Because the agricultural immigrants from Italy--the ideal settlers for the Colorado River Valley--are being herded in Concentration Camps in the tenements of the congested cities. Their skill as gardeners is wasted, their knowledge of art and handicraft lost, their children morally and physically degenerated, and their racial strength diminished. Gunmen and black-handers are evolved from that evil environment. We are rotting a race of virile rural people, instead of directing the vast human power inherent in them to creating a new Valley of the Nile, and building a new Alexandria at Yuma and a new Cairo at Parker, and planting every family that was located on a Garden Home in that marvelously rich country in another Garden of Eden. Because the railroads and the water power syndicates, with their allies the War Department engineers, seem to have the power to perpetuate this system of Speculation and Human Exploitation, and in consequence to dedicate the Colorado River Valley to desolation. They apparently have the power to inject some deadly poison into the arteries and veins of conventions and congresses and legislative bodies that makes action impossible along any line of constructive effort that would free the people from the thralldom of corporate opposition to government construction. Australia and New Zealand,--Japan, Sweden, Norway, and Switzerland have escaped from this thralldom and are a free and independent people, capable of directing the development of their resources, _and they are doing it_. The people of the United States have abolished human slavery, but they have been unable as yet to free themselves from the domination of organized capital or the influence of the aggregated appetite of an army of speculators and exploiters of our national resources. As a nation we are shackled by the Spirit of Speculation which insidiously opposes any legislation that would save our resources from speculative exploitation or directly develop them by government construction for the benefit of the people. Those who comprise this speculative class, which opposes all such constructive legislation, on the ground that it is paternalism, are the ones who cry loudest for the increase of Militarism. They want an army _hired_ to defend the nation and their property from attack. They constantly advocate increasing the $250,000,000 a year we now spend on our army and navy. Then they cry economy when it is proposed to spend less than half that amount every year throughout the whole United States to defend the country against the devastating forces of Nature. As a result the people are unable to safeguard against the recurrence of such appalling catastrophies as the Ohio Valley floods of 1913 or the Mississippi Valley floods of 1912 and 1913.