Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace Part 15

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?

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.