If the Colorado River Valley is to remain dedicated to speculation and exploitation, we could not maintain upon its deserts a standing army large enough, if we should have a war with Japan, to make even a pretense of protecting it from invasion from the south by the Japanese after they have settled those Mexican lands. They would not stop with taking the Philippines and Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington. They would sweep up from the south with an army of a million men from Mexico and extend their dominion over all the arid region. From the Cascade and the Sierra Nevada Ranges to the crest of the Rocky Mountains and from the Canadian line to Mexico would become Japanese territory. But that is too long a time in the future, the average self-complacent American says, to be of any immediate interest. It would take the Japanese more than a generation to put a million colonists in Mexico. Perhaps it would. It will take the Japanese a generation to double the Japanese population on the shores of the Pacific in Asia and America. Now they have only fifty million people. In one generation more they will have a hundred million and a goodly portion of them will be in America. Is it any too soon for this nation to begin right now to build the safeguards against that danger? Bear in mind that there are men and women now living who remember Chicago when there was nothing there but Old Fort Dearborn and a few log houses. Bear in mind that in less than ten years, from 1900 to 1908, more than 65,000 Japanese emigrated to Hawaii, and that in a single year, 1907, 30,226 Japanese came to the United States, and that in 1909 the number of trained and seasoned Japanese soldiers in Hawaii exceeded the entire field army of the United States. How long would it take Japan to put a million colonists--men of military age--on the Pacific Coast of Mexico? In "The Great Illusion," Norman Angell argues that war must cease because it does not pay. Would that argument apply in case of a war between the United States and Japan, with reference to the Colorado River Country and the rest of the territory now lying in the United States between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west? In the Colorado River Valley alone the Japanese would get 5,000,000 acres capable of being made to produce by their system of cultivation a net profit of $1,000 an acre, over and above a living for its cultivators. That would make a total of five billion dollars a year. In addition they would get 12,500,000 acres in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in California which if they produced from it only a net profit of $500 an acre every year--would yield a total of two and a half billion dollars annually. Oregon, Washington and Idaho would add as much more land, making another two and a half billion dollars a year.