Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 4

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 really requires large capital. Then come farther east and take these lands that are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes and put these lands into the service of America. This is what I call the making of the nation.
That land should tie up with all other land. Means of communication should be a part of that general scheme. We should have as good roads between the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or in Northern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is a work--the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a small and tentative appropriation--the work of surveying this country and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these men who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. There is a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to have small communities in which men have small acreages of land, not to speculate with but to cultivate; and these acreages are to center in small communities where men can talk together and profit by their own mistakes and their own successes and where those small communities will be tied up with all neighboring communities, so that there will be easy access between all parts of the country. Good roads and a rural express must be had. If you can help the Government in building good roads for little money or show how a rural express can be most profitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a new America.
And I can conceive of a United States that will be as rich per acre as France; in which the people will be divided into small communities, industrial communities as well as agricultural; for every one of these little places ought to have its own creamery, its own cannery. The farmer is the poorest man in the world to develop any kind of cooperative scheme. He needs assistance and is always hampered by the lack of capital. But now is our chance to see what can be done; to show it in the building of ideal communities, communities that have good houses, that have good sanitation, that are on good land where there is somebody who can direct them as to what should be planted and what should be avoided, communities which may be connected up with the world by highways, by developing rivers, and by railroads.
Now, I think if there is one great fault that industrially we have been guilty of in the United States, it has been the effort to develop quantity at the expense of quality. We have been a wholesale Nation. We have had a continent that was rich beyond any precedent. We did not know what any acre of our land might produce. A man might go on it out in Oregon and think it was a fir land, think it was good for nothing but timber, and find first that it was the richest kind of dairying land, and find next that it contained a gold mine or a chrome mine. We have never known, and we do not know yet, what the riches of the United States are, and we won't know until we have put study and thought and money into the problem of making this country what it can be by the application of thought, energy and investment.
The United States is not going to be after the war as it has been. That is a thing that you sober men of business are already thinking about. We are never going to return to the idea that was. The man that comes back from this war will be treated by us with distinguished consideration, because he has taken a risk that we have not taken; that we have not had the opportunity to take, I am sorry to say. But that man is going to insist upon larger opportunity for himself, and the largest opportunity that he wants is an opportunity to make himself independent, and he is going to have a conception of a social America that we have not had. This war is a leveling force. When we adopted the draft, under the leadership of that man over there (Senator Chamberlain), we did a