Our National Defense: The Patriotism of PeaceMaxwell, George Hebard
History
Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace
Maxwell, George Hebard
United States -- Defenses
When the electric light was first demonstrated to be a scientific success,
few realized in how short a time electricity would light the world. The
development of electric transportation and of the automobile are familiar
illustrations. Only a few years have elapsed since Kipling wrote "Across
the Atlantic with the Irish Mail." How many would then have believed
possible the work of the Aëroplane Service in the present war? And yet, all
that has so far been done is only a forecast of greater development in
aërial navigation in the near future. The original inventor of the
telephone has seen the evolution of its vast utilization and recently was
the first to talk over a wire across the continent.
No one would for a moment question that the national government could
establish an educational institution in which one thousand men with their
families could be located in a cottage on an acre of ground, and the men
trained in truck-gardening and poultry raising, and the women trained to
cook the products of the garden and poultry yard for the family table. That
is all there is to it; and to train a thousand men in that way is no more
difficult than to take a thousand raw recruits and transform them into a
regiment of trained soldiers. It is likewise beyond question that the same
man can be trained for both vocations, and every Homecroft Reservist would
be so trained. Gardeners make ideal soldiers. The Japanese proved that.
No one familiar with the multitude of cases where it has been done, would
have any doubt that a man and woman who know how to intensively cultivate
an acre can produce from it what that man and that woman need for their own
family to eat, and a surplus product worth from five hundred to a thousand
dollars a year or more. Neither would they doubt that a thousand could do
the same thing. Nor, again, would they doubt that one thousand men and
women of average intelligence and industry, who did not know how, could
learn the way to do it from competent instructors.
If that can be done with one thousand it can be done with ten thousand; and
if it can be done with ten thousand it can be done with one hundred
thousand, or one million, or five million. It would indeed be strange if
this nation could not train five million families so they would be
competent truck-gardeners, when that vocation has been mastered by thirty
million of Japan's rural population.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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