evil forces that are gnawing at the very vitals of our national existence by degenerating our racial strength and physical and mental power as a people.
There is a remedy for the physical degeneracy caused by congested cities.
That remedy is that the populations of such cities shall be scattered into the suburbs where every family can have a home in which they can live in contact with nature. It must be a home with a garden, where they can, if need be, get their living from their own Homecroft. The Homecroft should be the princ.i.p.al source of livelihood for every family,--the factory employment, or the wage earned from it, should be secondary. This one condition, wherever it is brought into existence for an entire community, will end all labor conflicts and disturbances. The most pernicious and poisonous influence in American thought to-day starts from the minds of employers of labor who, sometimes perhaps subconsciously, think they must control labor by having the working people always on the edge of the precipice of starvation. The idea that the wage earner can only be controlled by being kept in a position of personal dependence and subserviency is as medieval, inhuman, and barbarously wrong as was the idea that human slavery was necessary for the control of labor.
We have achieved religious liberty, political liberty, civil liberty, and personal liberty, but industrial liberty remains yet to be accomplished.
Industrial slavery is the corner stone of our industrial edifice. It will continue so as long as the lives of great mult.i.tudes of wageworkers revolve around a _job_, and they know no other way to supply human needs but a wage. Better men will give better service, and employers will get better results, when every wage earner is located on a Homecroft from which he can in any hour of need provide the entire living for himself and family.
That condition is the only permanent remedy for unemployment. When all wage earners--all men and women--in this country are trained Homecrofters, able to build a house and furnish it themselves by their own skill and knowing how to get their living from one acre, whenever need be, the Homecroft life will be the universal life of the working people, _and there will be no unemployment_.
Unemployment will continue so long as there is a great ma.s.s of floating labor, living from day to day on a wage while it lasts, and starving when it stops. No scheme can be devised that will end the miseries caused by unemployment, so long as that system of a floating ma.s.s of workers is perpetuated. Human genius cannot prevent the ebb and flow of prosperity.
Eras of depression are inevitable. When they come, thousands will be out of employment. Labor Bureaus, private or public, will not change that condition, because they cannot create jobs where none exist. It is philanthropy and not business for an employer to retain men out of sympathy for them when he does not need their labor. Philanthropy is a poor foundation on which to try to build any economic structure. Better by far have every workingman a Homecrofter, whose labor is needed on his homecroft, in home-garden or home-workshop, whenever it is not needed in some wage-earning employment.
The labor of women and children in factories, aside from all other considerations, is an economic waste, from the broad standpoint of the highest welfare and prosperity for all the people. Any woman who is a trained Homecrofter is worth more in dollars and cents per day or per week for what she can produce from that homecroft than she can earn in any factory. The same is true of every child old enough to seek factory employment. Homecroft women and Homecroft children will never work in factories, and whenever their labor cannot be had the labor of men will be subst.i.tuted and the whole world will be the better for it when that time comes.
_But what has all this to do with a Homecroft Reserve?_
It has much to do with it.
Every community of Homecrofters created to enlarge and maintain the Homecroft Reserve, would be a training school for Homecrofters. The term of enlistment for the educational training furnished by these great National Inst.i.tutions for the training of Homecrofters would be five years. Each organized community would be practically a separate Homecroft village.
Every one that was organized would make it easier to organize the next.
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