If the government can acquire by purchase, as is now being done, another million acres of forest lands in the Appalachian Mountains under the Appalachian National Forest Act, is there any reason why it should not acquire a million acres of land in West Virginia and irrigate it and subdivide it into one-acre garden homes, and put Homecrofters on it to intensively cultivate the land? If it can do that in West Virginia, is there any reason why it should not be done in Louisiana or in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley in California? In the case of the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements the government will see to it, itself, that its work does in fact result in actual home making, whereas speculators get the ultimate benefit of much of the other work that it does. If the government can maintain a Department of Agriculture at an expense of $20,000,000 in one year, for the instruction of farmers in _agriculture_, who get the benefit of that service without paying for it, is there any reason why it should not maintain educational institutions to train Homecroft Reservists in _Acreculture_, if they pay for the cost of that instruction and all the expenses of maintaining the necessary educational institutions? If the government can enlist men in the regular army for national defense and put them in camps and barracks in time of peace to waste their time in idleness, is there any reason why it should not enlist men in a Reserve and put them in Homecrofts, where their labor will be utilized in production, and the elevating influence of family and community life be substituted for the demoralizing influences of the life of the camp or barracks? There is no more reason why the government should not build and perpetually own the Homecrofts used for this national purpose of education and defense than there is that it should not own the Military Academy at West Point or the Naval Academy at Annapolis, or any land used by the Agricultural Department for any of its work, which is educational, or by the War Department, which is for national defense. The Homecrofts used to train and maintain in the service the Homecroft Reserves would be used for a combination of both purposes, and their cost would be just as properly classified as an expenditure for national defense as the cost of any existing camp, barracks, or army post now owned by the government. The burden of the Standing Army of less than 100,000 men now maintained by the United States could be very considerably reduced by establishing as large a portion of it as possible in the Homecroft System, were it not for the false ideals as to human values that are apparently so deeply imbedded in the minds of the military caste. _The entire Homecroft Reserve System should be organized as a separate department of the National government like the Forest Service or Reclamation Service, and should be known as the Homecroft Service._