Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 3

way to take care of them was to give them, as they said in those days, "bread and circuses," and so they reached over into Egypt, got the great wheat supply of that country, and provided the great circuses that are historical for the amusement of those people.
The Emperor of Germany 10 years ago was asked why he was unwilling to agree to a demobilization of his forces or to a reduction of his army and he said because it would demoralize the industries of Germany. They could not reabsorb so many men without reducing wages and throwing upon the country so many unemployed that it would make against the welfare of the land. We will have that problem to deal with.
The firm, strong position taken by the President in his note published yesterday indicates that he is ready to fight this thing out to a finish and that he will show to those on the other side that America has a determination to win, and that it is not a determination that fades quickly. If the Emperor of Germany has ever had a good look at a photograph of Woodrow Wilson, he has seen a prolongation of a chin that must have confirmed him in the belief that America does not take up a fight unless it puts it through; and we are to reach a military determination by whipping them until they say they have had enough.
Now, when this thing is over, our men will begin to come back into the United States. But not all at once. We won't have three or four million men to deal with in a single month. We will have them slowly returning to us through a year or a year and a half. As those men come filtering in through our ports we ought to be able to meet every man at every port with the statement that he does not have to lie idle one single day. We ought to be able to say to the man, "Here is something that you can do at once. If your old position is not vacant, if you can not go home to the old place and take up the work that you were in, then the Government of the United States, in its wisdom, has provided something which you can do at wages upon which you can live well."
And what should that be? The greatest problem that any country has, to my mind, is its own self-support. We have come to be independent in our resources, to be strong, and be 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