respected. So long as we are
industrially dependent, agriculturally dependent, somebody has a lever
that he can use in a time of crisis, as against this nation. Long
years ago we were the greatest of all agricultural people, and Thomas
Jefferson wanted us to remain in that position. He thought that the
safety and security of the United States lay in the fact that we would
live on farms. When De Toquevile came over here in 1830 he said the
reason democracy was a success in this country was because we were all
practically living on farms, living on what we raised ourselves, and
standing equally.

To-day the tendency is away from the farm toward the city, toward
industrial life, toward aggregations of people, away from the small
town to the larger town, and from the larger town to the metropolis.
People are being drawn from the farms, so that one-half of the arable
land this side of the Mississippi is unused to-day; so that between
here and New Orleans there are 40,000,000 acres of land privately
owned and unused; so that in the great Northwest, Minnesota, Oregon,
Washington, etc., there are 100,000,000 acres of cut-over lands that
are practically unused; and we have a new nation practically in the
undrained lands of our rivers and our bays and inlets, lands that are
as rich as any that lie out of doors, as rich as the valley of the
Nile or of the Euphrates. In the far western country, there are at
least 15,000,000 acres of land that we can put under water. Under
water, that land produces more than one crop a year, and that an
exceptionally rich crop.

We have been extending ourselves because of war in a great many
different directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedented
and unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. I
say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take
advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually
be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters of
the Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in the
Grand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at the
right times on that desert so as to raise cotton and cantaloupes and
alfalfa. Then come east and take the stumps from these cut-over lands.
Do it not as a private enterprise, because that is a slow, slow
process. Men are discouraged and disheartened when they look at the
problem of pulling an Oregon fir stump out of the ground. It real