This great work of safeguarding and defending the Mississippi Valley, the Ohio Valley, and the Missouri Valley from flood invasion, if done by the United States for those valleys, must, in the same way and to the same extent, be done by the nation for all other flood-menaced valleys throughout the country. It necessitates working out, in coöperation with the States and local municipalities and districts, a comprehensive and complete plan for water conservation, and its highest possible utilization for all the beneficial purposes to which water can be devoted. It necessitates the preservation of the forests and woodland cover on the watersheds, the reforestation of denuded areas, and the planting of new forests on a thousand hillsides and mountains and on treeless plains where none exist to-day. It necessitates the building of model communities on irrigated lands intensively cultivated, as object lessons, in a multitude of localities, to demonstrate the value, for many beneficial uses, of the water which now runs to waste in floods. It necessitates the establishment and maintenance of a great system of education to train the people in the intensive cultivation of land and the use of water to produce food for mankind, and thereby transform an agency of destruction into an agency of production on a stupendous scale. It necessitates building and operating great reservoir systems, main line canals, and engineering works, large and small, of every description that have ever been built anywhere in the world for the control of water for beneficial use, and to prevent floods and feed waterways. To have an inland waterway system in the United States, in fact as well as in name, necessitates building on all the rivers of this country such works as have been built on every river in Germany, such works as the Grand Canal of China, and such works as the English government has built or supervised in India and Egypt, and is now planning to build to reclaim again for human habitation the once populous but now desert and uninhabited plains of Mesopotamia. No argument ought to be needed to convince the people of the United States that this great work of national defense against Nature's forces should arouse the same patriotic inspiration and stimulate us to the same superhuman effort and energy that we would put forth to prevent any section of our country from being devastated by war. But if such an argument were needed it is found in the condition of Mesopotamia to-day, as compared with the days of Babylon's wealth and prosperity.