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 Japanese 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 bloody 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_, constitute 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.