And in order to save the enormous expense and waste that would result from increasing the standing army, and, in addition, to achieve the stupendous benefits that would result from the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, it is only necessary that the same common sense business methods and principles should be applied to the operations of the government that any large corporation would adopt if it had the financial resources, of the United States.
_Why should anyone be staggered at the proposition for the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve, or balk at it because it is big?_
When the national government owns 29,600,000 acres of national forests in the drainage basin of the Colorado River, is there any reason why it cannot reclaim and settle in one-acre garden homes, the comparatively small area of 1,000,000 acres which is only a part of what it owns in the main valley of the Colorado River between Needles and Yuma?
If it can do that in the Colorado River Country is there any reason why it should not take a million acres of land in northern Minnesota, which it now owns, and reclaim it and settle it in one-acre garden homes? The government now owns, in addition to that land, 987,000 acres of national forest in Minnesota.
If the government can acquire by purchase, as is now being done, another million acres of forest lands in the Appalachian Mountains under the Appalachian National Forest Act, is there any reason why it should not acquire a million acres of land in West Virginia and irrigate it and subdivide it into one-acre garden homes, and put Homecrofters on it to intensively cultivate the land?
If it can do that in West Virginia, is there any reason why it should not be done in Louisiana or in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley in California?
In the case of the establishment of the Homecroft Reserve Rural Settlements the government will see to it, itself, that its work does in fact result in actual home making, whereas speculators get the ultimate benefit of much of the other work that it does.
If the government can maintain a Department of Agriculture at an expense of $20,000,000 in one year, for the instruction of farmers in _agriculture_, who get the benefit of that service without paying for it, is there any reason why it should not maintain educational institutions to train Homecroft Reservists in _Acreculture_, if they pay for the cost of that instruction and all the expenses of maintaining the necessary educational institutions?
