Our National Defense: The Patriotism of PeaceMaxwell, George Hebard
History
Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace
Maxwell, George Hebard
United States -- Defenses
Whenever the nation starts, as is advocated in this book, to immediately
establish a Homecroft Reserve of 100,000 in the Colorado River Country near
Yuma; 100,000 in the San Joaquin Valley in California; 100,000 in
Louisiana; 100,000 in West Virginia; and 100,000 in Minnesota,--500,000 in
all,--and gets that part of its work for national defense done, each
100,000 will be rapidly extended to 1,000,000. That will mean that there
will be 5,000,000 enlisted Homecroft Reservists being trained as soldiers
of peace as well as soldiers for war--being trained to produce food for man
with a hoe as well as to defend their country, if need arises, with a gun.
Every Homecrofter and his entire family will be _students_, learning to be
Homecrofters, all of them, and taking a five years' course. One fifth of
the total 5,000,000 would be enlisted and the same number graduated every
year.
_What would be the result?_
Every year, year after year, 1,000,000 trained, scientific
Homecrofters--trained in home-handicraft, and in fruit-culture,
truck-gardening, berry-growing, poultry-raising, and in putting all their
products in shape for marketing, whether in their own stomachs or in the
markets of the world--would be graduated from these Homecroft villages
comprising the Homecroft Reserves. Each would have had a five years' course
in that training--a year longer than required for an ordinary college
course and of infinitely more practical value to them than a college
course.
They would pay for the use and occupancy of the Homecroft, and for the
instruction they would receive, a sum sufficient to cover all the cost of
providing the instruction, and six per cent on the value of the Homecroft,
four per cent interest and two per cent to go to a sinking fund that would
equal the value of the Homecroft in fifty years. The government would get
back every dollar it invested, with interest, and make the profit between
the cost of the Homecroft and its fixed ultimate value of $1,000. That
value would be from twenty to thirty per cent profit on the original
investment by the government.
Every one of the 1,000,000 Homecroft families that would be graduated every
year would go out into the great field of our national life and activity,
looking first for a Homecroft and second for employment in some industrial
vocation.
_Now how many of our people are there who can be induced to sit down and
hold their heads in their hands until they have stopped the whirl in which
most of their minds are involved, long enough to seriously weigh the
difference in value to the country and to every industrial and commercial
interest of 1,000,000 such trained homecrofters, compared with the
1,000,000 untrained and ignorant foreign immigrants whom we have been
swallowing up every year for so many years in the maw of our congested
cities?_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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