I particularly direct your attention to the very practical plans which the Secretary of the Interior has developed in his annual report and before your Committees for the reclamation of arid, swamp, and cutover lands which might, if the States were willing and able to cooperate, redeem some three hundred million acres of land for cultivation.  There are said to be fifteen or twenty million acres of land in the West, at present arid, for whose reclamation water is available, if properly conserved.  There are about two hundred and thirty million acres from which the forests have been cut but which have never yet been cleared for the plow and which lie waste and desolate.  These lie scattered all over the Union.  And there are nearly eighty million acres of land that lie under swamps or subject to periodical overflow or too wet for anything but grazing, which it is perfectly feasible to drain and protect and redeem.  The Congress can at once direct thousands of the returning soldiers to the reclamation of the arid lands which it has already undertaken, if it will but enlarge the plans and appropriations which it has entrusted to the Department of the Interior.  It is possible in dealing with our unused land to effect a great rural and agricultural development which will afford the best sort of opportunity to men who want to help themselves and the Secretary of the Interior has thought the possible methods out in a way which is worthy of your most friendly attention.

I have spoken of the control which must yet for a while, perhaps for a long long while, be exercised over shipping because of the priority of service to which our forces overseas are entitled and which should also be accorded the shipments which are to save recently liberated peoples from starvation and many devastated regions from permanent ruin.  May I not say a special word about the needs of Belgium and northern France?  No sums of money paid by way of indemnity will serve of themselves to save them from hopeless disadvantage for years to come.  Something more must be done than merely find the money.  If they had money and raw materials in abundance to-morrow they could not resume their place in the industry of the world to-morrow,-the very important place they held before the flame of war swept across them.  Many of their factories are razed to the ground.  Much of their machinery is destroyed or has been taken away.  Their people are scattered and many of their best workmen are dead.  Their markets will be taken by others, if they are not in some special way assisted to rebuild their factories and replace their lost instruments of manufacture.  They should not be left to the vicissitudes of the sharp competition for materials and for industrial facilities which is now to set in.  I hope, therefore, that the Congress will not be unwilling, if it should become necessary, to grant to some such agency as the War Trade Board the right to establish priorities of export and supply for the benefit of these people whom we have been so happy to assist in saving from the German terror and whom we must not now thoughtlessly leave to shift for themselves in a pitiless competitive market.