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

and the empire of
Rome came into existence was because of the returned soldiers. They
looked to their general to take care of them on their return, and their
general found that the 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