[Transcriber's note: Page numbers are enclosed in curly braces, e. G. {99}. They are located where page breaks occurred in the original book. Paragraphs are not broken. When a paragraph flows around illustrations the "next" page immediately preceding or following the illustrations jumps to account for the pages occupied by the illustrations. The location of the paragraph following the illustration group is indicated as {52 continued}. The material following {10}, up to the next {}, is on page 10, even if the next page number is not 11. Italic are enclosed in underscores: _this is italicized_. End Transcriber's note] WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP [Illustration: COUNT SHIGE-NOBU OKUMA OF JAPAN] (From a photograph and autograph given the author) Count Okuma, one of the Genro or Elder Statesmen of Japan and ex-Premier of the Empire, is an opponent of his country's high protective tariff and an earnest advocate of international arbitration. WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP THE OLD AND THE NEW IN JAPAN, CHINA, THEPHILIPPINES, AND INDIA, REPORTEDWITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TOAMERICAN CONDITIONS BYCLARENCE POE Author of "A Southerner in Europe, " "Cotton: Its Cultivation andManufacture, " Editor "The Progressive Farmer, " Sec'y North CarolinaHistorical Association, etc. , etc. Garden City New YorkDOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY1911 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGNLANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY CLARENCE POE THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESSGARDEN CITY, N. Y. TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE IN WHOM ACHIEVEMENT, CHARACTER AND PERSONAL CHARM MEET IN RARESYMMETRY; WHO HAS WON THE WISDOM OF AGE WITHOUT LOSING THE DEW OPYOUTH; AND WHOSE GENEROUS FRIENDSHIP HAD MADE ME HIS DEBTOR BEFORE ITAIDED ME ANEW IN PLANNING AND EXECUTING MY ORIENTAL TOUR {vii} PREFACE "The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, " as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton begins one of his books by saying, has half itsmembers in Asia. That Americans should know something about soconsiderable a portion of our human race is manifestly worth while. And really to know them at all we must know them as they are to-day. Vast changes are in progress, and even as I write this, the revolutionin China, foreshadowed in the chapters written by me from thatcountry, is remaking the political life of earth's oldest empire. FromJapan to India there is industrial, educational, political ferment. The old order changes, yielding place to the new. "Where Half the World is Waking Up" is not inappropriate therefore asthe title of the book now offered to the public. The reader willkindly observe here that I have written of where half the world iswaking up and not merely of the waking-up itself. My purpose has beento set forth the old and the new in due proportion; to present theplay of new forces against and upon the ancient, the amazinglyancient, forces that have dominated whole races for centuries. In mostplaces, in fact, the ancient force is still clearly the dominant one. Observe, too, therefore, that I have written not of where half theworld has waked up, but only of where it is waking up. The significantthing is that the waking is really taking place at all, and of thisthere can be no doubt. It was, in short, with the hope of securing for myself and presentingto others a photograph of the Orient as it is to-day that I made mylong trip through Japan, Korea, Manchuria, {viii} China, thePhilippines, and India during the past year. It was not a pleasuretrip nor yet a hurried "seaport trip. " I travelled either entirelyacross or well into the interior of each country visited, and all mytime was given to study and research to fit me for the preparation ofthese articles. That despite of the care exercised the book contains some errors, isdoubtless true. The sources of information in the Orient are notalways easy to find, nor always in accord after one finds them. Consider, for example, the population of Manchuria: it seems a simpleenough matter, yet it required the help of consuls of two or threenations to enable me to sift out the truth from the conflictingrepresentations of several writers and so-called authorities. For my part I can only claim a laborious and painstaking effort to getthe facts. Letters of introduction to eminent Englishmen kindlyfurnished me by Ambassador Bryce opened the doors of Britishofficialdom for me, and the friendship of Mr. Roosevelt and lettersfrom Mr. Bryan and our Department of State proved helpful in otherways. I thus had the good fortune not only to get the ready fraternalassistance of my brother newspaper men (of all races) everywhere, andthe help of English, German, and American consuls, but I was aided bysome of the most eminent authorities in each country visited--inChina, by H. E. Tang Shao-yi, Wu Ting Fang, Sir Robert Bredon, Dr. C. D. Tenney, Dr. Timothy Richard; in Japan, by ex-Premier Okuma, Viscount Kaneko, Baron Shibusawa, Dr. Juichi Soyeda; in Hong Kong, byGovernor-General Sir Frederick Lugard; in Manila by Governor-GeneralForbes, Vice-Governor Gilbert; in India, the members of the Viceroy'sCabinet, Hon. Krishnaswami Iyer, Dr. J. P. Jones, etc, etc. To all ofthese and to scores of others, my grateful acknowledgments aretendered. They helped me get information, but of course are in no caseto be held responsible for any opinions that I have expressed. To Mr. G. D. Adams, of Akron, Ohio, and Dr. Arthur {ix} Mez, ofMannheim, Germany, two generous fellow-travellers, my thanks are duefor the use of many of their photographs, and I am also indebted to_The World's Work_ and _The Review of Reviews_ for permission torepublish articles that have already appeared in these magazines. Thelarger number of chapters included in this volume, however, wereoriginally prepared with a view to their use in my own paper, TheProgressive Farmer. They are, therefore, often more elementary incharacter, let me say in the outset, than if they had been writtenexclusively for bookbuyers, but it is my hope that their journalisticflavor, even if it has this disadvantage, will also be found to havecertain compensating qualities. Perhaps just one other thing ought to be said: that practically everyarticle about any country was written while I was still in the countrydescribed. In this way I hoped not only to write with greaterfreshness and vividness, but I was enabled to have my articles revisedand criticised by friends well informed concerning the subjectsdiscussed. The reader will please bear in mind, therefore, that aletter about Tokyo is also a letter from Tokyo, a letter about Koreais a letter from Korea, etc. , and shift his viewpoint accordingly. Ihave also thought it best to be frank with the reader and let thechapters on China remain exactly as they were written--presenting apen picture of the Dragon Empire as it appeared on the eve of theoutbreak, while the revolution was indeed definitely in prospect butnot yet a reality. ----- "Give us as many anecdotes as you can, " was old Samuel Johnson'sadvice to Boswell, when that worthy proposed to write of Corsica; andthis wise suggestion I have sought to keep in mind in all my travel. Moreover, another saying of the great lexicographer's comes quaintlyinto my memory as I conclude this Foreword: "There are two thingswhich I am confident I could do very well, " he once remarked to SirJoshua Reynolds; "one is an introduction to any literary work stating{x} what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the mostperfect manner: the other is a conclusion, showing from various causeswhy the execution has not been equal to what the author promised tohimself and to the publick!" C. P. Raleigh, N. C. December 1, 1911. {xi} CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Japan: The Land of Upside Down 3 A Land of Contradictions Music as an Example Marriage and the Home Life Patriarchal Ideas Still Dominant. II. Snapshots of Japanese Life and Philosophy 9 What a Japanese City Is Like Strange Clothing of the Japanese Who Ever Saw So Many Babies? Alphonse and Gaston Outdone The Grace of the Little Women How the Old Japan and the Old South Were Alike A "Moral Distinction" Between Producers and Non-Producers. III. Japanese Farming and Farmer Folk 17 Japanese Farm Children Getting More Schooling than American Farm Children No Illiteracy in the New Japan Where Five Acres Is a Large Farm How Iowa Might Feed the Whole United States Farming Without Horses or Oxen What the Japanese Farmers Raise The Crime of Soil-waste All Work Done by Hand Cooperative Credit Societies a Success Farm Houses Grouped in Villages "A Seller of the Ancestral Land" The Japanese Love of the Beautiful a Suggestion for America. IV. "Welfare Work" in Japanese Factories 29 Manufacturing Bound to Increase Tariff Legislation Unfair to Agriculture A Visit to a Progressive Japanese Factory How the Factory Operatives Are Looked After Stricter Factory Legislation Coming. V. Does Japanese Competition Menace the White Man's Trade 34 A Study of Japanese Industrial Conditions Japanese Labor Cheap but Inefficient Actual Cost of Output Little Cheaper than in America Laborers in a State {xii} of Deplorable Inexperience Illustrations of Japanese Inefficiency Some Current Misconceptions Corrected Labor Wage Has Increased 40 Per Cent, in Eight Years The Burden of Taxation High Tariff Will Decrease Japan's Export Trade Subsidy Policy Destroying Individual Initiative Japanese Competition Not a Serious Menace to the White Man. VI. Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity in Japan 48 The Artistic Touch of the Japanese Religion Without Morals Buddhism in Fact vs. Buddhism Idealized by Arnold Official Notices Prohibiting Christianity Christianity "Puts Too High an Estimate on Woman" The Worth of the Individual Not Recognized The Elemental Significance of Japan's Awakening A New Type of Civilization. VII. Korea: "The Land of the Morning Calm" 60 I Have Become a Contemporary of David The Fascination of a Primitive City Some Odd Korean Customs-A True Romance and an Odd One Many Faces Marked by Smallpox A Typical Monarchy of Ancient Asia-The Honorable Mr. Yang-ban Six Men to Carry Fifty Dollars' Worth of Money Japanese Annexation Splendid Work of Foreign Missionaries. VIII. Manchuria: Fair and Fertile 70 Some First-hand Stories of the Russo-Japanese War A Bit of History with a Lesson The Site of the World's Next Great War Manchuria: Fair and Fertile Fat Harvests of Food, Feed, and Fuel A Land Where Everybody "Knows Beans" Golden Opportunities for Stock-raising Better Plows and Level Culture Graves as Thick as Corn Shocks IX. Where Japan Is Absorbing an Empire 78 Manchuria the One Great Oriental Empire Not Yet Developed Its Strategic Importance Why the "Open Door" Concerns Us All Japan's Shrewd Policies {xiii} Contempt of Chinese Authority Japan at Home vs. Japan in Manchuria How the Open Door Policy Was Violated Will Manchuria Go the Way of Korea? A Bit of Chinese Wit and Wisdom Truth Is in the Interest of Peace. X. Light from China on Problems at Home 93 A Chinese Martyr-Hero The Most Tremendous Moral Achievement of Recent Times A Lesson for America Putting Officials on Salaries Money Changers and Title Changers Making Education Practical The Parcels Post and Tariff Reform. XI. The New China: Awake and at Work 102 The Coming National Parliament The Successful War Against Opium China's Right-about-face in Education Building Up an Army Attacking the Graft System Railroads, Posts, and Telegraphs America's Relations with China. XII. A Trip into Rural China 116 The Camels from Mongolia Strange Traffic and Travel in Nankou Pass The Great Wall of China Surprisingly Progressive Farming Methods. XIII. From Peking to the Yangtze-Kiang 123 Street Life in Peking History That Is History Martyrdoms That Have Enriched the World Average Wages 15 to 18 Cents a Day Homes Without Firesides All China a Vast Cemetery Keeping on Good Terms with Dragons The Blessings of Our Alphabet Confucius as a Moral Teacher My Friendship with a Descendant of Confucius. XIV. Sidelights on Chinese Character and Industry 132 Healthy Public Sentiment Slavery and Foot-binding Still Practised "Big Feet No B'long Pretty" The Popularity of a No. 2 Wife The Virtue That Is Next to Godliness Largely Disregarded Some Discredited Americans Discovered Abroad A 600-Mile Trip on the Yangtze {xiv} River An Interview with Wu Ting Fang Farming on the Yangtze Shanghai Factory Laborers Paid 12 Cents a Day. XV. Farewell to China 142 A City of 2, 000, 000 People Without a Vehicle A Dead Chinaman More Important and Respected Than a Live One Queer Features of Chinese Funerals Cruelty of Chinese Punishments A Sample of Chinese Humor: The Story of the Magic Jar Amusing Trials of a Land Buyer "Pidgin English" Everything Is Saved The Influence That Is Remaking China. XVI. What I Saw in the Philippines 153 In Manila A Trip Through Five Provinces What the Philippine Country Looks Like Every Filipino Has Cigarette and a Clean Suit A Mania for Cock-fighting Snapshots of Philippine Life Labor the One Thing Lacking. XVII. What the United States Is Doing in the Philippines 163 Thirty Thousand White People and 7, 000, 000 Filipinos Rich Resources and Varied Products Millions in Lumber How the Islands Are Governed Restricting the Suffrage Education: Achievements of the American Government Postal Savings Banks and the Torrens System Public Health Work Building Roads And Then Keeping Them Up "A George Junior Republic. " XVIII. Asia's Greatest Lesson foe America . . 173 Where 10 Cents a Day Is a Laborer's Wage The Savage Struggle for Existence in the East Tasks Heart-sickening in Their Heaviness Where Women Are Burden-bearers $12 a Year for a Farm Hand An Overcrowded Population Not the Chief Cause of Asia's Poverty A Defective Organization of Industry Responsible Foolish Opposition to Labor-saving Tools Our Debt to Machinery Knowledge Itself a Productive Agency Ineffectiveness of Oriental Labor Tools and Knowledge the Secret of Wealth Importance of Our Racial Heritage The Final Lesson. {xv} XIX. The Straits Settlements and Burma 186 The Amazing Industry of the Chinese Easy Money in Cocoanuts How Germany Is Capturing Oriental Trade Rangoon the City of Gorgeous Colors Burma's Buddhist Temples Rangoon's Beasts of Burden Where the Elephants Do the Work Some First-hand Jungle Stories My Lord the Elephant Good-by to Burma. XX. Hinduism--and the Himalayas 198 Theoretical vs. Practical Hinduism The Kalighat Temple, Calcutta Human Sacrifices Two Indian Places of Worship: A Contrast A Visit to Benares Burning the Bodies of the Dead "Religion" as It Is in Benares The Himalayas: A New and Happier Subject. XXI. "The Poor Benighted Hindus" 210 India's Enormous Population "The Wealth of the Indies" a Romance A Typical Indian Village No Chairs, Mattresses, Knives, or Forks Used Where It Is 105 at Midnight "Gunga Din" in Evidence The Lady of Banbury Cross Outdone. XXII. Hindu Farming and Farm Life 218 Primitive Tools Used by Farmers What Crops Are Grown Where Drought Means Death Reducing the Ravages of Famine Usury and a Remedy Where America Is Behind Landowner and Farm Laborer Salaam, O Little Folk! XXIII. The Caste System in India 226 No Man May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower How Fatalism Sustains Caste Contamination by Touch A Bone Collector's Pride of Rank The "Thief Caste" Caste and the Banyan Tree A Maharaja's Defence of Caste Some Forces That Are Battering Down the System Foreign Travel Weakening Caste. XXIV. The Plight of the Hindu Woman 236 "Woman Is Not to Be Trusted" Twelve-year-old Brides and Bridegrooms A Wedding Procession in Agra {xvi} 5000 Rupees for a Wedding Feast The Plight of the Child-wives Cruel Treatment of Widows The Picture Not Wholly Dark One Worthy Tribute to the Grace of Woman. XXV. More Leaves from an India Notebook 246 Some Historic Indian Cities India No More Homogeneous than Europe English Rule: An Interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer Indian Wealth in a Few Hands 16 Cents a Day an Incredibly High Wage No Horses on Indian Farms Bombay a Great Cotton Market The Story of a Man-eater A Snake Story to End With. XXVI. What the Orient May Teach Us 261 Conservation the Keynote What Neglect of Her Forests Has Cost China Forestry Lessons from Japan and Korea Conserving Individual Wealth The Essential Immorality of Waste Avoiding the Wastes of War Preserving Our Physical Stamina and Racial Strength A Lesson from China Patriotism as a Moral Force The Coming "Conflict of Color" Oriental vs. Occidental Ideals. {xvii} ILLUSTRATIONS Count Shige-Nobu Okuma of Japan Frontispiece PAGE The Giant Avenue of Cryptomerias at Nikko 13 Typical Japanese Costumes and Temple Architecture 14 Japanese Farming Scenes 19 Japanese School Children 20 The Great Buddha (Diabutsu) at Kamakura 53 The Degenerate Koreans at Rest and at Work 54 Like Scenes from Our Western Prairies 81 Manchurian Women (showing peculiar head-dress) 82 Chinese Waste-paper Collector 82 Pu Yi the Son of Heaven and Emperor of the Middle Kingdom 105 How China Is Dealing with Opium Intemperance 106 A Man-made Desert 117 Pumping Water for Irrigation 117 Transportation and Travel in China 118 Fashionable Chinese Dinner Party 137 How Lumber Is Sawed in the Orient 137 A Quotation from Confucius 138 The Great Wall of China 147 Chinese Woman's Ruined Feet 147 Chinese School Children 148 The American Consulate at Antung 148 A Filipino's Home 157 The Carabao, the Work-stock of the Filipinos 158 An Old Spanish Cathedral 158 Society Belles of Mindanao, Philippine Islands 181 A Street Scene in Manila 181{xviii}Two Kinds of Workers in Burma 182 Types at Darjeeling, Northern India, and at Delhi, Central India 205 Two Rangoon Types 206 A Hindu Faquir 213 Some Fashionable Hindus 213 Hindu Children 214 The Taj Mahal from the Entrance Gate 241 Gunga Din on Dress Parade 242 Bathing in the Sacred Ganges at Benares 249 The Battle-scarred and World-famous Residency at Lucknow 250 Burning the Bodies of Dead Hindus 255 An Indian Camel Cart 255 Travel in India 256 {xix} WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP {3} I JAPAN: THE LAND OF UPSIDE DOWN "I cannot help thinking, " said one of my friends to me when I lefthome, "that when you get over on the other side of the world, in Japanand China, you will have to walk upside down like the flies on theceiling!" While I find that this is not true in a physical sense, it is true, asMr. Percival Lowell has pointed out, that, with regard to the mannersand customs of the people, everything is reversed, and the surest wayto go right is to take pains to go dead wrong! "To speak backward, write backward, read backward, is but the A B C of Orientalcontrariety. " Alice need not have gone to Wonderland; she should have come to Japan. I cannot get used, for example, to seeing men start at what with uswould be the back of a book or paper and read toward the front; and itis said that no European or American ever gets used to theconstruction of a Japanese sentence, considered merely from thestandpoint of thought-arrangement. I had noticed that the Japaneseusually ended their sentences with an emphatic upward spurt before Ilearned that with them the subject of a sentence usually comes last(if at all), as for example, "By a rough road yesterday came John, "instead of, "John came by a rough road yesterday. " And this, of course, is but one illustration of thousands that mightbe given to justify my title, "The Land of Upside Down, " the land ofcontradictions to all our Occidental ideas. That {4} Japan is a land"where the flowers have no odor and the birds no song" has passed intoa proverb that is almost literally true; and similarly, the far-famedcherry blossoms bear no fruit. The typesetters I saw in the _KokuminShimbum_ office were singing like birds, but the field-hands I saw atKomaba were as silent as church-worshippers. The women carry childrenon their backs and not in their arms. The girls dance with theirhands, not with their feet, and alone, not with partners. An ox isworth more than a horse. The people bathe frequently, but in dirtywater. The people are exceptionally artistic, yet the stone "lions" atNikko Temple look as much like bulldogs as lions. A man's birthday isnot celebrated, but the anniversary of his death is. The people areimmeasurably polite, and yet often unendurably cocky and conceited. Kissing or waltzing, even for man and wife, would be improper inpublic, but the exposure of the human body excites no surprise. Thenational government is supposed to be modern, and yet only 2 per cent, of the people--the wealthiest--can vote. Famed for kindness though thepeople are, war correspondents declared the brutality of Japanesesoldiers to the Chinese at Port Arthur such as "would damn the fairestnation on earth. " Though the nation is equally noted for simplicity ofliving, it is a Japanese banker, coming to New York, who breaks evenAmerica's record for extravagance, by giving a banquet costing $40 aplate. The people are supposed to be singularly contented, and yetSocialism has had a rapid growth. The Emperor is regarded as sacredand almost infallible, and yet the Crown Prince is not a legitimateson. Although the government is one of the most autocratic on earth, it has nevertheless adopted many highly "paternalistic"schemes-government ownership of railways and telegraphs, for example. The people work all the time, but they refuse to work as strenuouslyas Americans. The temples attract thousands of people, but usuallyonly in a spirit of frolic: in the first Shinto temple I visited thepriests offered me sake (the national liquor) {5} to drink. Labor perday is amazingly cheap, but, in actual results, little cheaper thanAmerican labor. It is amid such a maze of contradictions and surprises that one movesin Japan. When I go into a Japanese home, for example, it is a hundredtimes more important to take off my shoes than it is to take off myhat--even though, as happened this week when I called on a celebratedJapanese singer, there be holes in my left sock. (But I was comfortedlater when I learned that on President Taft's visit to a famous Tokyoteahouse his footwear was found to be in like plight. ) Speaking of music, we run squarely against another oddity, in thatnative Japanese (as well as Chinese) music usually consists merely ofmonotonous twanging on one or two strings--so that I can nowunderstand the old story of Li Hung Chang's musical experiences inAmerica. His friends took him to hear grand opera singers, to listento famous violinists, but these moved him not; the most giftedpianists failed equally to interest him. But one night the greatChinaman went early to a theatre, and all at once his face beamed withdelight, and he turned to his friends in enthusiastic gratitude: "Wehave found it at last!" he exclaimed. "That is genuine music!" . . . And it was only the orchestra "tuning up" their instruments! I might as well say just here that this story, while good, alwaysstruck me as a humorous exaggeration till I came to Japan, but themusic which I heard the other night in one of the most fashionable andexpensive Japanese restaurants in Tokyo was of exactly the samecharacter--like nothing else in all the world so much as an orchestratuning up! And yet by way of modification (as usual) it must be saidthat appreciation of Western music is growing, and one seldom hears inclassical selections a sweeter combination of voice and piano thanMrs. Tamaki Shibata's, while my Japanese student-friend has alsosurprised me by singing "Suwanee River" and other old-time Americanfavorites like a genuine Southerner. Take the social relations of the Japanese people as another {6}example of contrariety. Here the honorable sex is not the feminine butthe masculine. There is even a proverb, I believe, "Honor men, despisewomen. " Perhaps the translation "despise" is too strong, but certainlyit would be regarded as nothing but contemptible weakness for youngmen to show any such regard for young women, or husbands for theirwives, as is common in America. The wives exist solely for theirhusbands, nor must the wife object if the husband maintains otherfavorites, or even brings these favorites into the home with her. Andalthough a man is with his wife a much greater part of his time thanis the case in America, he may have little or no voice in selectingher; in fact, he may see her only once before marrying. After having seen probably half a million or more Japanese, Sundaysand week-days, I have not noticed a single young Japanese couplewalking together, and in the one case where I saw a husband and a wifewalking thus side by side I discovered on investigation that the manwas blind! "For a young couple to select each other as in America, " said a youngJapanese gentleman to me, "would be considered immoral, and as for ayoung man calling on a young woman, that never happens exceptclandestinely. " And when I asked if it was true that when husband andwife go together the woman must follow the man instead of walkingbeside him as his equal, he answered: "But it is very, very seldomthat the two go out together. " My Japanese friend also told me that the young man often hasconsiderable influence in selecting his life-partner (in case it isfor life: there is one divorce to every three to five marriages), butthe young woman has no more voice in the matter than the commodity inany other bargain-and-sale. When a young man or young woman gets ofmarriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on somesatisfactory prospective partner, and a "middleman" interviews theparents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and {7} financial and other considerations are satisfactory, itdoesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whetheryoung Barkis himself is "willin'. " The Sir Anthony Absolutes in Japanindeed brook no opposition. All of which, while not wholly commendable(my young Japanese friend himself dislikes the plan, at least in hisown prospective case), has at least the advantage of leaving butremarkably few bachelors and old maids in Japan. Here every man'shouse may not be his castle, but it is certainly his nursery. Usually, too, in the towns at least, his home is his shop; the front part fullof wares, with no hard and fast dividing line between merchandiserooms and the living rooms, children being equally conspicuous andnumerous in both compartments. Japan is still governed largely on patriarchal lines. The Emperorsthemselves depend largely on the patriarchal spirit for their power, claiming direct descent in unbroken line from the Sun-Goddess, whilethe people are supposed to be themselves descendants of Emperors or ofminor gods. In family life the patriarchal idea is still moreprominent, the father being the virtual ruler until he abdicates infavor of the eldest son. Ancestor-worship is general, of course, and a typical case is that ofmy young Nikko friend, who tells me that in his home are memorialtablets to six of his most recently deceased ancestors, and that hotrice is placed before these tablets each morning. Now the teaching isthat the spirits of the dead need the odor of the rice fornourishment, and also require worship of other kinds. Consequently theworst misfortune that can befall a man is to die without heirs tohonor his memory (the mere dying itself is not so bad); and if anoldest son die unmarried such action amounts almost to treason to thefamily. Moreover, if a man be without sons (daughters don't count), he mayadopt a son; and the cases of adoption are surprisingly frequent. Count Okuma, ex-prime minister of the empire, whom I visited lastSunday, adopted his son-in-law as his {8} legal son. A distinguishedbanker I visited is also an adopted son; and in a comparatively brieflist of eminent Japanese, a sort of abbreviated national "Who's Who, "I find perhaps twenty cases in which these eminent officials andleaders have been adopted and bear other family names than those withwhich they were born. The willingness to give up one's name in adoption, viewed in the lightof the excessive devotion to one's own ancestors and family name, isonly another illustration of Japanese contrariety. It is a land ofsurprises. Miyanoshita, Japan. {9} II SNAPSHOTS OF JAPANESE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY "What is a Japanese city like?" Well, let us "suppose, " as the childrensay. You know the American city nearest you, or the one you live in. Suppose then you should wake up in this city to-morrow morning andfind in the first place that forty-nine people out of every fifty haveput on such unheard-of clothing as to make you rub your eyes in wonderas to whether you are asleep or awake; next, that everybody has becomesix inches shorter, and that all these hundred-thousand five-foot menand four-foot women have unanimously developed most violentsunburn--have become bronzed almost beyond recognition. Moreover, the high buildings you once knew have all disappeared, and awilderness chiefly of tiny one and two story houses has taken theirplaces, wherein the first story, even in two-story buildings, is solow that all your new brown friends warn you by a gesture to duck yourhead as you go through the doors, while the second story is usuallylittle more than a garret. Next, a wild jargon of unmeaning voices strikes your ear and youdiscover that ninety-nine people out of a hundred have forgotten howto speak English. More than this, the English signs are no more, andon the billboards and before the business offices are marks that lookas if a thousand ostriches fresh from a thousand ink barrels had beenset to scratching new signs to take the places of the old. You pick upa book {10} or the morning paper, and the same thing has happened--pigtracks, chicken tracks, and double bowknots fantastically tied insteadof English type--and everybody begins at the back of the book andreads toward him instead of reading the way you have grown used to! And the buggies, carriages, and automobiles: what on earth has becomeof them? There's hardly a horse in sight, but dozens or scores of menwith bare legs and odd clothes, each flying around pulling a lighttwo-wheeled jinrikisha, a man or a woman seated in each man-drawn"buggy"; and there are dozens of other bare-legged men laboriouslypulling heavy loads of vegetables, freight, and even lumber and gianttelegraph poles! You jump into one of the rickshaws and forget yourstrange little Puck-like steed in the marvel of your surroundings tilla voice from the shafts makes you feel like Balaam when the ass spoketo him! By this time you begin to get a hazy idea as to how the people aredressed, and as nearly as you can make out, it is something like this: Evidently all the inhabitants of an ancient Roman city, a modernAmerican town, a half-dozen Hindoo villages, and several thousandseashore bathers have all thrown their clothes--(or the lack ofthem!)--into one tremendous pile, and everybody has rushed inpell-mell and put on the first thing, or the first two or threethings, that came to hand. There is every conceivable type ofclothing, but perhaps the larger number have wound up with somethinglike a light bathing suit and a sort of gingham dressing-gown beltedover it; and if one has less than this, why, then, as the Japanesesay, "_Shikata na gai_" (All right; it can't be helped). In the shopsand stores one passes a few men clad only in their own integrity and aloin-cloth, and both children and grown people dress with a hundredtimes more disregard of convention than the negroes in America. Of shoes, there is an equally great variety as of clothing, {11} butthe majority of men, women, and children (in muddy weather at least)have compromised on the "getas, " a sort of wooden sole strapped on thefoot, with wooden pieces put fore and aft the instep, these piecesthrowing the foot and sole about three inches above ground. It looksalmost as difficult to walk in them as to walk on stilts, but away thepeople go, young and old, and the muddy places marked by the strangefootwear look as if the corrugated wheels of a hundred mowing-machineshad passed along! In most cases the clatter of the "get as" is theloudest noise on the streets, for the Japanese are remarkably quiet:in Tokyo to-day I saw a thousand of them waiting to see the Empress, and an American crowd would literally have made more noise in a minutethan they made in an hour. On entering their houses, as we have already noticed, the people takeoff their getas, sandals, shoes or whatever outer footwear isused--for the very good reason that the people sit on the floor (onmats or on the floor itself), eat on the floor (very daintily, however), and sleep on the floor, so that to walk over the floor herewith muddy feet would be the same as if an American should walkroughshod over his chairs, table and bed. Even in the Japanesedepartment store I visited this morning cloth covers were put on myshoes, and this afternoon at the Ni-no Go Reiya Shinto temple I had togo in my stocking feet. Then the babies--who ever saw as many babies to the square inch? About10 per cent of the male population seems to be hauling other men, but50 per cent, of the female population seems hardly enough to carry thewise and happy-looking little Jap babies--not in go-carts (a go-cartor a hired nurse is almost never seen), but on the back. And theselittle women who when standing are only about as tall as you are whensitting--they seem hardly more than children themselves, so that yourecall Kipling's saying of Japan: "A four-foot child walks with athree-foot child, who is holding the hand {12} of a two-foot child, who carries on her back a one-foot child. " Boys in their teens are also seen with babies strapped on their backsin the same loose-fitting, sack-like baby-holders, and after work-timethe father takes a turn at the same business. You are reminded of thenegro who said to another: "'Fo Gawd, Bill, you's got the mos' chillunany nigger I ever seed. Why, I passed yo' house yistiddy mornin' atnine erclock and throwed a brick on top and hollered 'Fiah!' an' atfive erclock in the evenin' nigger chillun was still runnin' out!" Itseems sometimes as if such an incident, with Jap children substitutedfor negroes (I doubt if there is a negro here), might actually happenin Japan. And those two men bowing to each other as they meet--are theyrehearsing as Alphonse and Gaston for the comedy show to-night, or arethey serious? No, they are serious, for yonder is another pair meetingin the same way, and yonder another couple separating with even moreviolent "convulsions of politeness"--and nobody laughing but yourself. No wonder the Japanese are strong: they only need to meet a fewfriends a day to get exercise enough to keep them in trim! Look again:those women meeting at the depot, for example (for there arefamiliar-looking street cars and less familiar-looking passenger carsamid all these strange surroundings). There is the woman with her haircombed straight back, which, I am told, means that she is a widow; onewith an odd Japanese topknot, which means that she is married, and ayounger one whose hair is arranged in the style of unmarried girls;and though they are evidently bosom friends, they do not embrace andkiss at meeting--to kiss in public would be shocking to theJapanese--and you can only guess the depth of their affection by thegreater warmth and emphasis of their bows to one another. {13} [Illustration: THE GIANT AVENUE OF CRYPTOMERIAS AT NIKKO. ] This magnificent avenue, twenty-five miles in length, consists of trees planted by daimyos, or small lords, as a memorial to the great Japanese warrior and statesman, Iyeyasu. A spirit of simplicity and love of nature has produced a nobler monument than extravagance could possibly have done. {14} [Illustration: TYPICAL JAPANESE COSTUMES AND TEMPLE ARCHITECTURE. ] In the temple picture notice also how the limbs of the trees have been trained. Many fantastic effects are often produced in this way. {12 continued} They are trained in politeness from their youth up, are theseJapanese; and it is perhaps the greatest charm of both young and old. I must have seen a full hundred thousand Japanese {15} by this time, and I do not recall one in the attitude of scolding or abuse, whileauthorities tell me that the Japanese language simply has no words toenable one to swear or curse. I was also interested to have theAmerican Ambassador here tell me that in all his three years' stay inJapan, and with all the freedom with which a million children runabout the streets and stores, he has never seen a man impatient with achild. At the Imperial University yesterday morning I noticed twocollege boys part with the same deep courtesy used by the older men, and the little five-year-old girl near Chuzenji the other day thankedme for my gift with the most graceful of Eastern salaams. I shall not say that the excessive ceremoniousness of the men does notat times seem ludicrous, but when you come to your hotel dining-room, and the inexpressibly dainty little Japanese girls, moving almostnoiselessly on their sandaled feet (no getas indoors) welcome eachguest with smiling bows, happy, refined and graceful, a very differentimpression of Japanese courtesy comes over you. In America, unfortunately, the like courteous attention under such circumstancesmight be misinterpreted, but here you are only reminded of how athousand years of courtesy and gentle manners have given the women ofJapan--pretty though they are not, judged by our Western standards--anunsurpassed grace of manner and happiness of disposition together withShakespeare's well-praised "voice, soft and low, an excellent thing inwoman. " And here and everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with theovercoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more powerful incompelling deference than all the stormy strength of the "new woman"? Which reminds me that however much the social, political, and economicrevolution of the last forty years may have changed the nationalcharacter (and upon this point I shall not speak till later), it iscertain that Old Japan and the Old South were distinguished for not afew characteristics {16} in common. For example, we are reminded ofthe South's ante-bellum civilization when we learn that in old Japan"the business of money-making was held in contempt by the superiorclasses, " and of all forms of business, agriculture was held inhighest esteem. Next to the nobility stood the Samurai, or soldierclass, the social rank of all other persons then being as follows: (1)farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not onlyregarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in theearly ages were privileged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next tothe nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while asLafcadio Hearn tells us: "The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . . . There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a moral one. " I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we haverealized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential"morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturingabove trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it isthe men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade orbarter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor. They serve the world best: The barterers are, in limited numbers, necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but thestrength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are reallycreators of values. Tokyo, Japan. {17} III JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK I went yesterday to the Agricultural College of the ImperialUniversity of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had anappointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get furtherinformation concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers andJapanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out wasnot in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any otherfield product of the Mikado's empire. Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the mostimportant of all crops--the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact Idiscovered was simply this: These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened tocivilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterdayas backward "heathen"--they are getting, as a general proposition, just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of ourAmerican rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zealfor their children's welfare, just twice as good educationalfacilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys andgirls--boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a racewhich has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, andwhom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization andenlightenment. In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-day to theJapanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), theJapanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year, while the farm boy or girl {18} in my own state is getting only fiveor six months--and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago, not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling theJapanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys andgirls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how wecompare in the matter of utilizing school advantages, when he showedme that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empireof Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent. --98 out of every 100children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99out of every 100! Thirty-five years ago the average school attendancein Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the warwith Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbingstraight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the officialfigures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year--94 per cent. , then 95, then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99or 100, as they told me to-day. When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, furthermore, thatJapan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her bordersthat she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, Ididn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightenednation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others inmany states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort foreffective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents areindifferent to his future, the state does not compel them to give hima fighting chance in life--for the state's own sake and for the boy's. {19} [Illustration: JAPANESE FARMING SCENES. ] The upper picture shows a rice field in the foreground, tea alongside the buildings, and the graceful feathery bamboo in the background; also, an unusual sight on a Japanese farm, a group of cattle. The lower picture shows the work of transplanting rice. {20} [Illustration: JAPANESE SCHOOL CHILDREN. ] Boys predominate in the upper picture, girls in the lower. A system of compulsory education is enforced in Japan, and 98 per cent, of the children of school age attend. Even the country schools run ten months in the year--longer than in a majority of our states. {18 continued} With these facts before me, as I have said, I did not make anyvainglorious boasts of the great educational progress of our ownstates these last twenty years: However much progress we have made, these brown Japanese "heathen" have beaten us. While there is noofficial census on the question of illiteracy here, every Japanese manin his twenties must serve {21} two years in the army (unless he is ina normal school studying to be a teacher), and a record is made as tothe literacy or illiteracy of each recruit. That is to say, there is aplace where the fact of any recruit's inability to read would berecorded, but the Department of Education informed me to-day that theilliterate column is now absolutely blank. There are no illiterates among Japan's rising generation. More than this, we have to reflect that it is in their poverty thatthe Japanese are thus doing more than we are doing in our plenty. Wewaste more in a year than they make. Even with a hundred acres of landthe American farmer is likely to consider himself poor, but when Iasked my Japanese guide the other day if two _cho_ (five acres) wouldbe an average sized farm here he said: "No, not an average; such a manwould be regarded as a middle-class farmer--a rather large farmer. "And the figures which I have just obtained in a call on the nationalDepartment of Agriculture and Commerce more than justify the reply. Forty-six farmers out of every 100 in Japan own less than one and onequarter acres of land; 26 more out of every 100 own less than two andone half acres, and only one man in a hundred owns as much astwenty-five acres. (In the matter of cultivation also I find that 70per cent, cultivate less than two and one half acres, and nearly halfare tenants. ) This year the situation is even worse than usual, for disastrousfloods have reduced the rice crop, which represents one half Japan'scrop values, 20 per cent, below last year's figures, and many peoplewill suffer. Ordinarily, however, these little handkerchief-sized farms yieldamazingly. It has been shown by Prof. F. H. King that the fields ofJapan are cultivated so intensively, fertilized so painstakingly, andkept so continuously producing some crop, that they feed 2277 peopleto the square mile--21, 321 square miles of cultivated fields in themain islands supporting a population of 48, 542, 376. If the tilledfields of Iowa, for {22} example, supported an equal number of people persquare mile, the population so supported would be over 100, 000, 000. That state alone could feed the entire population of the United Statesand then have an excess product left for export to other countries! IfNorth Carolina did as well with her cultivated land she would support30, 000, 000 people, and if Mississippi's 11, 875 square miles of landunder cultivation supported each 2277 persons, then 27, 041, 375 people, or thirteen times the present population of the state, could live offtheir produce! And yet these Japanese lands have been in cultivation for unnumberedcenturies. Some of them may have been cleared when King Herod trembledfrom his dream of a new-born rival in Judea, and certainly "the glorythat was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" had not faded from theearth when some of these fields began their age-long ministry to humanneed. And they have been kept fertile simply by each farmer puttingback on the ground every ounce of fertility taken from it, forcommercial fertilizers were absolutely unknown until our owngeneration. Of course, with a population so dense and with each man cultivating anarea no larger than a garden-patch in America, the people are poor, and the wonder is that they are able to produce food enough to keepthe country from actual want. Practically no animal meat is eaten; ifwe except fish, the average American eats nearly twice as much meat ina week as the average Japanese does in a year: to be exact, 150 poundsof meat per capita is required per year for the average Americanagainst 1. 7 pounds for the average Japanese! Many of the farmers hereare too poor even to eat a good quality of rice. Consequently Japanpresents the odd phenomenon of being at once an exporter and a largeimporter of rice. Poor farmers sell their good rice and buy a poorerquality brought in from the mainland of Asia and mix it with barleyfor grinding. Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases allthe work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It ispitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did notappear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing butby digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps sixinches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm inKomaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a toolmuch like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight:the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant andthe left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamasabout thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they areat least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice! With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something onthe ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckersand gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sownas with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbageor tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripeningfields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer maysave the time the rice plants are getting to the transplanting stage. That is to say, some other crop is maturing on the land while the riceplants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through thecountry almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants ofsome new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted cropnow maturing or newly harvested. The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half theagricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and thenbarley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoesgrow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, andare much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches ofcotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it saidthat in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japaneseterritory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivatedplant, with leaves like those of the lotus or water-lily, is the taro, which I also saw growing in Hawaii; its roots are used for food aspotatoes are. Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, isreligiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand forcommercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being anormal application. So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. Afew days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 milesof great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This countryis different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that itis so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supremeamong peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts aretherefore necessary to take care of the soil. But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. Thepopulation is so dense that every one realizes the essentialcriminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resourcewhich must support human life as long as the race shall last. Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. Thatis to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches tosix feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similarlevel piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case forthe preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tiersystem is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methodsused in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, uplandcrops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre. The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the lastavailable foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and womencarrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly allcases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slantinghillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and themountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one levelterrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall. Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for muchbitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the ricelaboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting isalso done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When werecall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bareexistence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, andthat the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions whichgive joy and color to American and English country life, it is nowonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acreplots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try theirfortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may bementioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for thecompulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to thecountry. True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (thoughthis is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates ofinterest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow fromthese banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in mostcommunities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (correspondingsomewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylockmoney-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 percent. For advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds inthese "cooperative credit societies, " just as they would in savingsbanks, except that in their case their savings are used solely forhelping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judiciouscommittee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest ratesmight seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere herecommands higher interest than in America. {26} I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit societies, "because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmerswould do well to adopt. It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twentyyears ago, but I should think that there has been little improvementin the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These housesare grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, thefarmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day, much after the fashion of the workers on the largest Americanplantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story housesare almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farmingsections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of astory and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between therooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, andno chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabinsin the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for thefact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cottonpadding until they look almost like walking feather beds. True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear thatmy average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception ofJapanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far asmy observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the ruralpopulation of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population inAmerica. If their possessions are few, so are their wants. In fact. Dr. Juichi Soyeda, one of the country's leading men, in talking to me, expressed a doubt as to whether the new civilization of Japan willreally produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusionand isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). "Our farmpeople, " he said, "are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, andwhile their possessions are small, there is little actual want amongthem. A greater {27} number than in most other countries arehome-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire. " Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of theaffection of the people for their home farms. "The Japanese, " he said, "have a term of contempt for the man who sells an old homestead. "There is no English word equivalent to it, but it means "a seller ofthe ancestral land, " and to say it of a man is almost equivalent toreflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might developin America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes. I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the beautifulin nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tinyhome here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and treeand neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looksforward with connoisseur-like enthusiasm to the season for wistariablooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, tolotus-time in mid-summer, and to the chrysanthemum shows in the fall. The fame of Tokyo's cherry blossoms has already gone around the world, and thus they not only add to the pleasure of its citizens, but givethe city a distinction of no small financial advantage as well. Why may not our civic improvement associations, women's clubs, etc. , get an idea here for our American towns? A long avenue of beautifultrees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, wouldgive distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one whohas been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars thatmake the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I can never forget the magnificent avenue ofcryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as thecedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great ShogunIyeyasu's tomb in Nikko. Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day iscoming. Their children are going to school, as the {28} older folkcould not, and as a Japanese editor said to me this week: "Every boy in the empire believes he may some day become Premier!" What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we in Americashould feel highly favored in that we have such magnificent resources, and yet as sharply rebuked in that we are doing so little with them. And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the broadpatriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Landof the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is providing ten-monthsschools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, howotherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our Americanfarm boys and girls will not be outdistanced in twentieth-centuryachievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only ashopeless "heathen?" Tokyo, Japan. {29} IV "WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of Japan is toocongested. It is a physical impossibility for a people to live ingenuine comfort on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, eventhough their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds orchairs, Western houses or Western clothing. The almost exclusive useof hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a large standpoint, andit would seem that in future farmers must combine, as they are alreadybeginning to do, in order to purchase horses and horse-power tools tobe used in common by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant &Implement Company store the other day I saw a number of widelyadvertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand for themis increasing. Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce the nation'sfood, a larger number may engage in manufacturing, and gradually thesame principle of division of labor which has brought Western peopleto high standards of living, comfort, and earning power will producemuch the same result in Japan. Already wages, astonishingly low asthey are to-day to an ordinary American, have increased 40 per cent, in the last eight or ten years, this increase being partly due to thegeneral cheapening of money the world over, and partly also to theincreased efficiency of the average laborer. Unfortunately, however, Japan is not content to rely upon natural lawfor the development of its manufactures. Adam {30} Smith said in his"Wealth of Nations" (published the year of our American Declaration ofIndependence), that the policy of all European nations since thedownfall of the Roman Empire had been to help manufacturing, theindustry of the towns, rather than agriculture, the industry of thecountry--a policy in which America later imitated Europe. Japan nowfollows suit. For a long time the government has paid enormoussubsidies to shipbuilding and manufacturing corporations, and now ahigh tariff has been enacted, which will still further increase thecost of living for the agricultural classes, comprising, as they do, two thirds of the country's population. "'With your cheap labor and all the colossal Oriental market right atyour door, " I said to Editor Shihotsu of the _Kokumin Shimbun_ a dayor two ago, "what excuse is there for further dependence on thegovernment? What can be the effect of your new tariff except toincrease the burdens of the farmer for the benefit of themanufacturer?" And while defending the policy, he admitted that I hadstated the practical effect of the policy. "They are domesticconsumption duties, " was his phrase; and Count Okuma, one of theempire's ablest men, once Minister of Agriculture, has also pointedout how injuriously the new law will affect the masses of the people. "Some would argue, " he said in a speech at Osaka, "that the duties arepaid by the country from which the goods are imported. That this isnot the case is at once seen by the fact that an increase in dutymeans a rise in the price of an article in the country imposing theduty, and this to the actual consumer often amounts to more than therise in the duty. In these cases consumers pay the duty themselves;and the customs revenues, so far from being a national asset, aremerely another form of taxation paid by the people. " And the masses inJapan, already staggering under the enormous burden of an average taxamounting to 32 per cent, of their earnings (on account of their warswith China and Russia and their enormous army and navy expenditure), are ill-prepared to stand further {31} taxation for the benefit ofspecial interests. On the whole, there seems to have been much truthin what a recent authority said on this subject: "The Japanese manufacturers are concerned only to make monopoly profits out of the consumer. If they can do that, they will not worry about foreign markets, from which, in fact, their policy is bound more and more to exclude them. " In any case, manufacturing in Japan is bound to increase, but it oughtnot to increase through unjust oppression of agriculture or at theexpense of the physical stamina of the race. This fact is now winningrecognition not only from the nation at large, but frompublic-spirited manufacturers as well. Some very notable evidence upon this point came to me Wednesday wheninfluential friends secured special permission, not often granted tostrangers, for me to visit the great Kanegafuchi Cotton SpinningCompany's plant near Tokyo--the great surprise being not that Isucceeded in getting permission to visit this famous factory, thoughthat was partly surprising, but in what I saw on the visit. Much has been said and written as to the utterly deplorable conditionof Japanese factory workers, and I was quite prepared for sights thatwould outrage my feelings of humanity. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found the manager making a hobby of "welfare work" for hisoperatives and with a system of such work modelled after the Kruppsystem in Germany, the best in the world! And as the KanegafuchiCompany has seventeen factories in all, representing several citiesand aggregating over 300, 000 spindles, being one of the most famousindustries of Japan, it will be seen that its example is by no meanswithout significance. The Kanegafuchi's Tokyo factories alone employ 3500 operatives, andthey are cleaner, I should say, than most of our stores and offices. The same thing is true of their great hospital and boarding-house, andthe dining-room is also {32} surprisingly clean and well kept. Of thewelfare work proper a whole article could be written. Each operativepays 3 per cent, of his or her wages (most operatives are women) intoa common insurance and pension fund, and the company, out of itsearnings, pays into the fund an equal amount. From this a pension isgiven the family of any employee who dies, while if an operative getssick or is injured, a committee, assisted by Director Fuji, allows asuitable pension until recovery. In the case, however, oflong-standing disease or disability, help is given, after ten years, from still another fund. This employees' pension fund now amounts to$143, 000, while other funds given partly or wholly by the companyinclude $30, 000 for operatives' sanitary fund, $112, 000 in a fund "forpromoting operatives' welfare, " and $15, 000 for erecting anoperatives' sanatorium. The company also has a savings department, paying 10 per cent, on long-time deposits made by employees. There isan excellent theatre and dance hall at the Tokyo plant, and I supposeat the other branches also, and five physicians are regularly employedto look after the health of operatives. While the hours of labor in Japan generally are inexcusably long and, as a rule, only two rest days a month are allowed, the KanegafuchiCompany observes the Biblical seventh-day rest with profitableresults. The work hours are long yet, it is true, ten hours havingbeen the rule up to October 1, and now nine and one half hours. Theten hours this summer embraced the time from 6 to 6, with a halfhour's rest from 9 to 9:30, one hour from 11:30 to 12:30, and anotherhalf hour from 3 to 3:30; a system of halfway rests not common inAmerica, I believe. Conditions at Kanegafuchi, of course, are not ideal, nor would I holdthem up as a general model for American mills. Rather should Americaask: "If Japan in a primitive stage of industrial evolution is doingso much, how much more ought we to do?" More noteworthy still is thefact that the sentiment of the country is loudly and insistentlydemanding a law {33} to stop the evils of child labor and night work forwomen, which, on the whole, are undoubtedly bad--very bad. TheKanegafuchi welfare work is exceptional, but it is in line with thenew spirit of the people. That Japan with its factory system not yet extensive, its people usedto a struggle for existence tenfold harder than ours, and with apopulation comprising only the wealthy or capitalist class--that undersuch conditions, these Buddhist Japanese should still make effectivedemand for adequate factory labor legislation is enough to put toshame many a Christian state in which our voters still permitconditions that reproach our boasted chivalry and humanity. Perhapsall the changes needed cannot be made at once without injury tomanufacturing interests, but in that case the law should at leastrequire a gradual and steady approach to model conditions--a distinctstep forward each six months until at the end of three years, or fiveyears at longest, every state should have a law as good as that ofMassachusetts. Tokyo, Japan. {34} V DOES JAPANESE COMPETITION MENACE THE WHITE MAN'S TRADE? I With all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor tobe had for a mere song--four fifths of her cotton-factory workers, girls and women averaging 13-1/2 cents a day, and the male laboraveraging only 22 cents--it is simply useless for Europe and Americato attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize. Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge tothe front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has alreadydone as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helplessin competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion'sshare of Asiatic trade--the richest prize of twentieth-centurycommerce. In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English andAmerican manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last fewmonths, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protectivetariff partial confirmation of their predictions, they have assumedadded authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the factsas to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has becomeacutely interested in the matter. I account myself especiallyfortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks underpeculiarly favorable circumstances in a first-hand study of Japaneseindustrial {35} conditions. I have been in great factories andbusiness offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreignmanufacturers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had theviews of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire aswell as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with severalmen who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who hasstood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I havetaken pains to get the views of English and American consularofficials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper menboth foreign and native. And yet after having seen the big factories and the littlefactory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the mostambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall leave the countryconvinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot competewith Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouragingfor manufacturing in the Mikado's empire, but I do not believe thatthis development is to be regarded as a menace to English or Americanindustry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upona radical misconception of conditions as they are. In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as amilitary power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should bebranded as the groundless non sequitur that it is. "All our presenthas its roots in the past, " as my first Japanese acquaintance said tome, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuriesunnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for theblossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving, the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, theSamurai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce wasdespised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessaryevil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modernMinerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather anunrecognized Ulysses {36} of ancient skill surprising onlookers merelyignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the samehistorical standpoint, however, industrial Japan is a mere learner, unskilled, with the long and weary price of victory yet to pay. In the race she has to run, moreover, the Mikado-land has no suchadvantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In Americait has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; thatso-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community--not because it ischeap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro laborin the South, for example, I have come to regard as perhaps thedearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite preparedto find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditionsin a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that Imight find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there areany, and few of the disadvantages, encountered elsewhere. But it isnot so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job'strials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in anewspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap. " Andall my investigations have convinced me that the remark is asapplicable in Japan as it is in America or England. The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course, amazingly low. The latest 1910 statistics, as furnished by theDepartment of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40cents for carpenters, 31-1/2 cents for shoemakers, 34 cents forblacksmiths, 25-1/2 cents for compositors, 19-1/2 cents for male farmlaborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. Inthe cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wagesrun from 5 cents a day for the youngest children to 25 cents a day forgood women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the averagewages were 22-1/2 cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was{37} for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher gradeof efficiency than the average. But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known tohim, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I wasinvited--one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of muchtravel and culture who had studied commercial conditions at home andabroad rather profoundly--who expressed the conclusion that Japanesefactory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatlycheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather tritein view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the oldhandicrafts and family industries to which our people have beenaccustomed, " my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the momentwe turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness ofour endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers oftimes I have sought to work out some industrial policy which hadsucceeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, orAmerica, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsideredelements of a different environment, a totally different stage ofindustrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a recordfor continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, ourpolitical and military achievements are but the fruitage of our longhistory, but in industry we must simply wait through patientgenerations to reach the stage represented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct. " All my investigations since have confirmed the philosophy of thisdistinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention it, would befamiliar to many in America and England. In the Tokyo branch of theKanegafuchi Spinning Company (a company which controls 300, 000spindles) the director, speaking from the experience of one of thegreatest and best conducted industries in Japan, declared: "Yourskilled factory laborers in America or England will work four sides ofa ring frame; our unskilled laborer may work only one. " A youngEnglishman in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to dowork that I and my mate would take care of at home. " An Americanvice-consul told me that it takes three or four times as much Japaneseas foreign labor to look after an equal number of looms. A Japaneseexpert just back from Europe declared recently that "Lancashire laboris more expensive than ours, but really cheaper. " Similarly the Tokyocorrespondent of the London _Times_ summing up an eight-column reviewof Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom of thequestion and consider what is being paid as wages and what is beingobtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may find that Japaneselabor is not cheaper than in other countries. " {38} II My own conviction is that in actual output the Japanese labor issomewhat cheaper than American or European labor, but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in comparative cheapnessrepresents mainly a blood-tax on the lives and energies of theJapanese people, the result of having no legislation to restrain theruinous overwork of women and little children--a grievous debt whichthe nation must pay at the expense of its own stamina and which themanufacturers must also pay in part through the failure to developexperienced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year Book"expresses the view that "in per capita output two or three skilledJapanese workers correspond to one foreign, " but under presentconditions the difficulty here is to find the skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, told methat the average Japanese factory hand remains in the business lessthan two years, I was astonished, but inquiry from original sourcesconfirmed the view. With the best system of welfare work in theempire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half {39}to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employing2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as longas three years. Under such conditions, the majority of the operativesat any time must be in a stage of deplorable inexperience, and it isno wonder that the "Year Book" just quoted goes on to confess that"one serious defect of the production is lack of uniformity inquality--attributed to unskilled labor and overwork of machinery. " The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be foundin the fact that Japanese industries are women's industries--therebeing seven times as large a proportion of women to men, theDepartment of Commerce informs me, as in European and Americanmanufacturing. These women workers are mostly from the country. Theirpurpose is only to work two or three years before getting married, andthousands of them, called home to marry the husbands their parentshave selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit workbefore their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory laborers wholook on the work as a life business, " was an expression often repeatedto me. Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, have Iseen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's industrialefficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass to eachreader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table before me (formatch-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well asthe sort conducted through matrimonial middlemen without waiting forthe aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never inmy life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxesat home would you find so many splinters without heads, so manydefective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am toldthat it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilledforeign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do thework of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my {40} attention that in shops twoor three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanesenewspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotypecompositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. Inshort, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what Ihave written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheaplabor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, ratherspoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should haveto keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands. Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longerhours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week, eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as awhole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterruptedtoil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us, " as a Japanese professorsaid to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our peopleare not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried. "Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japaneseartistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and thepeople seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulnessinto the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo streetcars, " said an ex-cabinet officer to me; "the wheels are seldom ornever cleaned or oiled, and are half eaten by rust. " The railroads arebut poorly kept up; the telephones exhaust your patience; while in thecase of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself inamazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram fromOsaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow trainto start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of mymessage before it did. In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth asatisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and thatis that we should not put the blame wholly on the {41} wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility lies at the door ofinexpert managers. The family system of production has not only beenthe rule for generations with that minority of the people not engagedin farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training asufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production. In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not provingso abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factorieshave paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates ofinterest on money, as factories in England and America. BaronShibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers incotton manufacturing, is my authority for the statement that 12 percent, would be a rather high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures furnished by the Department of Finance show that for tenyears the average rate of interest on loans has been 11. 25 per cent. The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial advancehave been greatly exaggerated may also be demonstrated just here. While the latest government figures show that in twelve years thenumber of female factory operatives increased from 261, 218 to 400, 925and male factory operatives from 173, 614 to 248, 251, it is plain thata manufacturing population of 649, 000 in a country of 50, 000, 000 soulsis small, and the actual progress has not been so great as therelative figures would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories"employ less than ten persons and would not be called factories at allin England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a greathandicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the government at aheavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where "cheap labor" issupposed to be most advantageous, no very remarkable advance has beenmade in the last decade. From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers soincreased their trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worthof raw {42} cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, whileJapan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth a decadeprevious--though of course she made this cotton into higher gradeproducts. III It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan aresteadily increasing and will continue to increase. More significantthan the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have already givenattention, is the fact that these wages represent an average increaseper trade of 40 per cent, above the wages eight years previous. Thenew 1910 "Financial and Economic Annual" shows the rate of wages offorty-six classes of labor for a period of eight years. For not oneline of labor is a decrease of wages shown, and for only two anincrease of less than 30 per cent. ; sixteen show increases between 30and 40 per cent. , seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent. , eight from 50to 60 per cent. , three from 60 to 70 per cent. , while significantlyenough the greatest increase, 81 per cent. , is for female servants, afact largely due to factory competition. In Osaka the Britishvice-consul gave me the figures for the latest three-year period forwhich figures have been published, indicating in these thirty-sixmonths a 30 per cent. Gain in the wages of men in the factories and a25 per cent, gain in the wages of women. Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry must alsobe the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half million fewerwomen than men (1910 figures: men, 25, 639, 581; women, 25, 112, 338)--acondition the reverse of that obtaining in almost every other country. Now the young Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if theywere not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramountimportance of having descendants to worship their spirits, favor andarrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this competitionfor {43} wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and ahalf million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook for anygreat expansion of manufacturing based on woman labor is not verybright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper increasing her frantic bidsfor servants 81 per cent, in eight years, and still mourning that theyare not to be had, it is plain that the manufacturer has seriouscompetition from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact thatthe Japanese girls are for the first time becoming well educated andare therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand asoffice-workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka'sleading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500 women, but if Iwished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, it would beimpossible for me to get the labor, though I might increase to thisfigure by adding a few hundred each year for several years. " Unquestionably, too, shorter hours, less night work, weekly holidays, and better sanitary conditions must be adopted by most manufacturersif they are to continue to get labor. The Kobe _Chronicle_ quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the womenworkers are compelled to leave the factories on account of theirconstitutions being wrecked" after two or three years of night work, consumption numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Eitherthe mills must give better food and lodging than they now provide orelse they must pay higher wages directly which will enable thelaborers to make better provision for themselves. Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is the steadyincrease in cost of living, due partly to the higher standarddeveloped through education and contact with Western civilization, butperhaps even more largely to the fearful burden of taxation underwhich the people are staggering. A usual estimate of the tax rate is30 per cent. Of one's income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late JapaneseFinancial Commissioner to London, is quoted as authority for thestatement {44} that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this estimateincludes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to pay forsalt and tobacco as a result of the government monopoly in theseproducts, or the greatly increased prices of sugar resulting from thegovernment's paternalistic efforts to guarantee prosperity to sugarmanufacturers in Formosa. IV Higher still, and higher far than anything the nation has ever yetknown, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From aBritish textile representative I learned the other day that a grade ofEnglish woollens largely used by the Japanese for underwear will costover one third more under the new tariff, while the increased duty oncertain other lines of goods is indicated by the table herewith: PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE Old Tariff New Tariff Printed goods 3 22 White lawns 10 47 Shirtings 10 39 Cotton Italians 3 35 Poplins 8 19 Brocades 10 22 Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its bootstraps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me torealize even now that through the new tariff Japanese industry, as awhole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete inforeign markets than it will gain by shackled competition in the homemarkets. Farseeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of theempire's Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than anyother man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the time thenew law goes into force, " he declared, "I am {45} confident that itsinjurious effects will be so apparent that the people will force itsrepeal. With our heavy taxes the margin of wages left for comfort isalready small, and with the cost of living further increased by thenew tariff, wages must inevitably advance. This will increase the costof our manufactured products, now exported mostly to China, India, andother countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where we mustface the competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world. As our cost of production increases, our competition with Europe willbecome steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports willsurely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produceeverything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamperevery new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and mustespecially hinder navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have madesuch progress. " Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailiesare as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the Kobe_Chronicle_ declares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "Britishmanufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of theJapanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raisedprices against herself and damaged her own efficiency. " That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems to me toadmit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of Britishand American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the whiteman's trade loses in Japan will be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of1899 her export of yarns to China--in the much discussed "market rightat her doors"--dropped from a product of 340, 000 bales to a recentaverage of 250, 000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latestpublished government figures, the number of employees in Japanesecotton factories increased only 240--one third of 1 per cent. --or from73, 985 to 74, 225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to thefigures showing the {46} comparative English and Japanese imports ofraw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, ofKobe, Japan in this period going from $30, 000, 000 to $54, 000, 000, or77 per cent. , while England's advance was from $135, 000, 000 to$300, 000, 000, or 122 per cent. The increase in England's case, ofcourse, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, due to theincreased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none theless useful for the purposes of comparison. In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to stimulatespecial industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, itseems to me, equally as little danger to the trade of Europe andAmerica in general (though here, too, special industries may suffernow and then), because Japan is in this way simply handicappingherself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we havean illustration in the case of the Formosan sugar subsidy which seemsto have developed into a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelierfigure, the government seems to be in the position of the man who hadthe bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go. Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and specialprivileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, a dangerousand corrupting alliance of government with business developed, publicmorals debased (as was strikingly brought out in the Dai Nippon sugarscandal), and the people, as Mr. Sasano, of the Foreign Department, complains, now "rely on the help of the government on all occasions. "On the same point the Tokyo _Keizai_ declares that "the habit oflooking to the government for assistance in all and everything, oblivious of independent enterprise . . . Has now grown to the chronicstage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of the nationwill ultimately be sapped and undermined. " As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality" broughtagainst Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in thisdiscussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of Japanesecommercial suicide. But to one who holds {47} the view, as I do, thatthe community of nations is enriched by every worthy industrial andmoral advance on the part of any nation, it is gratifying to find thegeneral alarm over the present undoubtedly serious conditions, and itis to be hoped that the efforts of the authorities will result in anearly change to better methods. V Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day Japaneseindustry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the generalwell-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that theJapanese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in thefuture no more than in the present will Japan menace European andAmerican industry (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantagesin Manchuria, Korea, etc. ), for just in proportion as efficiencyincreases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages andstandards of living will advance. The three--efficiency, wages, costof living--seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainlybeen the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer byreason of Japan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms ofproduction should be abundantly compensated for in the better marketfor our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people ofincreasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living. In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason tofear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps she has beenallowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, butthat, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story. Kobe, Japan. {48} VI BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM, AND CHRISTIANITY IN JAPAN One of the most fascinating places in all Japan is Kyoto, the oldcapital of the empire, and one of its most picturesque and historiccities. Without great factories such as Osaka boasts of, without thepolitical importance of Tokyo, and without shipping advantages such ashave made Kobe and Yokahoma famous, Kyoto is noted rather forconserving the life of old Japan. Here are the family industries, thehandicrafts, and a hundred little arts in which the Land of the RisingSun excels. Little themselves in stature, the people of Japan are best in dealingwith little things requiring daintiness, finish, and artistic taste. Some one has said that their art is "great in little things and littlein great things, " and unlike many epigrams, it is as true as it isterse. A traveler gets the impression that most of their shops, or "stores, "as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps thisis largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to athousand utensils and household articles which in America would be rawand plain in their obvious practicality. The room in which I write isa fine illustration of this: finished in natural, unpainted woods, entirely without "fussiness" or show, and yet with certain touches andbits of wood carving that make it a work of art. Upon this point Imust again quote Lafcadio Hearn, whose {49} books, although often morepoetic and laudatory than accurate, are nevertheless too valuable tobe neglected by any student of Japan: "It has been said that in a Greek city of the fourth century before Christ every household utensil, even the most trifling object, was in respect of design an object of art; and the same fact is true, though in another and stranger way, of all things in a Japanese home; even such articles of common use as a bronze candlestick, a brass lamp, an iron kettle, a paper lantern, a bamboo curtain, a wooden tray, will reveal to educated eyes a sense of beauty and fitness entirely unknown to Western cheap production. " Like most old Japanese cities, Kyoto is proud of its temples, Buddhistand Shinto. And perhaps I should explain just here the differencebetween these two faiths that were long merged into one, but have beendissociated since the restoration of the Emperor to his old-timepowers forty years ago. Shinto is the ancient Japanese system ofancestor-worship, with its doctrine of the divine descent of theMikado from the Sun-goddess and its requirement that every faithfuladherent make daily offerings to the spirits of the family'sancestors. With the future life or with moral precepts for this lifeit does not concern itself. "Obey the Emperor and follow your owninstincts, " is the gist of the Shinto religion, in so far as it may becalled a religion at all: the tendency is to consider it only a formof patriotism and not a religion. Buddhism, on the other hand, is an elaborate system of theologycomprising a great variety of creeds, and insisting upon muchecclesiastical form and ceremony, however little it may have to dowith practical morals. "The fact is, we Japanese have never gotten ourmorals from our religion, " said one quasi-Buddhist newspaper man to mein Tokyo. "What moral ideas we have came neither from Shintoism norBuddhism, but largely from Confucius and the Chinese classics. " Buddhism as it left India may have been a rather exalted religioustheory, but if so, then in Japan it has certainly {50} degeneratedinto a shameless mockery of its former self. To read Sir EdwinArnold's glorification of theoretical Buddhism in his "Light of Asia, "and then see practical Buddhism in Japan with all its superstitionsand idolatries, is very much like hearing bewitched Titania's praiseof her lover's beauty and then turning to see the long ears and hairyfeatures of the ass that he has become. Nor is it without significance that Sir Edwin Arnold himself coming toBuddhist Japan dropped into open and flagrant immoralities such as aChristian community would never have tolerated, while the foremostAmerican-bred apologists for Buddhism here have been but littlebetter. One of the greatest and wealthiest temples in Kyoto is morenotorious right now for the vices of its sacred (?) officials than forany virtues in its creed, and one of the high priests, like theEmperor himself, has a dozen or more women in his household. SomeBuddhists are making an earnest effort to bring about at least anoutward reformation of their organization, but the difficulties aresuch as to make the success of the undertaking very improbable. Withthe usual Japanese quality of imitativeness they have started "YoungMen's Buddhist Associations, " "Sunday schools, " etc. , and are alsobeginning to follow the example set by the Christians of participatingin philanthropic and charitable work. In the Buddhist service Iattended last Sunday the gorgeously robed priest sat on a raised altarin the centre of the room, with other priests ranged about him, andthe general service, as usual, was much as if they had copied theCatholic ritual. After the Buddhist ceremonies, I went to the Christian service at theCongregational School, or Doshisha, where the sound of theAmerican-born minister's voice was punctuated by the street sounds ofwhirring rickshaw wheels and the noisy getas of passing Buddhists, while outside the window I could see the bamboo trees and the nowfamiliar red disk and white border of the Mikado's flag. Prayer wasoffered for {51} "the President of the United States, the King ofGreat Britain, the Emperor of Germany, and the Emperor of Japan. " At night I was even more interested, even though I could notunderstand a word, in a native Japanese service I attended for half anhour. Although there was a downpour of rain the chapel was comfortablyfilled and the faces of the worshippers, I thought, were of more thanordinary intelligence and promise, while their sincerity isillustrated by the fact that numbers of the women Christians areactually depriving themselves of suitable food in order to give moneyfor erecting a larger church building. The next evening I took tea with a missionary who has in his home oneof the public notices (dated March, 1868, ) and common throughout theempire forty odd years ago, prohibiting Christianity, the ancientpenalty being nothing less than death itself. The explanation of thisnotice is found in a bit of history. Three hundred and sixty years agothe Catholics came here, started missions, and made many convertsamong the lords or daimyios, who ordered their followers also tobecome Catholics, with the result that by the time of the firstEnglish settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, there were from 600, 000 to1, 000, 000 Christians, nominal and actual, away over here in Japan. Seven years later, however, government persecution began, Christianitywas put under the ban, and so remained until eight years after ourCivil War ended. Many Christians suffered martyrdom for their faith inthis long period; and a few who escaped detection even secretly handedtheir faith down from father to son through all the long generationsuntil tolerance came again. Dr. A. D. Hail, of Osaka, tells me that even as late as 1885 an oldman from the "backwoods, " as we should say, came to a village whereDr. Hail's brother was a missionary, discovered for the first timethat a man might be a Christian without being punished, and thenconfessed that each day he had worshipped secretly at a littleCatholic shrine hidden in {52} his wall, as his father and his father'sfather had done before him. As another illustration of the changed attitude toward Christianity, Imay mention that a Japanese Buddhist once came to Doctor Hail'sservices armed with a dagger to kill the preacher, but had hisattention caught by the sermon while waiting his chance and is now amissionary himself! Perhaps in no other respect is Christianity working a greater changethan in the general estimate of woman, although this is an objectionthe natives openly urge against Christianity. Just as in any conflictof interest the family in Japan has been everything and the individualnothing, so in every disagreement between husband and wife hisopinions count for everything, hers for nothing. The orthodox andtraditional Japanese view as to a woman's place has been veryaccurately and none too strongly set forth by the celebrated Japanesemoralist, Kaibarra, writing on "The Whole Duty of Woman": "The great lifelong duty of a woman is obedience. . . . Should her husband be roused at any time to anger, she must obey him with fear and trembling, and never set herself up against him in anger and forwardness. A woman should look on her husband as if he were Heaven itself and never weary of thinking how she may yield to her husband, and thus escape celestial castigation. " Similarly, in the "Greater Learning for Women" it is declared: "The five worst maladies that afflict the female mind are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy and silliness. These five maladies infest seven or eight out of every ten women, and it is from these that arises the inferiority of women to men. " {53} [Illustration: THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA. ] This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in the East than this. {54} [Illustration: THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK. ] The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth! {52 continued} The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or twoamusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--thatare of interest in this connection. A Japanese member of her churchdeclared: No, no, Mrs. {55} "Hail, you can't ever make me believe thatmy wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching aSunday-school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Whydid Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the Japanese answerwas: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and sheneeded some man to help her understand!" Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying hiswife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the Japaneseamazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his armin walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety! No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of theindividual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost aslargely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family thatcounted and not the individual, so in his relations to the largerworld beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighedagainst the wishes of the superior classes. In the earliest days, whenthe lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to waitupon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Evennow it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shameto save the family from want. The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the familyis the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains thesystem of adoption: a younger son not being essential to themaintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because herepresents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and mustthen join his other children in obeying the eldest son. In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of {56} individualrights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuriesthe smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but moreseriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down incold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightestprovocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword, " while incase of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thingfor soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide bydisemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that"the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christianspirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as anexample that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I havementioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as asin. " Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences thepeoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave likefatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order forcenturies has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrificepleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Familyor by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said insober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboysto-day is to die for their Emperor. --- This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be fromKorea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka andin Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit inorder to get first-hand information about industrial conditions. Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day'srecord here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths. Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we haveeradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shalleventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town asa disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitaryconditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me thatthere were 10, 000 cholera victims in that one city that year--theyellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night thesound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or withnew corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than313, 000 Japanese died of the scourge. I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interestingcountry. For just as America represents the ultimate type ofOccidental civilization, so does Japan represent the ultimate type ofOriental civilization. More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental andOccidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history. For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains andpeaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands hisfarthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "theLand of the Rising Sun. " He hardly thought of the existence of a West, but if his Buddha-like composure had been ruffled by such a thought, he might have droned monotonously: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. " But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the whiteman, starting from the land of the Euphrates, had pitched his camp, with each succeeding generation, nearer and nearer the setting sun. Greece--Rome--Spain--France--England--then four hundred years ago, more restless than the Mongolian, the white man dared the seas thathemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still thecourse of empire then continued until in our time the white manplanted his civilization on the Pacific Coast. There was no more West. Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeperthan reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-foundocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by thebooming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma. The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, andthe deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may oftenescape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it markednot merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama ofhuman evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strangeworld-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting inkeeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to anyother great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the youngUnited States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came theunlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East toWestern trade and thought. When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yetformed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to humancreatures and human creations, I think the far historian will recordfew events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-ofmeaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five yearsafter the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-olddrama of our westward march. So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident haverushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curiouscustoms and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts existside by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangelymingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, andwe wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock oftheir fierce encounter shall have passed. For it is not merely Japan, but all Asia, whose future may be affected by the outcome of the new, tense struggle here between the ideals of West and East. As on the streets of Tokyo and Yokahoma the Japanese {59} in Europeandress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coatsand trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, andgetas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern scienceand Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples withthe faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Westerncivilization surge against the old placidity of the East. What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, dependsso much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks tobuild the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine ofChristian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhistritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others, like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away allreligion, but they will find that they are fighting against anineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of thedivine in man. In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to convince me of thetruth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to thecountry with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing missionwork here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. ButI go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard hasdispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student ofsocial and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needsnothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing toforget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing thefundamental teachings of Christ Himself, and who have education, sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helpingmold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which mayultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race. Kobe, Japan. {60} VII KOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM" I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. Inthe civilization into which I have come science and invention are inswaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations ofWestern Europe still in the womb of Time. This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I amtravelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen, "as the Japanese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recordedhistory runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general features must have changed but little in all thistime. A typical Korean view of the present year might well bephotographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the OldTestament. The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in theprimitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks areof wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman herenever standing between the "plow-handles, " as we say, because there isonly one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. Withsickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in thefields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardlyhigh enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rockwalls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or onwhich immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun. Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or whatwas once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea. There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible picturesof the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October'shunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming hereand there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and thePleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar theancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railwaylocomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains andvalleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of thewild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gonenomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved totake a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your campout under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem toburn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awakenin the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble lifewas snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a fewshort months ago. As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly lessfascinating than the country through which I had travelled during theday. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangelyrobed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there inthe moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in ourrickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a deadera is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles ofmassive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail fromPalos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar. In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but aworld in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of thefamiliar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I havefound the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great baremountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbingtheir steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacentvalley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but littlehigher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a toweringskyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-storystudio building on the main street of the city. Practically everyother building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than theaverage white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but hesmokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the worldand doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of akingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home;no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There aremiserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feelthat he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but theburden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent inappearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that anAmerican would expect to crush them. The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge ofmourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extremesummit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and isbraided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it. This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tiehers. Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them tostay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on thestreet are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their headsand shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facialterritory exposed. The tourist is at first {63} inclined to think thatthere are many young girls on the streets, but this is because theboys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America. Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neatwhite dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married alittle later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave hishead (not necessarily as a sign of mourning!) and wear his hairthereafter in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. AnEnglish missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and howpretty an English or American girl does look in this far land!) toldme that a Korean girl of twenty or twenty-one is regarded as a ratherdesperate old maid, and the go-betweens, who arrange the marriageshere as they do in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum forgetting a husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood! The chancesare that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, and shedoesn't even see him then, for according to the curious custom herethe bride's eyes are sealed up until late afternoon of her weddingday. More than this, custom requires that the bride must keepabsolutely unbroken silence all the day long, and for a varying lengthof time thereafter. Mrs. Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "itmay be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound ofhis wife's voice, "--and the nature of the dear creatures in Americawill of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement! The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for good feessometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatisfactory features onunsuspecting swains, or match undesirable young fellows with girlsvastly superior to them. A rather amusing instance was reported to meby the young lady from whom I have just quoted. One of the officialsor noblemen in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was preparingto marry off into a family of rank in another city. A few days beforethe wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to {64} the father of thebride and said: "Did you know that your prospective son-in-law has ahare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in Korea is not merely such an undesirableaddition to one's countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because ofbeing without it, but under the old dispensation no one with aharelip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court andthereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital city. Therefore the father waxed thoughtful from his topknot to the end ofhis long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll do, " he finally said to hiswife. "We'll go ahead with the ceremony, but instead of my daughterI'll substitute my orphan niece. " And he did, and the young fellowdidn't know any better for a week. Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am extremely gladto add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" peroration, for that wasreally what happened in this case. The father of my young ladyinformant, who is a doctor, sewed up the young fellow's lip, he waspresented at court, and the real daughter who so narrowly escapedmarrying may be an old maid, for all I know. In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find littletuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there are victims, andto the generally unsanitary conditions. A daughter of one of theSouthern missionaries here, having contracted the malady, has justgone to Arizona in search of cure. Everywhere on the streets Iencounter faces marked by smallpox, and formerly to have had thedisease was the rule rather than the exception. In fact, instead ofalluding to a man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eyeteeth, " as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox. " Sincevaccination became the rule, however, there are very few cases. Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest factorsin the high death-rate, but conditions are improving. {65} And so longas authorities declare that in America half the infant death-rate isdue to ignorance or neglect, we haven't much right to point a scornfulfinger at Korea, anyhow. I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial governmentof Korea ended its inglorious career but a few short months ago. Whilethe records of the nation run back more than three thousandyears--probably to a period when Job was so superbly reproaching hiscomforters in the Land of Uz--the late dynasty runs back only 500years. We Americans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think ofmen of five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas, as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years wouldn'tentitle a family to enter good society over here. But though only fivehundred years in power, this recent dynasty succeeded in doing aboutas much devilment and as little good as many dynasties much older inyears. One of the missionaries explained to me yesterday that it wasonly when the King got very mad that he would order heads cut offwithout reason--but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivityat other periods may have been due to sloth. The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have been corruptbeyond the belief of the average American. When I was a boy I used tohear the old men in country churches thank God for the blessings oforderly government and for the privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest us or make us afraid. " As a rule, we take suchthings as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asiaand into countries where the people have been cursed by corruptgovernments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whimof the government, where property has been confiscated with no betterreason, and where men have had to die for their faiths:--when he, inshort, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property norconscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his Americanprivileges somewhat more highly. {66} The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeakably stupid. Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers or fortune-tellers tofind a lucky day or a lucky time of the moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness consulted the mutang, or conjurer, instead ofa doctor. Thus when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutangdeclared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always bereferred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would not leaveunless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean boundary, threehundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned horse was accordingly ledthe entire distance for His Excellency, the Smallpox Spirit, to rideaway on! The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were given, justas lives were taken merely at the whim of the Throne. Taxes werefarmed out, the grafting collectors taking from the people probablyfive or six times as much as finally reached the public treasury. Morethan this, the nobility robbed the people at will, and there was noauthority from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man whobecame energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his swollenfortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban, " as a noble wascalled, would take the trouble to borrow but never take the trouble torepay. For the Yang-ban was a "gentleman, " he was. It was beneath hisdignity to work--even to guide the reins of the horse he rode--but itwas not beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb"to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow withoutrepaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said that MotherYang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, as is recorded in theclassic lays of our own land, but Father never defiled himself bydoing anything so dishonorable as an honest day's work. But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The Yang-bans inKorea have been deprived of their ancient {67} privileges, and I fearthat even their fellows in America are by no means treated with theancient deference and respect due to persons of such exalted merit andblue-blood. What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery and theextortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that the Koreans herebecame disinclined to labor, while those who went to Manchuria, wherethere has been "proper security for the gains of industry" are said tobe quite a different folk--energetic because there has beenencouragement to be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation beingarbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer was toappear not to have anything worth raiding, and with the coinageconfined usually to the copper "cash" (each "cash" worth a smallfraction of a cent), it was difficult for a man to have much moneywithout everybody knowing it. If a man had much he needed a warehouseto store it in. Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaksof a time when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money, making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or one ponyto carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is mentioned in theJapanese official Year Book on Korea. The Japanese army bought $5000worth of timber in the interior, where the people were not used to anyother currency, with the result that "the army had to charter a smallsteamer and fill her completely with this copper cash to finance thetransaction!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this oldKorean money at ten cents a string, and even then probably paid toomuch. When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an independentmonarchy under a Japanese "protectorate, " but the day before I sailedfrom San Francisco, Japanese aggression took another step and thecountry was formally annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. Thereis little doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreansbetter government than the old monarchy gave them, but one {68} cannotexcuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her rule on the island. Yesterday morning I went out to the Old North Palace, a deserted andmelancholy memorial of vanished power, stood on the throne whereKorean kings once held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in whichthe Japanese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw theplace where they burned her body. The Japanese minister at that timewas recalled and placed on trial for the offence, and, though heescaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt was undoubted. It hasbeen estimated that in about eighteen months in 1907-'08, "12, 916Koreans, called 'insurgents' by the Japanese and patriots by theirfellow countrymen, were killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of whom lost their lives. " This looks more like butchery thanwar. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that there wereinexcusable delays in paying for land seized from Koreans, and in viewof all the circumstances it is questionable whether the Korean hatredor dislike of Japan will become very much less cordial than it isto-day. Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work been moresuccessful than in Korea (there are probably 125, 000 Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years ago), and I have beeninterested to learn that there is absolutely no truth in the Japanesenewspaper reports that immense numbers of native Christians areleaving the church since annexation. On the contrary, reports from allover the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midstof a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 1800conversions reported during the first ten days. At a Methodist missionschool I visited this morning I found that a hundred of the nativepupils had been canvassing the town a part of three successiveafternoons with the result that they had brought in the names of 697Koreans expressing a desire to become Christians. Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through {69}denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own sphere ofactivity, preventing duplication of effort, and my general observationhas convinced me that the criticisms of foreign mission work sometimesheard in America are based on a radical misconception of conditions. Even the non-Christians, in the great majority of cases, speak in highpraise of the splendid work of the missionaries. A typical expressionis that found in the latest issue of the Shanghai _National Review_, now before me, which may be expected to speak impartially. Referringto an address by Doctor Morrison, the Peking correspondent of theLondon _Times_, it says: "Doctor Morrison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it is to be found in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do otherwise than eulogize it. " Seoul, Korea. {70} VIII MANCHURIA--FAIR AND FERTILE "Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night"--I remember yet how one of thedispatches began which brought so vividly to my mind the meaning ofthe great death-grapple here between the Japanese and Russian hosts in1905. [Footnote: "Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly. Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals, are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated villages----" And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn--men footsore and weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the Japanese had not eaten. ] The story in a nutshell is this: "After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden. " So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle fiveyears ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. WhatGettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first greatcontest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Deathfor once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintrynightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn alongmiles of snowy trenches. I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one timethe Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered aretreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly topress the advantage and snatched victory from what they had thoughtwas ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of theRussian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light ofthe Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall andshoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as wententirely unpunished among Russian generals, " was one man's comment ashe talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters--fought 'and to'and with the butt of their muskets--and if they 'ad 'ad goodcommanders the Japs would never have won, " said an Englishman who hadseen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debaucheryand profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travellingregularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. Aboutthe same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerablequantity of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and thenext day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossackcommanders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking! The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers tocommander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced Japan tocede back to China some of the fruits of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour Japan nursed and fed fat her rankling grudge and bidedher time as deliberately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was inJapan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan{72} to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see thetremendous interest in the military drills in all the Japaneseschools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: "Weare getting ready to lick Russia. " It should also be observed that when the war came on the Japanese werenot only in a state of preparedness so far as battleships and armydrill and munitions of war were concerned, but they were also preparedin the vital matter of proper medical attendance. "When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army wasutterly without proper medical corps and equipment, and the death-ratewas disgracefully high. But the first Japanese who fell in crossingthe Yalu were taken at once to the best of Japanese surgeons and caredfor in the most approved of modern military hospitals. " So said afrank Scotchman to me yesterday, and in the light of the officialstatistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasantallusion to America. When the war with Russia ended, Baron Takaki, Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas in theSpanish-America War "fourteen men died from preventable diseases toone man killed on the field of battle, " the Japanese had lost only oneman from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, asusual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkablerecord, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking thewhite man's inventions and getting as much or more--more in thiscase--out of them than the white man himself. The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion what a wiselydirected health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering notonly in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also inconnection with plans for general public health activities at home. Every State should spend five times as much for this public healthwork as at present. In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces {73} ofthe fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, _kaoliang_ (sorghum)and millet--in some infrequent instances fertilized by the dead men'sbones--are seen on fields where contending armies struggled. Let it beso for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner inpeace while he may; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China'sThree Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's bloodmay redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is tome perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad monopolythrough the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territoryon the coast, Japan has obtained power bordering on control, andeverything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind tocomplete and retain that control. Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy tounderstand how it has now roused the covetousness of Japan just as thetemptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immensefarming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of theworld's mineral resources have only been touched. A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, in charge ofthe agricultural experiment farm here (he is a Minnesota man, Ibelieve), and found him enthusiastic over his corn crop justharvested. "I have been so surprised by the growth of corn this year, "he declared, "that I could hardly believe my own eyes. I have neverseen finer seed ears anywhere. " Among American states, only Iowa, hedeclares, is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raisingto prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section couldbeat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could be said of thenorthern country but for its colder climate. About Harbin, where theSouth Manchuria Railway joins the Trans-Siberian Line, one may seecuts thirty feet deep and the soil rich to the bottom. Most ofManchuria is level--strikingly like our Western Corn Belt and WheatBelt--and the {74} soil is of wind-drift origin "like a greatsnow-blanket, " very easily tilled. The plowing is done with asteel-tipped wooden beam such as I have already written of seeing inKorea, and only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains thefat harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods. It has been a positive joy to me in traveling through the country herein late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang, millet and corn(even with labor at 20 cents a day out here, the people don't pullfodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses almost surrounded by well-stuffedbarns, and corn cribs packed until the overflowing yellow ears spillout the ampler cracks. The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grainbeing used for food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit andrunning over with "The garnered largess of the fruitful year" not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used inManchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchurian winters aswell. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to bedried and burned in the houses. One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and practicallyno four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, however, Manchuria doeshave its farm vehicles: great heavy two-wheeled carts drawn by fromtwo to eight horses, donkeys, and asses. Sometimes there is a bighorse or two, then one or two donkeys half the size of the horses, anda couple of little asses or burros half the size of the donkeys--andmaybe a bull thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the WholeBlamed Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. TheWhole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in China areample proof that we needn't expect ours in America or anywhere else toget any better by letting them alone three thousand years. The Chinesehave tried it, and it doesn't work. The October roads are so bad inmany places that if {75} the carts had four wheels instead of two noteven the combined aggregation in the team could pull them out of themud. A little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stayso for five or six months--and then the Manchurian farmers go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the largermarkets--sometimes two or three hundred miles from home. The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, thefoundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, the symbolof its wealth, is the bean--the common soja, or soy bean as we knowit. What corn is to our Corn Belt and what cotton is to our SouthernStates, that the bean is to Manchuria: supreme among products. Thereis no class of people not affected by the prosperity or the adversityof his Majesty the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladiesone meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not only"know beans, " but can talk beans too. If the present rate of progressis maintained, it will not be long until no one will enumerate theworld's great crops--wheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc. --without including beans. The first beans were shipped to Europeonly about four years ago, and the London _Times_ correspondentestimates that next year Europe will take $35, 000, 000 worth. In a verygreat measure the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oilbeing extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cottonseedoil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the equivalent ofcottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. Parker says, tocottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock feed, but is now chieflyused for fertilizing purposes. My first acquaintance with the beancake was in Japan, where I found it enriching the earth forvegetable-growing, Japan importing an average of half a million tons ayear to put under its crops. Manchuria also uses not a little for thesame purpose. The more intelligent Manchurian farmers, however, arelearning that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the{76} world and get its fertilizing value only--just as our Americanfarmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to thedisgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producer withoutfirst getting its other value as a meat-producer. I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me tobelieve was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongoliaalongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly agreat grass plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr. Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges andbrought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc. , Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian citiesmight soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness. This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem ofmaintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to thosesections of America where the policy of selling everything off theland and putting nothing back threatens disaster. The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high asthe little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is thegeneral practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through theexperiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of levelcultivation. He also wishes to introduce better plows. "The truth is, "he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and JohnDeere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merelyscratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better thanthose the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly makeenough to subsist on. " In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and inManchuria I have also found a few patches, though the climate here isobviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that theJapanese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea. This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete {77} withoutsome mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields--thick-dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved andtwisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. Theycontain not vegetables, however, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound isa Chinaman's grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea, but the mounds are quite low there--all that I saw, at least, exceptthe Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they are about three orfour feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famoussights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the graveproper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificentgates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acrein extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high andsurrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up abouttwenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superstition as tothe existence of a sort of devil or "fung-shui" in the ground, and todisturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more "woesunnumbered" than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed toexist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs, and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to runtwenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it. Mukden, Manchuria. {78} IX WHERE JAPAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE "The Open Door in Manchuria--of what concern is it to me any more thanthe revolution in Portugal or the Young Turks movement inConstantinople?" With some such expression the average American islikely to dismiss the question--a question whose determination mayprove the pivot on which will swing the greatest world-movements ofour time as well as the prosperity of many European and Americanindustries, and that of the labor dependent upon them. I Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the presentstruggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions are rife. That it is a small country; that it is an infertile country; that itmust be already well developed in point of population and consumptionof goods: this is only the ABC of Manchurian misinformation. In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger than all ourNew England, Middle, and South Atlantic States from Maine to Georgiainclusive, and that into its borders all of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), together with all of the German Empire, could becrowded, and still leave a gap so big that Holland, Belgium, andSwitzerland would lack thousands of square miles of filling it: whileas to population Manchuria has only 18, 000, 000 people as compared with{79} 118, 000, 000 in the European countries just mentioned. And afterhaving travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria I should saythat the Asiatic area is the more fertile. The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest portion ofAsia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one who has beenthrough the fruitful lands of the American Corn Belt and Wheat Beltand goes later through Manchuria can fail to note the similaritybetween them in physical appearance and natural resources, and it maywell be that what the settlement of the West has meant in Americathese last fifty years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asiathese next fifty. In itself the sheer creation of such a country--larger far than GreatBritain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Manitoba--would appealat once to American commerce and industry, but you have only begun tograsp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to thecreation of such an empire in some favored portion of the sea. Manchuria means all this, but it means more: Its possession would givesuch vastly increased influence to any Power possessing it as to makethat Power a menace to the commercial rights of all other nations inAsia--rights of almost vital importance both to Europe and America. England and Germany, of course, are already dependent upon foreigntrade for their prosperity, and President McKinley was never soseerlike as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded theAmerican people that their own future greatness depends upon thedevelopment of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia, the greatestof continents, and especially to China, the greatest of countries onthis greatest of continents, that he looked, as we must also lookto-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial address on McKinley, which I hadthe good fortune to hear, the dead President's determined efforts tomaintain the ancient integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittinglymentioned as one of his most distinguished services to his people andhis time. {80} To keep the immense area of China from spoliation byother nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rightswithin boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper futuredevelopment of both European and American commerce and industry. II This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very realconcern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other nationsafter the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were careful to see thatthese belligerents guaranteed a continuance of the Open Door policy;this is why it is of importance to us to know whether this pledge isbeing kept. In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let me say in theoutset, I am not to be understood as being one whit more tolerant ofRussian than of Japanese aggression in Manchuria--I am not. In theRusso-Japanese War my sympathies were all with Japan, my presentfriendships with numbers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannotblind myself to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight ofpower" in the Orient. As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary attention toJapan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's must beself-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced in her sphereof influence is more important and contains two thirds the population. Then again: Northern Manchuria being cold and inhospitable, Japan'ssphere not only covers the fairer and more favored sectionagriculturally, but from the standpoint of military strategy (as amighty war taught all the world) Japan is vastly better placed. WithPort Arthur in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line fromAntung and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of Japanand through Korea to Manchuria without once getting into foreignwaters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing better. And finallyand most significant of all, Russia has {83} suffered perhaps the greatesthumiliation in her history by reason of Manchurian aggression; she haslearned Japan's point of vantage; and whatever advance she makes inthe near future will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance. {81} [Illustration: LIKE SCENES FROM OUR WESTERN PRAIRIES. ] Manchuria is a vast empire--one of the most fertile portions of the earth's surface. The great money crop is the soy bean, and the lower picture shows miles of beans and bean-cake awaiting shipment at Changchun. {82} [Illustration: MANCHURIAN WOMEN (SHOWING PECULIAR HEAD-DRESS), ] [Illustration: CHINESE WASTE-PAPER COLLECTOR. ] Everything in China is scrupulously saved--except human labor. That is wasted on a colossal scale through the failure to use improved machinery or scientific knowledge. {83 continued} Whatever may be the meaning of the alleged secret treaty between Japanand Russia, the great truth which all nations need to remember isthis: Whatever scotches Japanese aggression in Manchuria scotchesRussian aggression at the same time--automatically and simultaneously. To the Open Door in Manchuria Japan carries the key. III Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations in SouthManchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the use she is makingof this monopoly and her plans to maintain it, we must now considermore in detail. When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia in the controlof what is now the South Manchurian Railway, running from Dairen(formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438 miles, through the very heart ofthe country, and she also obtained from China the right "to maintainand work the military line constructed between Antung and Mukden_and_"--as if of secondary importance--"to improve the said line so asto make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial goodsof all nations. " The stipulation with regard to the South ManchurianRailway was that China should have the right to buy it back in 1938, and with regard to the Antung-Mukden line, in 1932, by paying thetotal cost--"all capital and all moneys owed on account of the lineand interest. " And just here Japan is playing a wily game. Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just referred to, nowregarded as a part of the South Manchurian system. Although runningthrough a very mountainous and sparsely settled area, it is of immenseimportance to Japan {84} from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden asit does with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan, and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own territoryto Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in getting outof her own waters and boundaries. The paramount military importance ofthe line is further indicated by the fact that no one had thought of acommercial line here at all. Simply as a matter of war-time necessityJapan stretched a 2-1/2-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountainbarrens to transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see, therefore, how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintainand improve"--especially "improve"--this line. In October I spent twodays travelling over its entire length (188 miles), most of the timeon the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to see on what amagnificent scale the new broad-gauge substitute line is now building. In striking contrast to the traditional Japanese tendency toimpermanence in building, this line is constructed regardless ofexpense as if to last for a thousand years. Tunnel after tunnelthrough solid rock, the most superb masonry and bridges whereverstreams intervene, the best of ballast to make an enduringroadbed--all these indicate the style of the new, not "improved" bututterly reconstructed, line which is building for Japan's benefit atChina's expense--at China's expense directly if she buys it back in1932, at China's expense indirectly if she doesn't. It will be remembered, of course, that according to her agreement withChina, Japan was to begin the work of "improving" the Antung-Mukdenline within two years. Whether she was strangely unable to make anysort of beginning in the period, or whether she purposely delayed itin order to show her contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, itis difficult to say; what is known is only that the Mikado'sgovernment let its treaty rights lapse, and then when China objectedto a renewal, defied China, and proceeded with the work of"improvement" by what was euphemistically termed "independent action. " {85} Incidentally, it may be recalled just here that in the PortsmouthPeace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the rest of the world"to exploit their respective railways in Manchuria exclusively forcommercial and industrial purposes and in no wise for strategicpurpose. " That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control ofManchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expensive for thehard-pressed Peking government to buy back is self-evident. She islooking far ahead, as those interested in the continuance of the OpenDoor policy must also look far ahead. The real Open Door question isnot a matter of the last four or five years or of the next four orfive years, but whether after a comparatively short time the Door isto be permanently closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is onlyhuman in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also besaid that other nations are only human if they wish to protect theirown interests. IV For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly obviousplan to make the railways too expensive for China to purchase when thelease expires, and just here some comparisons may be in order. InJapan proper the government-owned railway stations are severe andinexpensive structures in which not one yen is wasted for display andbut little for convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to thedisreputable condition and appearance of the leading station(Shimbashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign touristsmust inevitably have their general impressions of the countryunfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is itsappearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, alsounder the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of theinvestment held by the government and one {86} sixth by individualJapanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsomestations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, havebeen erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railwaycompany, " the system has built a magnificent modern city--streetrailways, waterworks, electric light plants, macadamized roads, andbeautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, notcontent with the best of equipment for every phase of legitimaterailway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such asJapan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for theOrient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities ofManchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet thehotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, forexample, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipmentanywhere in the Far East. In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected notonly to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevantenterprises--hotels, parks, cities--in which the railway companieshave embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for linesbuilt not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategicimportance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation! As an Englishmansaid to me: "It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a$1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improvements whentaking it back, and you should spend $10, 000 in improving my $1000house--and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes. " More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep herabsolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facilities. In ArticleIV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocallyengaged not to "obstruct any general measures, common to allcountries, which China may take for the development of the commerceand industry of Manchuria, " but in December of the same year Japancaused China to yield a secret agreement prohibiting any new line "inthe {87} neighborhood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railwayor any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, underthreat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for theHsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been made with anEnglish syndicate, and later Japan and Russia on the same pretextprevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun line across Mongolia andManchuria, although a hundred miles or more away from the SouthManchurian line. V That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and expects tocontinue to hold it, is very clear. With China as yet too weak toprotect herself, Japan is virtually master of the situation. Let usask then--since this is in an American book--whether the Open Doorpolicy is being enforced even now; to ask it of any one in Manchuriais to be laughed at. I tried it once in a Standard Oil office and theman in front of me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing so absurd a question, was also unable to contain hismerriment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy, Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only aquestion as to the extent of that condition. The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early treaties beforethe discriminations began. The military railroads, which Japan was inhonor bound to all the world to use only for war purposes, were usedfor transporting Japanese goods before the military restrictions withregard to the admission of other foreign goods were removed. TheChinese merchant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piecegoods" and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods comingover were quickly taken up and a market for these particular "chops"or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies largely on the chop) wasestablished. By the time European and American goods came back theirmarket in many cases {88} had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trademark rights had been virtually ruined by the closenessof Japanese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of threenations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not mentionsome recent case of trademark infringement. Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, when theJapanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the one great octopusof Japanese business and commerce) secured freight rates thatpractically stifled foreign business competitors. The railway companynow asserts that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because ofheavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evileffects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traderswere thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and establishpermanent trade connections. Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Government and theMitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competitors are virtually inthe plight of having to ship goods over a line owned by arival--without any higher tribunal to guarantee equality of treatment. As was recently declared: "Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The traffic manager of the railway is an ex-employee of Mitsui. The customs force at Dalny is not only entirely Japanese--no other foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs office employs exclusively assistants of his own nationality--but a number of the customs inspectors are ex-employees of Mitsui. The Mitsui company also maintains branches all through Manchuria in and out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment of Chinese likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes--2 per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new inland town--shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands of the foreigner. American piece goods often pay likin tax, two, three, or four times, while the Japanese--sometimes legitimately by reason of their branch houses, sometimes illegally by bluffing Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas--manage to escape likin almost altogether. " It may not be true that the Japanese customs officials at Dairen (thetreaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese {89} collector atthis port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese goods to besmuggled through to Manchuria--although consuls of three nations a fewmonths ago thought the matter serious enough to suggest aninvestigation--but the evasion of likin taxes in the interior is anadmitted fact. More flagrant still is another violation of international treatyrights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants are not allowed todo business in the Manchurian interior away from the twenty-four openmarts, but it has been shown that several thousand Japanese are nowstationed within the prohibited area, and Japan's reply to the ChineseViceroy's protest is that he should have objected sooner and that itis now too late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in theinterior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves paying theregular likin and consumption taxes, are finding themselves unable tocompete with the Japanese, who refuse to pay these taxes. Thus Japanis gradually rooting out the natives who stand in her way, and, day byday, tightening her grip on the country. She is advancing step by step as she did in Korea. On the whole, the Mikado's subjects seem already to count themselvesvirtual masters of the country. Inside their railway areas andconcessions they have their own government; in the majority of caseswhile in Manchuria I found it more convenient to use the Japanesetelegraph or the Japanese postal system than the Chinese; and where Istopped at the little towns along the line it was a Japanese officerwho came to inquire my name and nationality. When I was in Mukden theGerman consul there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested forspying on his movements, only to find that they were acting under thedirection of Japanese officials who claimed immunity for them! Thefact that they have their soldiers back of them, and that they can betried only in their own courts, also gives the Japanese unlimitedassurance in bullying the natives. At Mukden the Japanese bellboystruck my Chinese rickshaw {90} man to get his attention. At Taolusome weeks ago some Japanese merchants who were there doing businessillegally (for it is not an open mart) were interfered with, with theresult that the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden werepreparing a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity forany injury to an unlawful business! Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach the nativestheir place. "If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese bullet, " as aChinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the fault is not that ofthe man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman is to blame for getting inthe way of it!" VI Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Manchuria, thosewho excuse or sympathize with her evident purpose to make Manchuriawalk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position--thepitiably abused and threadbare plea that the Japanese have won thecountry by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answerto this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty Chinamanjust mentioned. "The Japanese, " said he, "claimed they were fightingRussia because she was preparing to rob China of Manchuria; now theythemselves out-Russia Russia. It is much as if I should knock a mandown, saying, 'That man was about to take your watch, ' and then takethe watch myself!" The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and the sympathy ofevery other American acquaintance of mine as far as I can now recall, was with Japan in her struggle because of our hot indignation overRussian aggressiveness. But if Japan had said, "I am fighting to putRussia out only that I may myself develop every identical policy ofaggrandizement that she has inaugurated, " it is very easy to see withwhat different feelings we should have regarded the conflict. {91} Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend to thecontrol or possession of Manchuria. As one of the ablest Englishmenmet on my tour in the Far East pointed out, Japan's purposes ininaugurating the war were four: (1) to get a preponderating influencein Korea; (2) to get the control of the Tsushima Straits, which apreponderating influence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russiafrom her ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (asshe alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia inManchuria. All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has actualpossession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian navy has been sweptaway. Again, she has become (with the consent of England) thecommanding naval power in the eastern Pacific; and she has gained aninfluence in South Manchuria at least equal to that which Russia hadprevious to the war. And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria her bloodwill have been spilt without result! Unless she can do more in the wayof robbing China than she went to war with Russia for doing, she willnot be justified! Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed the matterin Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion that Japan will neverget out of Manchuria, unless forced to do so by a speedily awakenedChina or by the most emphatic and unmistakable attitude on the part ofthe Powers. Chinese, English, Americans, Germans--allnationalities--in Manchuria agree that thus far the way of Manchuriahas been the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances--arebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve--is neededfor the same end to be reached. Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting out offoreign goods, now made only partially possible by the discriminationof a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chinese Empire and foreigntrade rights within it menaced by the added preeminence of Japan, thepeople of Europe and America {92} may wake up too late to find out atlast that the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat moregeneral importance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change ofgovernment in Portugal. Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations takeheed in time all this may be prevented. China's waking up may servethe same purpose, but it is doubtful whether she will developsufficient military strength for this. In any case there need be andshould be no war, and in describing conditions as I found them mypurpose is to help the cause of peace and not that of bloodshed. Forif the Powers realize the seriousness of the situation and giveevidence of such feeling to Japan that she will realize the bounds ofsafety, there will be no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance, indifference, or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so farthat she cannot retreat without a struggle. Truth is in the interestof peace. Mukden, Manchuria. {93} X LIGHT FROM CHINA ON PROBLEMS AT HOME I am here in China's ancient capital at one of the most interestingperiods in all the four thousand years that the Son of Heaven hasruled the Middle Kingdom. The old China is dying--fast dying; a newChina is coming into being so rapidly as to amaze even those who weremost expectant of rapid change. The dreams of twelve years ago, thathave since seemed nothing but dreams, are coming into actualrealization. Great reforms were then proposed--twelve years ago--and the Emperorsanctioned edict after edict for their introduction. But their hourhad not yet come. I talked yesterday with one of the men whose voice was most potent atthat time: a man whose heart was then aflame with the idea of remakingChina. They dared much, did these men, and Tantsetung, a Chinaman ofhigh rank and a Christian, consecrated himself on his knees to thegreat task, with all the devotion of a Hannibal swearing allegiance toCarthage. But reaction came. The Emperor was deposed and the EmpressDowager substituted, and Tantsetung and five other leaders werebeheaded. Now, however, dying Tantsetung's brave words have already beenfulfilled: "You may put me to death, but a thousand others will riseup to preach the same doctrine. " A new reign has come; the EmpressDowager, dying, has been succeeded by a mere boy, whose father, thePrince Regent, holds the imperial sceptre. But the sceptre is nolonger all-powerful. {94} For the first time in all the cycles ofCathay the voice of the people is stronger than the voice of theThrone. Men do not hesitate any day to say things for which, ten yearsago, they would have paid the penalty with their heads. There are many things that give one faith in the future of China, butnothing else which begets such confidence as the success of thecrusade against the opium habit. Four years ago, when the news wentout that China had resolved to put an end to the opium habit withinten years--had started on a ten years' war against opium--there weremany who scoffed at the whole project as too ridiculous and quixoticeven for praise; there were more who regarded it as praiseworthy butas being as unpromising as a drunkard's swearing off at New Year's, while those who expected success to come even in twice ten yearshardly dared express their confidence among well-informed people. "If there is anything which all our contact with the Chinese hastaught more unquestionably than anything else, it is that the Chinamanwill always be a slave to the opium habit. " So said a professedlyauthoritative American book on China, published only five years ago, and to hold any other opinion was usually regarded as contradictory tocommon sense. "We white Americans can't get rid of whiskeyintemperance with all our moral courage and all our civilization andall our Christianity. How then can you expect the poor, ignorantChinaman to shake off the clutches of opium?" So it was said, butto-day the most tremendous moral achievement of recenthistory--China's victory over opium-intemperance already assured andin great measure completed, not in ten years, but in four--stands outas a stinging rebuke to the slow progress our own people have made intheir warfare against drink-intemperance. To shake off the opium habit when once it has gripped a man is no easytask. Officials right here in Peking, for example, died as a result ofstopping too suddenly after the {95} edict came out announcing that noopium victim could remain in the public service. But a member of theEmperor's cabinet, or Grand Council, tells me that 95 per cent, of thepublic officials who were formerly opium-smokers have given up thehabit, or have been dismissed from office. Five per cent, may smoke insecret, but with the constant menace of dismissal hanging like aDamocles sword over their heads, it may be assumed that even these feware breaking themselves from the use of the drug. Formerly it was the custom for the host to offer opium to his guests, but the Chinese have now quite a changed public sentiment. Becausethey recognize that opium is ruining the lives of many of theirpeople, and lessening the efficiency of many others, because theyregard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to theirsons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as anopium-smoker, even "in moderation. " To be free from such an enervatingdissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one'sfamily, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw acartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there wereheld up to especial scorn and humiliation the weakling officials whohad lost their offices by reason of failure to shake off opium. Inshort, the opium-smoker, instead of being a sort of "good fellow withhuman weaknessess"--and with possibilities, of course, of goingutterly to wreck--has become an object of contempt, a bad citizen. The earnestness of the people has been strikingly illustrated in thegreat financial sacrifices made by farmers and landowners in sectionswhere the opium poppy was formerly grown. The culture of the poppy insome sections was far more profitable than that of any other crop; itwas, in fact, the "money crop" of the people. In fact, to stop growingthe opium poppy has meant in some cases a decrease of 75 per cent, inthe profit and value of the land. Farms mortgaged on the basis of oldland values, therefore, had to be sold; peasants who had {96} beenhome-owners became homeless. And yet China has thought no price toogreat to pay in the effort to free herself from this form ofintemperance. Well may her leading men proudly declare, as one did tome to-day: "While America dares not undertake the task of stopping thewhiskey curse among less than a hundred million people, we arestopping the opium curse among over four hundred millions. " It shouldalso be observed that there is little drunkenness over here. At adinner party Friday evening my hostess thought it worth while tomention as a matter of general interest to her guests (so rare is theoccurrence) that she had seen a drunken Chinaman that day. I have notyet seen one. China is waking up, and I am glad she is. She is going into industrialcompetition with all the world, and I am glad that she is. I believethat every strong and worthy nation is enriched by the properdevelopment of every other nation. But in this coming struggle thepeople whom vice or dissipation has rendered weak sooner or later mustgo down before the men who, gaining the mastery over every vicioushabit, keep their bodies strong and their minds clear. In thundertones indeed does China's victory over opium speak to America. If weare to maintain our high place among the nations of the earth, if weare to keep our leadership in wealth and industry, we can do it onlyby freeing ourselves, as heroically as the yellow man of the Orient isdoing in this respect, from every enervating influence that nowweakens the physical stamina, blunts the moral sense, or befogs thebrain. The new China is devoting itself to a number of other reforms to whichthe people of America may well give attention. The curse of graftamong her public officials ("squeeze" it is called over here) is oneof the most deep-rooted cancers with which she has to contend. Officers have been paid small salaries and have been allowed to makeup for the meagreness of their stipends by exacting all sorts of feesand tips. Before the coming parliament is very old, however, it will{97} doubtless undertake to do away with the fee and "squeeze" system, stop grafting, and put all the more important offices on a strictsalary basis. Under the old fee system of paying county and cityofficials in the United States, as my readers know, we have often letenormous sums go into office-holders' pockets when they should havegone into improving our roads and schools. The Chinese system not onlyhas this weakness, but by reason of the fact that the fees are notregularly fixed by law, as is the case with us, the way is opened fornumberless other abuses. Currency reform is in China a matter hardly second in importance tothe abolition of "squeeze. " There is no national currency here; eachprovince (or state, as we would say) issues its own money when itpleases, just as the different American states did two generationsago. I remember hearing an old man tell of going from the Carolinas toAlabama about 1840 and having to pay heavy exchange to get hisCarolina money changed into Alabama money. So it is in China to-day. You must get your bills of one bank or province changed whenever yougo into another bank or province, paying an outrageous discount, and abanking corporation will even discount a bill issued by another branchof the same corporation. Thus a friend of mine with a five-dollarRussia-Asiatic banknote from the Peking branch on taking it to theRussia-Asiatic's branch at Hankow gets only $4. 80 for it. Nor is this all: All kinds of money are in circulation, the valuesconstantly fluctuating, and hundreds and thousands of men make aliving by "changing money, " getting a percentage on each transfer. Take the so-called 20-cent pieces in circulation; they lack a littleof weighing one fifth as much as the 100-cent dollar; consequently ittakes sometimes 110 and again 112 cents "small coin" to equal onedollar! The whole system is absurd, of course, and yet when thegovernment proposes to establish a uniform national currency it is {98}said that the influence of these money-changers is so great as to makeany reform exceedingly slow and difficult. And yet let not my readers at home with this statement before themproceed too hastily to laugh or sneer at China for unprogressiveness. For my part, as I have thought of this matter of money transfer overhere, the whole question has seemed to me to be on all-fours with ourquestion of land title transfers at home, and the more I have thoughtof it the firmer has the conviction become. In fact, China's failureto adopt a modern currency system is perhaps even less a sinningagainst light than our failure to adopt the Torrens system ofregistering land titles. The man who makes a living by changing moneyand investigating its value is no more a parasite than the man whomakes a living changing titles or investigating their value; thehindrance of trade and easy transfer of property is no more excusablein one case than the other; and the 90 per cent, that China might saveby a better system of money transfers is paralleled by the 90 percent, that we might save by a better system of title transfers. Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of thepeople, prevents currency reform in China--yes, that is true. Butbefore we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-ChangingLawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, doesnot go to our next legislature and stifle any measure for reformingland-title registration. And in saying this I am not to be understoodas making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or ourAmerican lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I knoware lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with thereally useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping uputterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of thepeople. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimedonly at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are ledby selfishness to oppose it. {99} After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform inthe new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands ofyears the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been toproduce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages andpoets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book onChina five years ago he could say: "The Chinese scholar knows nothing of ancient or modern history (outside of China), geography, astronomy, zoology or physics. He knows perfectly well the dynastic history of his own country and he composes beautiful poems, and these are his only accomplishments. " But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting publicofficials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished theyear after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal ofthe school is to train men and women for useful living, for practicalthings, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education nowhas the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages ismade to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latinand soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and continues toread English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasinghis efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. InJapan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching ofagriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all thesethings China is also moving--blunderingly, perhaps, but yet makingprogress--toward the most modern educational ideas. As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten yearsof making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japanhave actually moved relatively much farther away from old standardsthan we have done, and if they should continue the same rate ofadvance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing morefor the efficiency {100} of the people than our American schools aredoing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decryingculture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to oldstandards of education with even more tenacity than absurdlyconservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am amongthose who insist that culture may come from a study of useful thingsas well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of thechemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge ofchemistry that is without practical use; and that a boy may get aboutas much cultural value from the knowledge of a language which does puthim into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a languagewhich might put him into touch with ancient life but which he willprobably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving andtradition-cursed China and Japan, as we thought them a generation ago, have already committed themselves to making education train for actuallife. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent tothe idea? The practical value of this article, I am reminded just here, has todo almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind yourmember of the legislature of the parallel between the wasteful andantiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful andantiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform yourmember of the legislature and your school officials of the advance ofpractical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind bothyour member of the legislature and your congressman of China'ssuccessful crusade against the opium evil as an incentive for moredetermined American effort against the drink evil. Let me concludethis letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prodyour representatives in Washington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-daycomes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on theirofficials; and this {101} parenthetical observation may be as full ofsuggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length. ) The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washingtonare just these: First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day Imailed a package by parcels post to another country for about halfwhat it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to anotherat home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called"heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-calledenlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt? Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article oneof the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the averagetariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30per cent. Less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty percent. , he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electricdynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold forChinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this triphave men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buythem at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago ofbuying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; amissionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can ofRoyal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meatsare cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery madein Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buyit at the factory gates. And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given. How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be heldup in such fashion remains to be seen. Peking, China. {102} XI THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution(she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing torisk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking wouldindorse. And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide thedestinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reignedsupreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter inthe whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake. For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, whichbut yesterday was a matter of question, is now a matter of history. "China Breaking Up" was the keynote of everything written about theMiddle Kingdom ten years ago; "China Waking Up" has been the keynoteof everything treating of it these last five years. Sir John Jordan, British Minister to China, does not exaggerate whenhe declares that in a European sense China has made greater progressthese last ten years than in the preceding ten centuries. Thecriticism one hears most often now is, not that the popular leadersare too conservative, but that they are if, anything, too radical; aremoving, not too slowly, but too rapidly. Instead of the old charge that China is unwilling to learn what theWest has to teach, I now hear foreigners complain that a littlecontact with Europe and America gives a leader {103} undue influence. "Let an official take a trip abroad and for six months after hisreturn he is the most respected authority in the empire. " Instead ofEnglish missionaries worrying over China's slavery to the opium habit, we now have English officials embarrassed because China's too rapidbreaking loose from opium threatens heavy deficits in Indian revenues. Instead of the old extreme "states' rights" attitude on the part ofthe provinces, as illustrated by the refusal of the others to aidManchuria and Chihli in the war with Japan, the beginnings of anintense nationalism are now very clearly in evidence. Even Confuciusno longer looks backward. A young friend of mine who is a descendantof the Sage (of the seventy-fifth generation) speaks English fluentlyand is getting a thoroughly modern education, while Duke Kung, whoinherits the title in the Confucian line, is patron of a governmentschool which gives especial attention to English and other modernbranches--by his direction. Significant, too, is the fact that theancient examination halls in Peking to which students have come fromall parts of the empire, the most learned classical scholars amongthem rewarded with the highest offices, have now been torn down, andwhere these buildings once stood Chinese masons and carpenters arefashioning the building that is to house China's first nationalparliament--unless the parliament comes before this building can bemade ready. And so it goes. When a man wakes up, he does not wake up in a part ofhis body only, he wakes up all over. So it seems with Cathay. The moreserious problem now is not to get her moving, but to keep her frommoving too rapidly. In his Civic Forum address in New York three yearsago, Wu Ting Fang quoted Wen Hsiang's saying, "When China wakes up, she will move like an avalanche. " A movement with the power of anavalanche needs very careful guidance. The one question about which every Chinese reformer's heart is nowaflame is that of an early parliament. By the imperial decree of 1908a parliament and a constitution were {104} promised within nine years. At that time there was little demand for a parliament, but with theorganization of the Provincial Assemblies in the fall of 1909 thepeople were given an opportunity to confer together and were alsogiven a taste of power. For the first time, too, they seem to haverealized suddenly the serious plight of the empire and the fact thatsince the deaths of the late Emperor and Empress Dowager, and thedismissal of Yuan Shih-Kai by the Prince Regent acting for the infantEmperor, the Peking government is without a strong leader. Consequently the demand for a hastened parliament has grown toopowerful to be resisted. True, when the delegates from all theProvincial Assemblies voiced this demand to the Prince Regent lastspring his reply was the Edict of May 29, declaring that the programmeoutlined by their late Majesties, like the laws of the Medes andPersians, could not be changed. Furthermore, the Throne remarkedsignificantly: "Let no more petitions or memorials upon this subjectbe presented to Us; Our mind is made up. " Unfortunately for the peace of the Regent, however, John Chinaman isabsurdly and obnoxiously persistent on occasion. If you will not heedother appeals, he may commit suicide on your doorstep, and then youare bewitched for the rest of your days, to say nothing of yournights. The talk of an earlier parliament would not down even at thebidding of the Dragon Throne. Quietly unmanageable delegations waitedupon viceroys and compelled these high officials to petition for areopening of the question. Down in Kiang Su a scholar cut off his leftarm and with the red blood wrote his appeal. In Union MedicalHospital, here in Peking, as I write this, a group of students arerecovering from self-inflicted wounds made in the same cause. Going tothe Prince Regent's, they were told that the Prince could not seethem. "Very well, " they declared, "we shall sit here till he does. " Atlength the Prince sent word that, though he could not receive them, hewould consider their petition, and the students then sliced the {107}living flesh from their arms and thighs as evidence of theirearnestness, coloring their petition with their blood. {105} [Illustration: PU YI, THE SON OF HEAVEN AND EMPEROR OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM. ] The baby sovereign of one of the vastest and oldest of empires is shown here in the lap of his father. Prince Chun, the Regent. {106} [Illustration: HOW CHINA IS DEALING WITH OPIUM-INTEMPERANCE. ] Burning a pile of pipes of reformed smokers at Hankow. The amazing success of China's crusade to free her people from the opium curse may be justly reckoned one of the greatest moral achievements in history--a challenge to our Western world. {107 continued} At this period of our drama there came upon the stage a new actor, atfirst little heeded, but quickly becoming the dominating figure--theTzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly. This body, consisting of 100nobles and men of wealth or scholarship appointed by the Throne, and100 selected members of Provincial Assemblies approved by theviceroys, was expected to prove a mere echo of the royal wishes. "Itis evident that the government is to have a docile and submissiveassembly. Mediocrity is the chief characteristic of the memberschosen. " So wrote one of the best informed Americans in China, someweeks before it assembled, October 3. Reuter's press agent in Pekingpredicted through his papers that a few pious resolutions wouldrepresent the sum total of the Assembly's labors. And yet the first day that these two gentlemen went with me to look inon the Assembly we found it coolly demanding that the Grand Council, or imperial cabinet, be summoned before it to explain an allegedbreach of the rights of Provincial Assemblies! From the very beginning the course of this National Assembly insteadily gathering unexpected power to itself has reminded me of theold States-General in France in the days just before the Revolution, and I could not help looking for Danton and Robespierre among thefiery orators in gown and queue on this occasion. Significantly, too, I now hear on the authority of an eminent scholar that Carlyle's greatmasterpiece is the most popular work of historical literature evertranslated into Chinese. May it teach them some lessons of restraintas well as of aggressiveness! Be that as it may, the Assembly has proved untamable in its demandsfor an early parliament, not even the hundred government membersstanding up against the imperious pressure of public opinion. In lateOctober the Assembly {108} unanimously petitioned the Throne to hasten theprogramme of constitutional government. The day this petition waspresented it was currently rumored in Peking that unless the PrinceRegent should yield the people would refuse to pay taxes. But heyielded. The trouble now is that he did not yield enough to satisfythe public, and there is every indication that he will have to yieldagain, in spite of the alleged unalterableness of the present plan, which allows a parliament in 1913 instead of in 1916, as originallypromised. A parliament within eighteen months seems a safe predictionas I write this. It also seems safe to prophesy that the powers of the parliament willbe wisely used. In local affairs the Chinese practically establishedthe rule of the people centuries before any European nation adoptedthe idea. Nominally, the local magistrate has had almost arbitrarypower, but practically the control has been in the hands of thevillage elders. When they have met and decided on a policy, themagistrate has not dared run counter to it. In much the same fashion, governors and viceroys of provinces have been controlled and kept incheck. Thus centuries of practical self-government in local affairshave given the Chinese excellent preparation for the new departure innational affairs. What is proposed is not a new power for the peoplebut only an enlargement or extension of powers they already exercise. Parliamentary government is the one great accomplishment the Chinesepeople are now interested in, because they propose to make it the toolwith which to work out the other Herculean tasks that await them. Happy are they in that they may set about these tasks inspired by theself-confidence begotten of one of the greatest moral achievements ofmodern times. I refer, of course, to the almost marvellous success oftheir anti-opium crusade which I have already discussed. Mr. Frederick Ward, who has just returned from a visit to manyprovinces, finding in all the same surprising success {109} in enforcinganti-opium regulations, declares: "It is the miracle of the MiddleKingdom and a lesson for the world. "' China's next great task is the education of her people, and the remedyfor pessimism here is to compare her present condition, not with thatof other nations, but with her own condition ten years ago. A reportedschool attendance of less than one million (780, 325 to be exact) in apopulation of 400, 000, 000 does not look encouraging, but when wecompare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few yearsago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitanprovince of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now moreteachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago, and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214, 637! Even if China had not established a single additional school, however, or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, hereducational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. Foras different as the East is from the West, so different, in literalfact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared withher educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of educationwas swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions ofunnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the newpolicies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands ofthe old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, forwithout their support the new movement would have been hopelesslybalked. The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history orgeography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higherbranches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learnedessay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these meansto get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousandcharacters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up abook {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the"Trimetrical Classics, " consisting of proverbs and historicalstatements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught inmuch the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed thepowers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The oldeducation enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the newgives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward toChina and backward to her past; the new looks outward to othercountries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to developa few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens. "Even our students who go abroad, " as a Peking official said to me, "illustrate the new tendencies. Formerly they preferred to study lawor politics; now they take up engineering or mining. " A consideration of Chinese education, however brief, would not be fairwithout mention of the crushing handicap under which her people laborand must always labor so long as the language remains as it isto-day--without an alphabet--separate and arbitrary characters to belearned for each and every word in the language. This means anabsolute waste of at least five years in the pupil's school life, except in so far as memorizing the characters counts asmemory-training, and five years make up the bulk of the averagestudent's school days in any country. If it were not for this handicapand the serious difficulty of finding teachers enough for presentneeds, it would be impossible to set limits to the educational advanceof the next twenty years. The school and the teacher have always been held in the highest esteemin China. Her only aristocracy has been an aristocracy, not of wealth, but of scholarship; her romance has been, not that of the poor boy whobecame rich, but of the poor boy who found a way to get an educationand became distinguished in public service. Under the old system, ifthe son of a hard-working family became noted for aptness in the {111}village school, if the schoolmaster marked him for a boy of unusualpromise, the rest of the family, with a devotion beautiful to see, would sacrifice their own pleasure for his advancement. He would beput into long robes and allowed to give himself up wholly to learning, while parents, brothers, and sisters found inspiration for their ownharder labors in the thought of the bright future that awaited him. The difficulty is that education has been regarded as the privilege ofa gifted few, not as the right of all. In a land where scholarship hasbeen held in such high favor, however, once let the school doors opento everybody and there is little doubt that China will eventuallyacquire the strength more essential than armies or battleships: thepower which only an educated common people can give. China's next great purpose is to develop an efficient army. "Might isright" is the English proverb that I have found more often on thetongues of the new school of Chinese than any other; and we mustconfess that other nations seem to have tried hard enough to make heraccept the principle. In the old days there was a saying, "Better haveno son than one who is a soldier. " To-day its new foreign-drilled armyof 150, 000 to 200, 000 men is the boast of the Middle Kingdom, and thearmy is said to be the most honestly administered department of thegovernment. In sharp contrast to the old contempt for the soldier, Inow find one of the ablest journals in the empire (the Shanghai_National Review_) protesting that interest in military training isnow becoming too intense: "Scarce a school of any pretensions but hasits military drill, extending in some instances as far as equipmentwith modern rifles and regular range practice, and we regret to noticethat some of the mission schools have so far forgotten themselves asto pander to this militarist spirit. " It has often been said, of course, that the Chinese will not make goodsoldiers, but whether this has been proved is open to question. Certainly, in view of their wretchedly inferior {112} equipment, theirfailure to distinguish themselves in the war with Japan cannot beregarded as conclusive. Take, for example, this description by aneye-witness: "Every tenth man [among the Chinese soldiers] had a great silk banner, but few were armed with modern weapons. Those who had rifles and modern weapons at all had them of all makes; so cartridges of twenty different sorts and sizes were huddled together without any attempt at classification, and in one open space all sorts were heaped on the ground, and the soldiers were fitting them to their arms, sometimes trying eight or ten before finding one to fit the weapon, throwing the rejected ones back into the heap. " No sort of efficiency on the part of the rank and file could haveatoned for such criminal indifference to equipment on the part of theofficers. It seems to be the opinion of the military authorities withwhom I have talked that the Chinese army is now better manned thanofficered. "Wherever there has been a breach of discipline, I havefound it the officers' fault, " an American soldier told me. The annexation of Korea, once China's vassal, by Japan, and thatcountry's steadily tightening grip on Manchuria have doubtlessquickened China's desire for military strength. Moreover, she wishesto grow strong enough to denounce the treaties by which opium is evennow forced upon her against her will, and by which she is forced tokeep her tariff duty on foreign goods averaging 5 per cent. , alike onluxuries and necessities. The fifth among China's Herculean labors is the cleansing of herAugean stables, and by this I can mean nothing else than the abolitionof the system of "squeeze, " or graft, on the part of her officials. Infact, no other reform can be complete until this is accomplished. Thebulk of every officer's receipts comes not from his salary, which isas a rule absurdly small, but from "squeezes"--fees which every manwho has dealings with him must pay. In most cases, of course, thesefees have been determined in a general way by long usage, but theiracceptance opens the way for innumerable abuses. High {113} offices areauctioned off. When I was in Manchuria it was currently reported thatthe Governor of Kirin had paid one hundred thousand taels for hisoffice. When I was in New-chwang the Viceroy of Manchuria had justenriched himself to the extent of several thousand taels by a visit tothat port. The men who had had favors from him or had favors to askleft "presents" of a rather substantial character when they called. Ilearn from an excellent authority that when an electric lightingcontract was let for Hankow or its suburbs a short time ago theofficials provided a squeeze for themselves of 10 per cent. , but thatthe Nanking officials, in arranging for electric lights there, didn'teven seem to care whether the plant worked at all or not: they wereanxious only to make a contract which would net them 35 per cent, ofthe gross amount! Under such circumstances it is not surprising tolearn that many an office involving the handling of governmentrevenues has its price as definitely known as the price of stocks orbonds. In private business the Chinese have a reputation for honesty whichalmost any other nation might envy. With their quickened spirit ofpatriotism they will doubtless see to it that their public business isrelieved of the shameless disgrace that the "squeeze system" nowattaches to it. These are some of the big new tasks to which awakened China isaddressing herself. Of course, the continued development of herrailways is no less important than any other matter I have mentioned, but railway building cannot be regarded as one of China's really newtasks. For years she has been alive to the importance of uniting thepeople of the different provinces by means of more railways, moretelegraph lines, and better postal service. The increase in number ofpieces of mail handled from 20, 000, 000 pieces in 1902 to 306, 000, 000in the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the progressof the post office and to the growing intelligence of the people. Bytelegraph the people of remotest Cathay now make their wishes known tothe Son of Heaven and the {114} Tzucheng Yuan; it was by telephonethat this Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly, requested the GrandCouncil of the Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of myfirst visit. The slow and stately camel caravans still come down fromMongolia to Peking--I have seen them wind their serpentine lengththrough the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doingfor centuries past--but no longer do they bring the latest news fromthe tribes about Desert Gobi. Across 3500 miles of its barren wastesan undaunted telegraph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts ofthe earth. " It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability of a newChina; the question now is as to how the new China is going to affectthe United States and the rest of the world. From our Pacific Coast, China is our next-door neighbor, and vastly nearer in fact than anymap has ever indicated. Even New York City is now nearer to Shanghaiand Hong Kong, in point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago acentury ago. How Japan's awakening has increased that country'sforeign trade all the world knows--and China has eight times thepopulation of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, withalmost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet untouched! Someone has said that to raise the Chinese standard of living to that ofour own people would be (from the standpoint of markets) equivalent tothe creation of four Americas. The importance of bringing about closercommercial relations between the United States and the Middle Kingdomcan hardly be overestimated. It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate China'sfriendship we shall not go to the length of changing our policy ofexcluding Asiatic immigration. To the thoughtful student it must beplain that in the end such a change would lead only to disastrousreaction. At the same time we might well effect a change in ourmethods of enforcing that policy. There is nothing else on land or seathat the Celestial so much dreads as to "lose face, " to be humiliated, and it {115} is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policyrather than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in theway of thorough cordial relations with America. You wouldn't so muchobject to having the servant at the door report his master not at hometo visitors, but you would object to having the door slammed in yourface; and John Chinaman is just about as human as the rest of us. Moreover, our own friendliness for John should lead us to adopt themore courteous of these two methods. Why should not our next exclusionlaw, therefore, be based upon the idea of reciprocity, and providethat there shall be admitted into America any year only so manyChinese laborers as there were American laborers admitted into Chinathe preceding year? Finally, it must always be remembered that the awakening of China is amatter far more profound than any statistics of exports or imports orrailway lines or industrial development. The Dragon Empire cannotbecome (as she will) one of the mightiest Powers of the earth, herfour hundred million people cannot be brought (as they will bebrought) into the full current of the world's activities, withoutprofoundly influencing all future civilization. For its own sakeChristendom should seize quickly the opportunity offered by thepresent period of flux and change to help mold the new force that itmust henceforth forever reckon with. "The remedy for the yellow peril, whatever that may be, " as Mr. Roosevelt said while President, "is notthe repression of life, but the cultivation and direction of life. "The school, the mission, the newspaper--these are the agencies thatshould be used. Japan has thousands of teachers in China and scores ofnewspapers, but no other nation is adequately active. The presentkindly feeling for America guarantees an especially cordial receptionfor American teachers, ministers, and writers, and those who feel thecall to lands other than their own cannot find a more promising fieldthan China. Peking, China. {116} XII A TRIP INTO RURAL CHINA I can't get over (and I hope I never shall) my boyish interest in thegreat strange animals that walk along behind the steam piano in thecircus parades. And the animals that I like to see most, I believe, are the elephants and the camels. The elephant has about him suchquiet, titanic, unboasting strength, such ponderous and sleepy-eyedmajesty, as to excite my admiration, but the camel has almost an equalplace in my interest and esteem. He is a funny-looking beast, is the camel, and he always reminds me ofHenry Cates' story of the very little boy who started making a mud manin the spring branch, but before he got the second arm on, a stormcame up, and when he came back his man had mysteriously disappeared. But when Johnny went to town next day and for the first time in hislife saw a one-armed man, the whole mystery cleared, and rushing up, he demanded: "Why didn't you wait for me to finish you?" Somehow thecamel, like Johnny's mud man, always looks to me as if he got awaybefore he was finished. He is either a preliminary rough sketchaccidentally turned loose on the world, or else he got warped somehowin the drying process--great, quiet, shaggy, awkward, serene, goose-necked, saddle-backed Old Slow and Steady! {117} [Illustration: A MAN-MADE DESERT. ] [Illustration: PUMPING WATER FOR IRRIGATION. ] The destruction of China's mountain forests has made deserts of vast areas that were once fair and fruitful. The lower picture, showing Chinese pumping water by human treadmill, furnishes another illustration of the Orient's waste of labor. {118} [Illustration: TRANSPORTATION AND TRAVEL IN CHINA. ] The camels that come down from Mongolia and wind their unhurried way from Chien Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace form one of the most picturesque of the many picturesque sights in fascinating old Peking. The right-hand picture shows the author utilizing the most rapid means of transit in the mountains north of Peking. {116 continued} Let me confess, therefore, that hardly anything else on my entire tourhas given me more pleasure than the sight of the camel trains aboutPeking and all the way to the end of the Nankou Pass in the mountainsnorth of the ancient Chinese {119} capital. At the Pass this morning I sawthree such camel trains coming down from Mongolia and the Desert ofGobi: long, slow-moving, romantic caravans that made me feel as if Ihad become a character in the Arabian Nights or a contemporary ofKublai-Khan. One of the trains was the longest I have yetseen--twenty-five or thirty camels, I should say, treading Indian-filewith their usual unostentatious stateliness, a wooden pin through eachcamel's nostrils from which a cord bound him to the camel next ahead, a few strangely dressed drivers guiding the odd Oriental procession. Nor were the camels the only strange travellers encountered by myparty, a young Frenchman, the German, and myself, as we rode ourlittle donkeys mile after mile of rocky way from Nankou villagethrough the Pass. To begin with, we were ourselves funny-lookingenough, for my donkey was so small that he could almost walk under thebelly of my saddle-horse at home, and my feet almost touched theground. The donkeys ridden by my friends were but little larger, andaltogether we looked very much like three clowns riding trick mules--an effect somewhat heightened when the Frenchman's donkey dropped himtwice in the mud! It was our clothing, however, our ordinary Americanand European trousers, coats, overcoats and hats, and the fact that wewore no queues down our backs, that made us objects of curiosity tothe Mongolian and Manchurian camel-drivers, shepherds, horse-traders, and mule-pack drivers whom we met on the way, just as we wereinterested in the sheepskin overcoats, strange hats, etc. , which wefound them wearing along with the usual cotton-padded garments. Thesecotton-padded clothes are much like those heavily padded bed-quiltsineptly called "comforts, " and as the poor Chinese in the coldersections of the empire cannot afford much fire in winter, they add onelayer of cotton padding after another until it is difficult for themto waddle along. On the whole, the life and travel we found on our donkey-ride over therough roads of Nankou Pass were Biblical in their {120} verysimplicity and primitiveness. Most of the men we meet come from awayup in Mongolia, where no railroad has yet gone, and the camels and thedonkeys (the donkeys in most cases larger than those we rode) bringdown on their backs the Mongolian products--wool, hides, grain, etc. --and carry back coal, clothing, and the other simple suppliesdemanded by the rude peasantry of Mongolia. We met several pack trainsof donkeys, sometimes twenty-five or forty, I suppose, each carrying aheavy load of sacks on his back, or perhaps big, well-packed basketsor goods-boxes carefully balanced. A horse over here will tote aboutas much as a horse at home would pull. Then there were several immensedroves of sheep: in one drove two or three thousand, I estimated, andevery sheep with a black face and a white body, so that the generaleffect was not unlike seeing a big bin of black-eyed peas. The Chineseraise immense numbers of long-eared black hogs, too, and drive them tomarket loose in the same way that they drive their sheep. We also mettwo or three droves of mountain horses, a hundred or more to thedrove. But it would have been well worth while to make the trip if we hadgotten nothing else but the view of and from the Great Wall at the endof the journey. About two thousand miles of stone and brick, twenty-seven feet high, and wide enough on top for two carriages todrive abreast, this great structure, begun two thousand years ago tokeep the wild barbarian Northern tribes out of China, is truly "thelargest building on earth, " and one of the world's greatest wonders. It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, butwhere we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height afteranother until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands oftons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steepmountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder. Certainly no one who has walked on top of the great wall, climbingamong the clouds from one {121} misty eminence to another, as we didto-day, can ever forget the experience. Perhaps it was well enough, too, that the weather was not clear. Themists that hung about the mountain-peaks below and around us; theroaring wind that shepherded the clouds, now driving them swiftlybefore it and leaving in clear view for a minute peak after peak andvalley after valley, the next minute brushing great fog-masses overwall and landscape and concealing all from view--all this lent anelement of mystery and majesty to the experience not out of keepingwith our thought of the long centuries through which this strangeguard has kept watch around earth's oldest empire. Dead, long dead andcrumbled into dust, even when our Christian era began, were the handsthat fashioned these earlier brick and laid them in the mortar, andfor many generations thereafter watchmen armed with bows and arrowsrode along the battlements and towers, straining their eyes for sightof whatever enemy might be bold enough to try to cross the mightybarrier. However unwise the spirit in which the wall was built, we cannot butadmire the almost matchless daring of the conception and the almostunparalleled industry of the execution. Beside it the digging of ourPanama Canal with modern machinery, engines, steam power andelectricity, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, is nolonger a subject for boasting. To my mind, the very fact that theChinese people had the courage to conceive and attempt so colossal anenterprise is proof enough of genuine greatness. No feeble folk couldeven have planned such an undertaking. On this trip into the heart of China, however, I have noticed a numberof things of decidedly practical value in addition to the merelycurious things I have just reported. In the first place, I have beensimply amazed to find that these Chinese farmers around Peking, Nankou, and Tien-tsin are far ahead of some of our farmers in thematter of horsepower help in plowing. {122} Coming up from Peking to Nankou, I found farmers in almost every fieldbusy with their fall plowing or late grain sowing, and while therewere dozens and dozens of three-horsepower plows, I saw only one ortwo one-horsepower plows on the whole trip. This is all the moresurprising in view of the fact that labor is so cheap over here--15cents a day American money would be a good wage for farm hands--butevidently the farmers realize that although plow hands are cheap, theymust have two or three horses in order to get the best results fromthe soil itself. One-horse plows do not put the land in goodcondition. With two, three, or four horses or donkeys (they use largedonkeys for plowing, even if small ones for riding) they get the landin good condition in spite of the fact that they cannot get the goodplows that any American farmer may buy. I rode donkey-back throughsome farming country yesterday and watched the work rather closely. The plows, like those in Korea, have only one handle, but are muchbetter in workmanship. Here they are made by the villagecarpenter-blacksmith, and have a large steel moldboard in front, andbelow it a long, sharp, broad, almost horizontal point. The Chinese farmers, it should also be observed in passing, fullyrealize the importance of land rolling and harrowing. It is nouncommon sight to see a man driving a three-horse harrow. It is alsosaid that for hundreds of years the Chinese have practised a suitablerotation of crops and have known the value of leguminous plants. Nankou Pass, China. {123} XIII FROM PEKING TO THE YANGTZE-KIANG I shall have to go back to Peking some time. You must hurry out of thecity, men tell you there, or else ere you know it the siren-like Lureof the East will grip you irresistibly; and I felt in some measure thesoundness of the counsel. The knowledge that each day the long trainsof awkward-moving camels are winding their unhurried way fromChien-Men Gate to the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, the yellow-tiledroofs of the Forbidden City gleaming ahead of them, while to the leftare the faint gray-blue outlines of the Western Hills--all this willbe to me a silent but perpetual invitation to go back. The very life in the streets presents a panorama of never-failinginterest. One can never forget the throngs of Chinese men in gowns andqueues (the wives wear the trousers over here!), the nobles andofficers in gorgeous silks and velvets; the fantastic head-dress ofthe Manchu ladies, and the hobbling movements of the Chinese womenhampered by ruined feet; the ever-hurrying rickshaws with perspiring, pig-tailed coolies in the shafts; the heavy two-wheeled Peking cartslike half-sized covered wagons; the face of some fashionable foreignor native woman glimpsed through the glass windows of her sedan chair, eight runners bearing on their shoulders their human burden; the longlines of shop fronts with such a pleasing variety of decorative coloras to make one wonder why artists have not made them famous; theuniformed soldiers from every nation on the earth to guard the variouslegations, and {124} Chinese soldiers with cropped hair and foreignclothing. The strange street noises, too, will linger in one's memoryever after: the clattering hoofs of fleet Mongolian ponies, thejingling bells of the thousands of sturdy little saddle donkeys, therattling of the big cowbells on the dusty camels, the clanging gong ofa mandarin's carriage, outriders scurrying before and behind to beartestimony to his rank, and the sharp cries of peddlers of many kinds, their wares balanced in baskets borne from their shoulders. Or perhaps there is a blaze in the street ahead of you. Some man hasdied and his friends are burning a life-sized, paper-covered horse inthe belief that it will be changed into a real horse to serve him inthe Beyond; and imitations of other things that might be useful to himare burned in the same way. Or perhaps a marriage procession may pass. A dozen servants carryplacards with emblems of the rank of the family represented by thebride or groom, numerous other servants bear presents, and the brideherself passes by concealed in a gorgeous sedan chair borne on theshoulders of six or eight coolies. Fascinating as it is for its present-day interest, however, Peking iseven richer in historic interest. And by historic in China is notmeant any matter of the last half-hour, such as Columbus's discoveryof America or the landing at Plymouth Rock; these things to theChinaman are so modern as to belong rather in the category of recentdaily newspaper sensations along with the Pinchot-Ballingercontroversy or the Thaw trial. If he wishes something genuinelyhistoric, he goes back three or four thousand years. For example, afriend of mine, at a little social gathering in New England some timeago, heard a young Chinese student make a talk on his country. Incidentally he was asked about a certain Chinese custom. "Yes, "' heanswered, "that is our custom now, since we changed. But it has notalways been so. We did the other way up to four or five centuriesbefore Christ. " Whereupon the audience, amazed at the utterly casualmention of an event two thousand {125} years old as if it were a happeningof yesterday, was convulsed in merriment, which the young Chinaman wasentirely unable to understand. When Christ was born Peking (or what is now Peking, then bearinganother name), having centuries before grown into eminence, had beendestroyed, rebuilt, and was then entering upon its second youth. Aboutthe time of the last Caesars it fell into the hands of the Tartars, who gave place to the Mongols after 1215. It was during the reign ofthe Mongol Emperor, Kublai Khan, that Marco Polo visited his capital, then called Cambulac. Seventy-three years before Columbus discoveredAmerica the Emperor Yung-loh, whose tomb I saw near Nankou, built thegreat wall that surrounds the Tartar City to this day--forty feethigh, wide enough on top for four or five carriages to drive abreast, and thirteen miles around. Yet the history which the foreigner in Peking is likely to have mostoften in mind is really very recent. For it has been only ten yearsand a few months since the famous Boxer outbreak. The widely currentidea is that this Boxer movement originated in anti-missionarysentiment, but this is not borne out by the facts. The late Col. Charles Denby, long American Minister to China, pointed out veryclearly that the main cause was opposition to the land-grabbingpolicies of European nations. Once started, however, it took the formof opposition to everything foreign--missionaries and non-missionariesalike. I passed the old Roman Catholic Cathedral the other day incompany with a friend who gave me reminiscences of the siege thatsounded like echoes of the days of the martyrs; stories of ChineseChristian converts butchered like sheep by their infuriated fellowcountrymen. When the Pei-tang, in another part of the city, wasfinally rescued by foreign troops, the surviving Christians andmissionaries were dying of starvation; they had become mere wan, half-crazed skeletons, subsisting on roots and bark. The heroism shown by many of the Chinese Christian converts {126}during this Boxer uprising has enriched the history not only of thechurch, but of mankind; for what man of us is not inspired to worthierthings by every high deed of martyrdom which a fellowman anywhere hassuffered? Into the Pei-tang the Boxers hurled arrow after arrow withletters attached offering immunity to the Chinese converts if theywould abandon their Christian leaders, but not even starvation led oneto desert. Colonel Denby estimated that in the whole empire 15, 000Chinese Christians were butchered and that only 2 per cent of themabandoned their faith. A missionary told me the other day of onefamily who took refuge in a cave, but when finally smoked out bysuffocating flames, refused life at the cost of denying their Master, and went to death singing a hymn in Chinese, "Jesus Is Leading Me. " AtTaiyan-fu an especially touching incident occurred: Five or six younggirls, just in their teens, were about to be killed, when a leaderintervened, declaring: "It is a pity to slaughter mere children, " andurged them to recant. Their only answer was: "Kill us quickly, sincethat is your purpose; we shall not change. " And they paid for theirfaith with their lives. I am writing this down on the Yangtze-Kiang (Kiang means river inChinese), having boarded a steamer at Hankow, the famous Chineseindustrial centre, about 600 miles south of Peking. About Hankow Ifound farming much more primitive than that around Peking, Nankou, andTientsin. Instead of the three and four horse plows I found in NorthChina, the plowmen about Hankow seem to rely chiefly on a single ox. The farms, too, are much smaller. No one here speaks of buying a"farm"; he buys a "field. " In Kwang-tung there is a saying that onesixth of an acre "will support one mouth. " As nearly as I can findout, the average wages paid farm laborers is about 10 cents (gold) aday. The average for all kinds of labor, a member of the Emperor'sGrand Council tells me, is about 35 to 38 cents Mexican, or 15 to 18cents gold a day. In forming a mental picture of a rural scene anywhere in {127} Chinaor Japan there are three or four things that must always be kept inmind. One is that there are no fences between fields; I haven't seen awooden or wire farm-fence since I left America. A high row or ridgeseparates one field from another, and nothing else. In the next place, there are no isolated farm-houses. The people live in villages, fromten to fifty farmhouses grouped together, and the laborers go out fromtheir homes to the fields each morning and return at evening. The samesystem, it will be remembered, prevails in Europe; and as populationbecomes denser and farms grow smaller in America, we shall doubtlessattempt to group our farm homes also. Even now, much more--vastlymore--might be done in this respect if our farmers only had the planin mind in building new homes. Where three or four farms come neartogether, why should not the dwellings be grouped near a commoncentre? It would mean much for convenience and for a better sociallife. Another notable difference from our own country is the absenceof wooden buildings or of two-story buildings of any kind. In thispart of China the farmhouse is made of mud bricks, or mud and reeds, or else of a mixture of mud and stone, and is usually surrounded by ahigh wall of the same material. Again, there are no chimneys. While my readers are basking in thejoyous warmth of an open fire these wintry nights they may reflectthat the Chinaman on this side of the earth enjoys no such comfort. Enough fire to cook the scanty meals is all that he can afford. Toprotect themselves against cold, as I have already pointed out, thepoor put on many thicknesses of cotton-padded cloth. The rich wearfurs and woolens. When a coolie has donned the maximum quantity ofcotton padding he is about as nearly bomb-proof as an armor-platedcruiser. Certainly no ordinary beating would disturb him. At this time of the year (the late fall) farmers are busy plowing andharrowing. On my last Sunday in Peking I went out to the Temple ofAgriculture, where each spring the Emperor or Prince Regent comes andplows sixteen rows, the purpose {128} being to bear testimony to thehigh honorableness of agriculture and its fundamental importance tothe empire. This happens, as I have said, in early spring, but it isin late fall that Chinese do most plowing. They are also busy nowflailing grain on ancient threshing-floors of hard-baked earth, orgrinding it in mills operated by a single donkey. In this part of China the mound-like graves of the millions--possiblybillions--of the Chinese dead are even more in evidence than in thenorthern provinces. Let China last a few more thousand years with itspresent customs and the country will be one vast cemetery, and thepeople will have to move away to find land to cultivate. As not onegrave in a thousand is marked by a stone of any kind, it would seem asif they would not be kept up, but the explanation is that eachChinaman lives and dies hard by the bones of his ancestors. The careof their graves is one of life's most serious duties. Even when Johngoes to America, half his fortune, if need be, will be used to bringhis body back to the ancestral burying ground. In a land so given over to superstition I have no doubt that the mosthorrible disasters would also be expected as the penalty forinterfering with any grave. It seems odd that a people who had aliterature centuries before our Anglo-Saxon ancestors emerged frombarbarism should now be the victims of superstitions almost as grossas those prevailing in Africa; but such are the facts. ChangChih-tung, who died a few months ago, was one of the most progressiveand enlightened Chinese statesmen of the last hundred years, but noteven a man of his type could free himself from the great body ofsuperstition handed down from generation to generation. In Wuchang I crossed an amazingly steep, high hill known as "DragonHill, " because of the Chinese belief that a dragon inhabits it. Thislong hill divides the city into two parts; every day hundreds andsometimes possibly thousands of people must climb up one side and downthe other in getting from one part of the town to another. Therefore, when Chang {129} Chih-tung was Viceroy in Hankow he decided that hewould make a cut in this hill and save the people all this trouble. And he did. Very shortly thereafter, however, he sickened of a painfulabscess in his ear, and the Chinese doctors whom he consulted werequick in pointing out the trouble. By making the cut in the hill, theytold him, he had offended the earth dragon which inhabits it, andunless the cut were filled up Chang might die and disaster might comeupon the city. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but torestore the ancient obstruction to travel, and so it remains to thisday. In sight from Dragon Hill is another hill known as Tortoise Hill, supposed to be inhabited by a tortoise spirit or devil, and at itsfoot are some lakes in which it has long been said that the tortoisewashes its feet. Now these lakes are on property owned by the HanyangSteel & Iron Works and they decided a few years ago that they wouldeither drain off the water or else fill up the lakes so as to get moreland. But before they got started the Chinese civil authorities heardof it and notified the Hanyang Company that such a proceeding couldnot be tolerated. The tortoise would have nowhere to wash his feet, and would straightway bring down the wrath of Heaven on all thecommunity! It is from superstitions such as these that the schools must free theChinese before the way can be really cleared for the introduction ofChristianity. The teacher is as necessary as the preacher. And thetask of getting the masses even to the point where they can read andwrite is supremely difficult. The language, it must be remembered, hasno alphabet. Each word is made not by joining several letterstogether, as with us, but by making a distinct character--eachcharacter an intricate and difficult combination of lines, marks, anddots. Or perhaps the word may be formed by joining two distinctcharacters together. For example, to write "obedience" in Chinese youwrite together the characters for "leaf" and "river, " the significancebeing that true obedience is as trusting {130} and unresisting as thefallen leaf on the river's current. My point is, however, that foreach word a distinct group of marks (like mixed-up chicken tracks)must be piled together, and the task of remembering how to recognizeand write the five thousand or more characters in the language wouldmake an average American boy turn gray at the very thought. My friendDoctor Tenney, of the American Legation in Peking, asserts that atleast five years of the average Chinese pupil's school life might besaved if the language were based on an alphabet like ours instead ofon such arbitrary word-signs. There is one thing that must be said in favor of the Chinese system ofeducation, however, and that is the emphasis it has always laid onmoral or ethical training. The teaching, too, seems to have beenremarkably effective. Take so basic a matter as paying one's debts, for example: it is a part of the Chinaman's religion to get even withthe world on every Chinese New Year, which comes in February. If hefails to "square up" at this time he "loses face, " as his expressivephrase has it. He is a bad citizen and unpopular. Consequently allsorts of things may be bought cheaper just before the New Year thanany other time. Every man is willing to make any reasonable sacrifice, selling his possessions at a great discount if necessary, rather thanhave a debt against him run over into the new period--an excellentidea for America! I do not know whether Confucianism is responsible for this particularpolicy, but at any rate the fact remains that outside the Bible theworld has never known a more sublime moral philosophy than that ofConfucius. It means much, therefore, that every Chinese pupil mustknow the maxims and principles of the great sage by heart. Moreover, as Confucius did not profess to teach spiritual truth, themissionaries in China are fast coming to realize that it is bothunnecessary and foolish to urge the people to abandon Confucianism. The proper policy is to tell the Chinese, "Hold on to all that is goodand true in Confucius. There is very little in his teachings that is{131} in conflict with religion, and Christian leaders now recognizehim as one of the greatest moral forces the world has known. But tothe high moral teaching of the Chinese master you must add now themoral teachings of Christianity and, more essential still, the greatbody of spiritual truth which Confucianism lacks. " The grand old manamong Chinese missionaries, Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who has been in thework since 1850, said to me in Peking, "Some of the best Christiansare now the best Confucianists. " Confucianism, as any one can see by reading the books, is no more asubstitute for Christianity than Proverbs is for St. John's Gospel. AsDoctor Brewster, another missionary, says, "We do not ask an Americanscholar to renounce Plato to become a Christian; why should we ask aChinaman to renounce Confucius?" Confucius lived five centuries before Christ, and at his old home inShantung are the graves alike of his descendants and hisancestors--the oldest family burying ground in the world. "No monarchon earth can trace back his lineage by an unbroken chain through somany centuries. " In Peking I was so fortunate as to form a friendshipwith a descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation--Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh--a promising and gifted senior in the Imperial Collegeof Languages. At my request he inscribed a scroll for me in beautifulChinese characters, representing one of my favorite quotations fromhis world-famous ancestor. I give an English translation herewith: "Szema-New asked about the Superior Man. The Master said, 'The superior man is without anxiety or fear. ' "'Being without anxiety or fear, ' said New, 'does this constitute what we should call the superior man?' "The Master replied, 'When a man looks inward and finds no guilt there, why should he grieve? or what should he fear?'" On board _S. S. Kutwo_, Yangtze River, China. {132} XIV SIDELIGHTS ON CHINESE CHARACTER AND INDUSTRY Having mentioned some of the good points of John Chinaman (and he hasmany excellent points), it is also necessary to point out some of hisshortcomings. The trouble with John is that he had some tiptopancestors, but he fell into the habit of looking backward at them socontinuously that he has failed, in recent centuries, to make anyfurther progress. He had a civilization and a literature when ourwhite ancestors were wearing skins; but there he stopped, so that wehave not only caught up with him, but have passed him almostimmeasurably. The result is that now China is waking up to find that agreat number of ancient abuses, both in public and private life, mustbe sloughed off if she is to become a genuinely healthy modern nation. Of what has been accomplished with reference to opium I have alreadywritten at length. But this is only a beginning. With the opium evil under foot, China will still have other dragons toslay--if I may use the term dragon in an evil sense in a country whosenational emblem is the dragon. For one thing, slavery still exists inChina. A friend of mine in Peking told me of an acquaintance, aneducated Chinaman, who bought a young girl two years ago for twohundred taels (about $120 gold), and says now he would not take onethousand two hundred (about $720 gold). Already, however, a vigoroussentiment for the complete abolition of slavery has {133} developedover the empire. About six months ago an imperial edict was issuedprohibiting slave trading, decreeing that child-slaves should becomefree on reaching the age of twenty-five, and opening ways for olderslaves to buy their freedom. The peons or slaves of the Manchu princeswere, however, excepted from the terms of this edict. Foot-binding also continues a grievous and widespread evil. Formerlyevery respectable Chinese father bound the feet of all his girls. Fathers who did not were either degraded men, reckless of publicopinion, or so bitterly poor as to require the services of theirdaughters in unremitting manual labor. Consequently, a natural foot ona woman became a badge of social inferiority: a Chinaman of prominencewouldn't marry her. Now, however, many of the wealthier upper-classChinamen in the cities are letting their girls grow up with unboundfeet, and this custom will gradually spread until the middle and lowerclasses generally, seeing that fashion no longer decrees such abarbaric practice, will also abandon it. The progress of the reform, however, is by no means so rapid as couldbe wished. A father with wealth may risk getting a husband for hisdaughter even though she has natural feet, but ambitious fathers amongthe common people fear to take such risks. An American lady whose homeI visited has a servant who asked for two or three weeks' leave ofabsence last summer, explaining that he wished to bind the feet of hisbaby daughter. My friend, knowing all the cruelty of the practice, andhaving a heart touched by memories of the heart-rending cries withwhich the poor little creatures protest for weeks against theirsuffering, pleaded with the servant to let the child's feet alone. Butto no effect. "Big feet no b'long pretty, " he said, and went homeunconvinced. "The feet, " according to the brief statement of ex-Minister CharlesDenby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to five years. Thetoes are bent back until they penetrate the sole of the foot, and aretightly bound in that position. The {134} parts fester and the toesgrow into the foot. " The result is that women grow up with feet thesame size as when they were children, and the flesh withers away onthe feet and below the knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed girland woman must hobble around on mere stumps. When you first see aChinese woman with bound feet you are reminded of the old pictures ofPan, the imaginary Greek god with the body of a man and the feet of agoat. The resemblance to goat's feet is remarkably striking. As thewomen are unable to take proper exercise--except with greatpain--there is little doubt that their physical strength has beenseriously impaired by this custom, and that the stamina of the wholerace as well has suffered in consequence. Whenever a foreigner--it is the white man who is "the foreigner" overhere--begins a comparison or contrast between the Chinese and theJapanese, he is sure to mention among the first two or three thingsthe vast difference in moral standards with regard to family life. Thecleanness of the family life in China, he will tell you, is one of thegreat moral assets of the race, while the contrary conditions largelyprevailing in Japan would seem to threaten ultimate disaster to thepeople. As in most Asiatic countries, however, there is in China no verydefinite moral sentiment against a man's marrying more than one wife. In fact, it is regarded not as a question of morals but of expense. Itis one of the privileges of the Chinaman who can afford it, and theNo. 1 wife is often glad for her husband to take a No. 2 and a No. 3wife, because the secondary wives are somewhat under her authority andrelieve her of much work and worry. A few months ago a Chinaman inHankow had a very capable No. 2 wife who was about to quit him to workfor some missionaries, whereupon Wife No. 1, Wife No. 3, and themuch-worried husband all joined in a protest against the household'slosing so capable a woman. All these three wives were in subjection to the husband's mother, however, until the old lady took cholera last year, and {135} in a dayor so was dead. The prevalence of awful scourges, such as cholera andbubonic plague, is another evil which the new China must conquer. These diseases are due mainly, of course, to unsanitary ways ofliving, and when you have been through a typical Chinese city youwonder that anybody escapes. The streets are so narrow that withoutstretched arms you can almost reach from side to side, and theunmentionable foulness of them often smells to heaven. Moreover, if you have the idea that the typical Chinaman is content tolive only on rice, prepare to abandon it. Hogs are more common in avillage of Chinamen than dogs in a village of negroes; and, in somecases, almost equally at home in the houses. I saw a Chinese woman inKiukiang feeding a fat porker in the front room, while, in the narrowstreets around, hogs and dogs were wandering together or lyingcontentedly asleep in the sunshine by the canal bank. In fact, theancient Chinese character for "home" is composed of twocharacters--"pig" and "shelter"--a home being thus represented as apig under a shelter! Small wonder that cholera is frequent, smallpox a scourge, and leprosyin evidence here and there. Quite recently a couple of missionteachers of my denomination have died of smallpox: they "didn'tbelieve in vaccination. " Shanghai, as I write this, is just recoveringfrom a bubonic plague scare. There were one or two deaths from theplague among the Chinese, whereupon the foreigners put into force suchdrastic quarantine regulations that the Chinese rebelled with riots. The whites then put their cannon into position, the volunteer soldierswere called out, and it looked at one time as if I should find thecity in a state of bloody civil war, but fortunately the trouble seemsnow to have blown over. Unfortunately the ignorant Chinese put a great deal more faith inpatent medicines and patent medicine fakirs than they do in approvedsanitary measures. It is interesting to find that American patentmedicines discredited at home by {136} the growing intelligence of ourpeople have now taken refuge in the Orient, and are coining the poorChinaman's ignorance into substantial shekels. Worst of all, some ofthe religious papers over here are helping them to delude theunintelligent, just as too many of our church papers at home aredoing. In Shanghai I picked up a weekly publication printed in Chinese andissued by the Christian Literature Society, and asked what was theadvertisement on the back. "Dr. Williams's Pink Pills for PalePeople, " was the answer. One of the most peculiar things about China is the existence of almostunlimited official corruption side by side with high standards ofhonesty and morality in ordinary business or private life. I havealready referred to the system of "squeeze" or graft by which almostevery official gets the bulk of his earnings. In Shanghai it is saidthat the Taotai, or chief official there, paid $50, 000 (gold) for anoffice for which the salary is only $1500 (gold) a year. Against this concrete evidence of official corruption place thisevidence of a high sense of honor in private life. A young Chinaman, employed in a position of trust in Hankow, embezzled some money. Thecompany, knowing that his family was one of some standing, notifiedthe father. He and his sons, brothers of the thief, went after theyoung fellow and killed him with an ax. The community as a wholeapproved the action, because in no other way could the father free hisfamily from the disgrace and ostracism it would have incurred byhaving an embezzler in it. {137}[Illustration: FASHIONABLE CHINESE DINNER PARTY. ] [Illustration: HOW LUMBER IS SAWED IN THE ORIENT--THERE AREPRACTICALLY NO SAW MILLS. ] {138} [Illustration: A QUOTATION FROM CONFUCIUS. ] This is the upper part of a scroll kindly written for the author by Mr. Kung Hsiang Koh (or Alfred E. Kung as he signs himself in English). Mr. Kung is a descendant of Confucius (Kung Fut-zu) of the seventy-fifth generation, and the complete quotation of which the scroll is a reproduction in Chinese characters reads as follows: "Ssu-ma Niu asked for a definition of the princely man. " "The Master said: 'The princely man is one who knows neither grief nor fear. ' 'Absence of grief and fear?' said Niu, 'Is this the mark of a princely man?' The Master said, 'If a man look into his heart and find no guilt there, why should he grieve? Or of what should he be afraid?'" {136 continued} The Yangtze River trip from Hankow to Shanghai, mentioned in my lastletter, I found very interesting. We were three days going the 600miles. The Yangtze is the third largest river in the world andnavigable 400 miles beyond Hankow, or 1000 miles in all. It would benavigable much farther but for a series of waterfalls. Nearly thirtymiles wide toward the mouth, its muddy current discolors the ocean'sblue forty miles out in the Pacific, I am told. In fact, I think {139}it must have been that distance that I last saw the great turgidstream off the Shanghai harbor. Even as far up as Hankow the riverbecomes very rough on windy days. Consequently, when I wished to goacross to Wuchang, I found that the motor boat couldn't go, sotempestuous were the waves, but a rather rickety looking little nativecanoe called a "sampan, " with tattered sails, bobbing up and down likea cork, finally landed me safely across the three or four miles ofsea-like waves. All the way from Hankow to Peking one encounters allsorts of Chinese junks and other odd river-craft. In many cases theylook like the primitive Greek and Roman boats of which one seespictures in the ancient histories. The Chinese are excellent sailorsand manage their boats very skilfully. The greatest canal that theworld knows was begun by them in the time of Nebuchadnezzar andfinished thirteen centuries ago. Until very recently, however, the Chinese have not wanted railways. Coming from Hankow to Shanghai I passed in sight of the site of theold Woosung-Shanghai Railway, the first one built in China; but beforeit got well started the people tore it up and threw it into the river. In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly Minister tothe United States, and he told me of his troubles in building, underLi Hung Chang's directions, what turned out to be the first permanentrailway in China. This was less than twenty-five years ago. Li HungChang said to Mr. Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build arailway, they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibilitymyself. The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is tolet the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think it is. "Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to work on the Tongshan Railway. He builtfirst ten miles, then twenty more. Then as the road was working well, and its usefulness demonstrated, he and Li Hung Chang thought theymight get permission from the Throne to construct a line from Tientsinto Peking. Successful in this effort, they went ahead with the surveyand {140} imported from America the materials for building theline--and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The matterhad been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and 80 per cent, ofthem had opposed building the line! Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is calling forrailroads in almost every non-railroad section, and the railroadsalready built are paying handsome dividends. Everybody seems totravel. Besides the first-class and second-class coaches, most trainscarry box-cars, very much like cattle-cars and without seats of anykind, for third-class passengers. And I don't recall having seen oneyet that wasn't chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group ofAmericans would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the linebetween Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200-mile trip infive hours which formerly took him nineteen days. Before the railwaycame he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten miles a day, his luggage on oneside the wheel, and himself on the other. Thousands of thesewheelbarrows, doing freight and passenger business, are in use inShanghai and the regions roundabout. A frame about three feet wide andfour feet long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie willcarry as much as half a ton on one of them. Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is grown, and Iwent out into some of the fields in the neighborhood of Shanghai. Thestalks were dead, of course, and in some cases women were pulling themup for fuel, but I could see that the Chinese is a poorer variety thanour American cotton, and is cultivated more poorly. Instead ofplanting in rows as we do, the peasants about Shanghai broadcast in"lands" eight or ten feet wide, as we sow wheat and oats. AboutShanghai they do not use the heavier two and three horse plows I foundabout Peking; consequently the land is poorly broken to begin with, and the cultivation while the crop is growing amounts to very little. No sort of seed selection or variety breeding has ever been attempted. No wonder that {141} the stalks are small, the bolls small and few innumber, and the staple also very short. From my observation I should say that with better varieties and bettercultivation China could easily double her yields without increasingher acreage. There is likely to be some increase in acreage, too, however, because farmers who have had to give up poppy culture are insearch of a new money crop, and in most cases will take up cotton. As I have said before, the coolie class wear padded clothes allwinter, and as they have no fire in their houses, they naturally haveto wear several suits even of the padded sort. I remember a speechCongressman Richmond P. Hobson made several years ago in which hespoke of having seen Chinamen with clothes piled on, one suit on topof another, until they looked like walking cotton bales. Some of hishearers may have thought this an exaggeration, but if so, I wish togive him the support of my own observation and that of a preacher. Asa Chinaman came in the street-car in Shanghai Friday my missionaryhost remarked: "That fellow has on four or five suits already, andhe'll put on more as the weather gets colder. " Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International CottonMills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory that theChinese men and women he employs average about 12 cents a day(American money), but that from his experience in England he would saythat English labor at 80 cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'dhave more for your money at the week's end. One white girl will lookafter four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, asyou see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine;the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two overseerswould be enough for this room, while here we must have seven. " Hong Kong. {142} XV FAREWELL TO CHINA With this letter we bid farewell to China. When I see it again it willdoubtless be greatly changed. Already I have come too late to seepoppy fields or opium dens; too late to see the old-time cells inwhich candidates for office were kept during their examinationperiods; too late, I am told, to find the flesh of cats or dogs forsale in the markets. If I had waited five years longer, it is likelythat I should not have found the men wearing their picturesque queuesand half-shaven heads; before five years, too, a parliament and acabinet will have a voice in the government in which until now the onepotent voice has been that of the Emperor, the "Son of Heaven"divinely appointed to rule over the Middle Kingdom. All over thecountry the people are athrill with a new life. Unless present signsfail, the century will not be old before the Dragon Empire, instead ofbeing a country hardly consulted by the Powers about matters affectingits own interests, will itself become one of the Powers and will haveto be consulted about affairs in other nations. Be it said, to begin with, that I am just back from Canton, the mostpopulous city in China and supposedly one of the half dozen mostpopulous in the whole world. As no census has ever been taken, it isimpossible to say how many people it really does contain. Theestimates vary all the way from a million and a half to threemillions. Half a million people, it is said, live on boats in theriver. Some of them are born, marry, grow old, and die without everhaving known a home {143} on land. And these boats, it should beremembered, are no larger than a small bedroom at home. I saw many ofthem yesterday afternoon, and I also saw many of the women managingthem. The women boatmen--or boat-women--of Canton are famous. Think of a city of two or three million people without a vehicle ofany kind--wagon, buggy, carriage, street-car, automobile, or even arickshaw! And yet this is what Canton appears to be. I didn't see evena wheelbarrow. The streets are too narrow for any travel except thatof pedestrians, and the only men not walking are those borne on theshoulders of men who are walking. My guide (who rejoices in the nameof Ah Cum John) and I went through in sedan chairs--a sort of chairwith light, narrow shafts before and behind. These shafts fit over theheads and bare shoulders of three coolies, or Chinese laborers, and itis these human burden-bearers who showed us the sights of Canton. To get an idea of what the city is like, fancy an area of about thirtysquare miles crowded with houses as thick as they can stand, everyhouse jam up against its neighbors, with only walls between--no roomfor yards or parks or driveways--and these houses dense with people!Then punch into these square miles of houses a thousand windingalleys, no one wide enough to be called a street, and fill up thesealleys also with hurrying, perspiring, pig-tailed Chinamen. There areno stores, shops or offices such as would look familiar to anAmerican, but countless thousands of Chinese shops wide open to thestreets, with practically no doors in evidence. Such is Canton: a human hive of industry: a maze of labyrinthinealleys crowded with people, the alleys or streets too narrow to getthe full light of day! Outside this crowded city of Canton's living masses is the even largerand more crowded city of Canton's dead. From the highest point on thecity wall my guide pointed out an unbroken cemetery extending for tenmiles: the hills dotted {144} with mounds until they have theappearance of faces pitted by smallpox. For the Chinaman, however unimportant in actual life, becomes a man ofimportance as soon as he dies, and his grave must be carefully lookedafter. The finest place I saw in Canton was the mortuary where thedead bodies of wealthy Chinamen are kept until burial. The handsomecoffins I saw ranged in value from $1400 to $2700 Mexican, or halfthese amounts American money. The lacquered surfacing accounts for thehigh cost. Nor are these departed Celestials kept here for a few days only. Sometimes it is a matter of several years, my guide told me, thegeomancers or fortune-tellers being employed all this time in findinga suitable site for a grave. These miserable scoundrels pretend thatthe soul of the dead man will not rest unless he is buried in just theright spot and in just the right kind of soil. Perhaps no professionalman in China earns as much as these fakirs. Sometimes it happens thatafter a man has been dead two or three years his family suffers aseries of misfortunes. A frequent explanation in such cases is thatthe wrong site has been chosen for the dead man's burial place. Another geomancer is then hired and told to find a new grave where thesoul will rest in peace. Of course, he charges a heavy fee. In one $1400 coffin I saw was the body of a wealthy young Chinaman whodied last spring. Three times a day a new cup of tea is placed on thetable for his spirit, and on the walls of the room were scores of silkscrolls, fifteen feet long, expressing the sympathy of friends andrelatives. Around the coffin, too, were almost life-size images ofservants, and above it a heap of gilded paper to represent gold. Whenthe geomancers finally find a suitable grave for the poor fellow hewill be buried, and these paper servants and this paper gold will beburned, in the belief that they will be converted into real servantsand real gold for his use in the spirit world. {145} A friend of mine in Peking who saw the funeral of the late Emperor andEmpress Dowager told me some interesting stories of the truly Orientalceremonies then celebrated. Tons of clothes and furs were burned, andvast quantities of imitation money. A gorgeous imitation boat, naturalsize and complete in every detail from cabins to anchors, steamerchairs, and ample decks, was fitted up at a cost of $36, 000 Americanmoney, and burned. Furthermore, as my friend was coming home oneevening, he was surprised to see in an unexpected place, some distanceahead, a full regiment of soldiers, gorgeous in new uniforms, andhundreds of handsome cavalry horses. Getting closer, what was hisamazement to find that these natural-size soldiers and steeds wereonly make-believe affairs to be burned for the dead monarchs! Tomaintain their rank in the Beyond they must have at least one fullregiment at their command! Since we are on such gruesome subjects we might as well finish withthem now by considering the punishments in China. I went out to theexecution grounds in Canton, but it happened to be an off-day whennobody was due to suffer the death sentence. I did see the cross, though, on which the worst criminals are stretched and strangledbefore they are beheaded. The bodies of these malefactors are notallowed ordinary burial, but quick-limed, I believe. There were humanbones beside the old stone wall where I walked, and when a Chinesebrat lifted for a moment a sort of jute-bagging cover from a barrelthe topmost skull of the heap grinned ghastly in the sunlight. The cruelty of Chinese punishments is a blot upon her civilization. When I was in Shanghai a friend of mine told me of having been to alittle town where two men had just been executed for salt-smuggling. Salt is a government monopoly in China, or at least is subject to aspecial revenue duty, so that salt smuggling is about equivalent toblockading whiskey in America. {146} Recognized forms of punishment are death by starvation and "death bythe seventy-two cuts"--gradually chopping a man to pieces as if hewere a piece of wood. This latter punishment is for treason. To let abad criminal be hanged instead of beheaded is regarded as a favor, theexplanation being that the man who has his head cut off is supposed tobe without a head in the hereafter. The worst feature of the whole system is the treatment of prisoners tomake them confess. The Chinese theory is that no one should bepunished unless he confesses with his own mouth. Consequently the mostbrutal, sickening tortures are practised to extort confession, and, inthe end, thousands and thousands of innocent men, no doubt, ratherthan live longer in miseries far worse than death, have professedcrimes of which they were innocent. But let us turn now to happier topics--say to an illustration ofChinese humor. Very well; here is the sort of story that tickles aChinaman: it is one they tell themselves: A Chinaman had a magic jar. And when you think of a jar here don'tthink of one of the tiny affairs such as Americans use for preservesand jams. The jar here means a big affair about half the size of ahogshead: I bathed in one this morning. It was in such jars that AliBaba's Forty Thieves concealed themselves. Well, this magic jar hadthe power of multiplying whatever was put into it. If you put in asuit of clothes, behold, you could pull out perhaps two or three dozensuits! If you put in a silver dollar, you might get out a hundredsilver dollars. There doesn't seem to have been any regularity aboutthe jar's multiplying properties. Sometimes it might multiply by two, while again it might multiply by a hundred. At any rate, the owner of the magic receptacle was getting rich fairlyfast, when a greedy judge got word of the strange affair somehow. Accordingly he made some kind of false charge against the man and madehim bring the jar into court. {149} Then the judge pretended that hecouldn't decide about the case, or else pretended that the man neededpunishment for something, and so wrongly refused to give the citizen'sproperty back. Instead the magistrate took the jar into his own homeand himself began to get rich on its labors. {147} [Illustration: THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. ] The building of the Great Wail, considered simply as a feat of Herculean labor, leaves us no room to boast over the Panama Canal. [Illustration: CHINESE WOMAN'S RUINED FEET. ] The lower picture shows the terrible deformity produced by foot-binding. {148} [Illustration: CHINESE SCHOOL CHILDREN. ] The upper picture suggests a word about the amazing fertility of the Oriental races--the Japanese, for example, increasing from their birth-rate alone as fast as the United States from its birth-rate plus its enormous immigration. [Illustration: THE AMERICAN CONSULATE AT ANTUNG. ] A great need of America in the East is better consular buildings. Witness this one at Antung. {149 continued} Now, when this happened, the friends of the mistreated man began tomurmur. Failing to do anything with the magistrate, they appealed tothe magistrate's father--for though you may be fifty or seventy yearsold in China, if your father is living you are as much subject to hisorders as if you were only ten; this is the case just as long as youboth live. But when the father spoke about the complaints of thepeople the magistrate lied about the jar somehow, but not in a wayentirely to deceive the old fellow. He decided to do someinvestigating, and went blundering around into a dark room in searchof the jar, and before he saw what he was doing came upon it and fellinto it. Whereupon he cried to his son to pull him out. The son did come, but when he pulled out one father, behold there wasanother still in the jar--and then another and another and another. Hepulled out one father after another till the whole room was full offathers, and then he filled up the yard with fathers, and had six oreight standing like chickens on the stone wall before the accursed oldjar would quit! And to have left one father in there would naturallyhave been equivalent to murder. So this was the punishment of the unjust magistrate. He had, ofcourse, to support all the dozens of aged fathers he pulled out of thejar (a Chinaman must support his father though he starve himself), andit is to be supposed that he used up all the wealth he had unjustlypiled up, and had to work night and day as well all the rest of hislife. Of course the jar, too, had to be returned to its owner, and inthis way the whole community learned of the magistrate's unfairlywithholding it. This story is interesting not only for its own sake, but for {150} thelight it sheds on Chinese life--the relations of father and son; theunjust oppression of the people by the officials in a land where thecitizen is without the legal rights fundamental in Americangovernment; and, lastly, the "Arabian Nights" like flavor of thistypically Chinese piece of fiction. One of the funny things among the many funny things I have encounteredin China is the peculiar way of buying or selling land, as reported tome by Rev. Dr. R. T. Bryan. If you buy land from a Chinaman, aboutShanghai at least, without knowing the custom of the country, you mayhave to make him three additional payments before you get through withhim. For, according to the custom, after the first payment he willgive you a deed, but after a little while will come around sighing, regretting that he sold the land and complaining that you didn't payenough. Accordingly, you will pay him a little more, and he will giveyou what is called a "sighing paper, " certifying that the "sighingmoney" has been paid. A few days or weeks pass and he turns up again. You didn't pay him quite enough before. Therefore, you make anothersmall payment and he gives you the "add-a-little-more" paper showingthat the "add-a-little-more" money has been paid. Last of all, youmake what is called the "pull-up-root" payment, and the land is safelyyours. Of course, the impatient foreigner hasn't time for this sort of thing, consequently he pays enough more in the beginning to cancel thesevarious dramatic performances. Doctor Bryan's deed certifies that the"sighing money, " "add-a-little-more money, " and "pull-up-root money"have all been settled to start with. "Pidgin English, " or the corruptions of English words and phrases bymeans of which foreigners and Chinese exchange ideas, is also veryamusing. "Pidgin English" means "business English, " "pidgin"representing the Chinaman's attempt to say "business. " Some of theChinese phrases are very useful, such as "maskee" for our "nevermind. " Other good phrases {151} are "chop-chop" for "hurry up, ""chin-chin" for "greeting, " and "chow-chow" for "food. " "Have you had plenty chow-chow?" my good-natured Chinese elevator-boyin Shanghai used to say to me after dinner; and the bright-eyed littlebrats at the temples in Peking used to explain their failure to doanything forbidden by saying they should get "plenty bamboochow-chow"! Bamboos are used for switches (as well as for ten thousandother things), and "bamboo chow-chow" means the same thing to theChinese boy as "hickory tea" to an American boy! A Scotch fellow-passenger was telling me the other day of the sayingthat "The Scotchman keeps the Sabbath day, and every other good thinghe can lay his hands on. " Now, the Chinaman, unlike the Scotchman, doesn't keep the Sabbath, but he does live up to all the requirementsof the second clause of the proverb. Nothing goes to waste in Chinaexcept human labor, of which enough is wasted every year to make awhole nation rich, simply because it is not aided by effectiveimplements and machinery. The bottles, the tin cans, the wooden boxes, the rags, the orange peels--everything we throw away--is saved. Andthe coolies work from early morn till late at night and every day inthe week. Their own religion does not teach them to observe theseventh day, and this requirement of Christianity, in China as well asin Japan, is regarded as a great hardship upon its converts. Buddhism in China, as in Japan, it may also be observed just here, isnow only a hideous mixture of superstition and fraud. As I foundbelievers in the Japanese temples rubbing images of men and bulls tocure their own pains, so in the great Buddhist temple at Canton Ifound the fat Buddha's body rubbed slick in order to bring flesh tothin supplicants, while one of the chief treasures of the temple is apair of "fortune sticks. " If the Chinese Buddhist wishes to undertakeany new task or project, he first comes to the priest and tries outits advisability with these "fortune sticks. " If, when dropped to the{152} floor, they lie in such a position as to indicate good luck, hegoes ahead; otherwise he is likely to abandon the project. Let me close this chapter by noting a remark made to me by Dr. TimothyRichard, one of the most eminent religious and educational workers inthe empire. "Do you know what has brought about the change in China?" he asked meone day in Peking. "Well, I'll tell you: it is a comparative view ofthe world. Twenty years ago the Chinese did not know how their countryranked with other countries in the elements of national greatness. They had been told that they were the greatest, wisest, and mostpowerful people on earth, and they didn't care to know what othercountries were doing. Since then, however, they have studied books, have sent their sons to foreign colleges and universities, and theyhave found out in what particulars China has fallen behind othernations. Now they have set out to remedy these defects. Thecomparative view of the world is what is bringing about the remakingof China. " In China, no doubt, the men who have brought the people this"comparative view of the word" were criticised sometimes for presumingto suggest that any other way might be better than China's way; butthey kept to their work--and have won. Doctor Richard himself did mucheffective service by publishing a series of articles and diagramsshowing how China compared with other countries in area, population, education, wealth, revenue, military strength, etc. Such comparisonsare useful for America as a country, and for individual states andsections as well. Hong Kong, China. {153} XVI WHAT I SAW IN THE PHILIPPINES Of the cruelty of Chinese punishments I have already had something tosay, but there is at least one thing that should be said for theChinese officials in this connection: No matter how heinous his crime, they have never sent a criminal from Hong Kong to Manila in anIndo-China boat in the monsoon and typhoon season. Dante could have found new horrors for the "Inferno" in the voyage asI made it. From Saturday morning till Sunday night, while the stormwas at its height, the waves beat clean over the top of our vessel. Athousand times it rolled almost completely to one side, shivered, trembled, and recovered itself, only to yield again to the wrath andfury of mountain-like waves hurled thundering against it and over it. The crack where the door fitted over the sill furnished opening enoughto flood my cabin. In spite of the heat not even a crack could beopened at the top of the window until Monday morning. A bigger ship afew hours ahead of us found the sea in an even more furious mood. Thecaptain stayed on the bridge practically without sleep three days andnights, going to bed, spent with fatigue and watching, as soon as hecame at last into sight of Manila. Two weeks ago the captain ofanother ship came into port so much used up that he resigned and gavehis first mate command of the vessel, while still another vessel hasjust limped into Manila disabled after buffeting the storm for a briefperiod. {154} At any rate, the trip is over now, and I write this in Manila, withits tropical heat and vegetation, its historic associations, itsstrange mixture of savage, Spanish, and American influences. The PasigRiver, made famous in the war days of '98, flows past my hotel, andbeautiful Manila Bay, glittering in the fierce December sunlight, recalls memories of Dewey and our navy. But the moss-green walls aboutthe old Spanish city remind us of days of romance and tragedy morefascinating than any of the events of our own generation. In the dayswhen Spain made conquest of the world these streets were laid out, andthe statues of her sovereigns, imperious and imperial, still standhere to remind us that nations, like men, are mortal, and that forfollies or mistakes a people no less surely than an individual mustpay the price. Nor let our own proud America, boasting of her greater area and richerresources, think she may ignore the lessons the history of herpredecessors here may teach. The statue of Bourbon Don Carlos in hisroyal robe that stands amid the perennial green of the CathedralPark--it may well bring our American officers who look out daily uponit, and the other Americans who come here, a feeling not of pride butof profound and reverent humility: "God of Our Fathers, known of old. Lord of our far-flung battle-line. Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine. Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget, lest we forget!" In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I left ManilaThursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, travelling throughthe provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. Thefirst four of these are known as Tagalog provinces; the fifth isinhabited by Ilocanos and Pampangans. Three dialects or languages arespoken by the {155} tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyondDaguban are savage dog-eating, head-hunting tribes; taos, or peasants, buy dogs around Daguban and sell to these savages at good profits. The provinces I travelled through are typical of Filipinolandgenerally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of the landis under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampagrass, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but thebroad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of thecocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papayaafford a spectacle unlike anything we see at home. About Dagubanespecially many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by theAgno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile inthe time of Pharaoh--especially when I looked at the plowing going onaround them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the oldEgyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crookedsmall tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makesthe beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, someof the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece ofwood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U withthe prongs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with twopieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, theFilipino's harness is complete. Before going into any further description of the plows, however, letus get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as Isaw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and womencutting the crop with old-fashioned knives and sickles; the generalappearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in earlysummer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the uppertwo feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, someof it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of{156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damplow-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freightboats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed out of single logs. Most striking of all are the houses in which the people live, clustered in villages, as are farmhouses in almost every part of theworld except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the massiveluxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts ashigh as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. Inmost instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12feet, and a sort of lean-to adjoining, through which the ladder comes. A one-horse farmer's corn crib is about the size of the largerFilipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, butof bamboo--the ever-serviceable bamboo--which, as my readers probablyknow, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our riverbanks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made oflarger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunksform the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat likethat of which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; theroofing is of _nipal_, which looks much like very long corn shucks. In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough to hold six oreight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with shucks: such inappearance is the Filipino's house. Around it are banana trees bentwell toward the ground by the weight of the one great bunch at thetop, and possibly a few bamboo and cocoanut trees. For human ornamentsthere are rather small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men, women, and children in clothing rather gaylycolored--as far as it goes: in some cases it doesn't go very far. Thefavorite color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixtureof pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination of red andwhite. Bare feet are most common, {159} but many wear slippers, andnot a few are now slaves enough to fashion to wear American shoes. Themen, except the very poorest, wear white, nor is it a white worn darkby dirt such as Koreans wear, but a spotless, newly washed white. Nearly every Filipino seems to have on clothes that were laundered theday before. A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outergarment worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body. {157} [Illustration: A FILIPINO'S HOME. ] Nearly all the native houses I saw in the rural Philippines were of this type--about this size, set on stilts, and constructed of similar material. The scene is not quite natural-looking, however, without a banana grove and a fighting cock or two. {158} [Illustration: THE CARABAO, THE WORK-STOCK OF THE FILIPINOS. ] [Illustration: AN OLD SPANISH CATHEDRAL. ] Of all the native Oriental peoples, the Filipinos alone have become thoroughly Christianized. The great majority are Catholics. {159 continued} The beast of burden in the Philippines, the ungainly, slow-movinganimal that pulls the one-handled plows and the two-wheeled carts, isthe _carabao_. The _carabao_, or water buffalo, is about the size ofan ordinary American ox, and much like the ox, but his hide is black, thick, and looks almost as tough as an alligator's; his horns areenormous, and he has very little hair. Perhaps his having lived in thewater so much accounts for the absence of the hair. Even now he mustevery day submerge himself contentedly in deep water, must cover hisbody like a pig in a wallow: this is what makes life worth living forhim. Furthermore, when he gives word that he is thirsty Mr. Tao (thepeasant) must not delay watering him; in this hot climate thirst maydrive him furiously, savagely mad, and the plowman may not be able toclimb a cocoanut tree quick enough to escape hurt. I saw quite a few goats, some cattle, a few hogs, and, of course, somedogs. Much as the Filipino may care for his dog, however, he alwaysreserves the warmest place in his heart for nothing else but hisgamecock, his fighting rooster. Cock-fighting, and the gamblinginseparably connected with it, are his delight, and no Southernplanter ever regarded a favorite fox-hound with more pride andaffection than the Filipino bestows on his favorite chicken. In grassyyards you will see the rooster tied by one leg and turned out toexercise, as we would stake a cow to graze, while his owner watchesand fondles him. I shall never forget a gray-headed, bright-eyed, barefooted old codger I saw near Tarlac stroking the feathers of hisbird, while in his eyes was the pride as of a woman over {160} herfirst-born. A man often carries his gamecock with him as a negro wouldcarry a dog, and he is as ready to back his judgment with his last_centavo_ as was the owner of Mark Twain's "Jumping Frog" before thatill-fated creature dined too heartily on buckshot. Sundays and saints'days are the days for cock-fighting--and both come pretty often. I wish I could give my readers a glimpse of the passengers who got onand off my train between Manila and Daguban: Filipino women carryingbaskets on their heads, smoking cigarettes, and looking afterbabies--in some cases doing all three at once; Filipino men, likewisesmoking, and with various kinds of luggage, including occasionalgamecocks; Filipino children in most cases "undressed exceedingly, " asMr. Kipling would say; and American soldiers in khaki uniforms andhelmets. At one place a pretty little twelve-year-old girl getsaboard, delighted that she is soon to see America for the first timein six years. For a while I travel with an American surveyor whosework is away out where he must swim unbridged streams, guard againstpoisonous snakes, and sleep where he can. An army surgeon tells me aswe pass the site of a battle between the Americans and the Filipinoinsurgents eleven years ago: the Filipinos would not respect the RedCross, and the doctors and hospital corps had to work all night withtheir guns beside them, alternately bandaging wounds and firing onsavages. In telling me good-bye a young Westerner sends regards to allAmerica. "Even a piece of Arizona desert would look good to me, " hedeclares; "anything that's U. S. A. " A young veterinarian describes thegovernment's efforts to exterminate rinderpest, a disease which insome sections has killed nine tenths of the _carabao_. A campaign asthorough and far-reaching as that which the Agricultural Department athome is waging against cattle ticks is in progress, but the ignorantfarmers cannot understand the regulations, and are greatly hindering awork which means so much of good to them. Such are a few snapshots of Philippine life. {161} Of the vast natural resources of the Philippines there can be noquestion. With a fertile soil, varied products, immense forest wealth, and possibly extensive mineral wealth; with developing railway andsteamship lines; with the markets of the Orient right at her doors andspecial trade advantages with the United States--with all theseadvantages, the islands might soon become rich, if there were only anindustrious population. Unfortunately, the Filipino, however, doesn't like work. Whether ornot this dislike is incurable remains to be seen. Perhaps as he comesinto contact with civilization he may conceive a liking for otherthings than rice, fish, a loin-cloth, and shade--plenty of shade--andproceed to put forth the effort necessary to get these other things. Already there seems to have been a definite rise in the standards ofliving since the American occupation. "When I came here in '98, " Mr. William Crozier said to me, "not one native in a hundred wore shoes, and hats were also the exception; you can see for yourself how greatis the change since then. " Moreover, in not a few cases Americans who have complained ofdifficulty in getting labor have been themselves to blame: they triedto hire and manage labor the American way instead of in the Filipinoway. The _custombre_, as the Spanish call it--that is to say, thecustom of the country--is a factor which no man can ignore withoutpaying the penalty. I am having to prepare this article very hurriedly, and I mustpostpone my comment on the work of the American Government untillater. In closing, however, I am reminded that just as the old proverbsays, "It takes all sorts of people to make a world, " so I am seeingall sorts. A week ago yesterday the Hong Kong papers announced thatMr. Clarence Poe would be the guest at luncheon of his Excellency theGovernor-General, Sir Frederick Lugard, K. C. M. G. , C. B. , D. S. O. , etc. , and Lady Lugard, in the executive mansion; yesterday {162} I had"chow" (food) in a Filipino's place, "The Oriental Hotel, Bar, andGrocery, " away up in the Province of Pangasinan, and climbed to myroom and cot on a sort of ladder or open work stairs such as one mightexpect to find in an ordinary barn! It was the best place I could findin town. Nor do the incongruities end here. After getting my evening meal Iwalked out in the warm December moonlight, past the shadows of thestrange buildings and tropical trees--and all at once there burst outthe full chorus of one of the world's great operas, the magnificentvoice of a Campanini or Caruso dominating all! Great is the graphophone, advance agent of civilization! Manila, P. I. {163} XVII WHAT THE UNITED STATES IS DOING IN THE PHILIPPINES There are so many islands in the Philippine group, which I have justleft behind me (I write in a steamer off Manila), that if a man wereto visit one a day, without stopping for Sundays, it would take himeight years to get around. Most of these islands though, of course, are little more than splotches on the water's surface and do notappear on the map. The two big ones, Mindanao and Luzon, contain threefourths of the total land surface of 127, 000 square miles, leaving theother one fourth to be divided among the other 3138 islets. The land area statistics just given indicate that the Philippines areabout the size of three average American states and the population(7, 000, 000) is about three times that of an average Americancommonwealth. There are only about 30, 000 white people in the islands, and 50, 000 Chinese. Chinese immigration is now prohibited. The 7, 000, 000 native Filipinos who make up practically the entirepopulation represent all stages of human progress. The lowest of themare head-hunters and hang the skulls of their human enemies outsidetheir huts, as an American hunter would mount the head of an elk orbear. The great majority, however, have long been Christians and haveattained a fair degree of civilization. Even among the savage tribes ahigh moral code is often enforced. The Igorrotes, for example, thoughsome of their number make it a condition of marriage {164} that theyoung brave shall have taken a head, shall have killed his man, haveremarkable standards of honor and virtue in some respects, andformally visit the death penalty as the punishment for adultery. Because roads or means of communication have been poor the people havemingled but little, and there are three dozen different dialects. Inthe course of a half day's journey by rail I found three differentlanguages spoken by the people along the route. The originalinhabitants were Negritos, a race of pigmy blacks, of whom only aremnant remains, but the Filipino proper is a Malayan. Filipinos are unique in that they alone among all the native peoplesof Asia have accepted Christianity. Fortunate in being without thegold of Mexico or Peru, the Philippines did not attract the morebrutal Spanish adventurers who, about the time of Magellan'sdiscovery, were harrying wealthier peoples with fire and sword. Instead of the soldier or the adventurer, it was the priest, his soulaflame with love for his church, who came to the Philippines, and theimpression made by his virtues was not negatived by the bloody crimesof fellow Spaniards mad with lust of treasure. The result is that tothis day probably 90 per cent, of the Filipinos are Catholics. Beforethe priests came, the people worshipped their ancestors, as do otherpeoples in the Far East. The only Asiatics who have accepted Christianity, the Filipinos arealso the only Asiatics among whom women are not regarded as degradedand inferior beings. "If the Spaniards had done nothing else here, " asa high American official in Manila said to me, "though, as a matter offact, we are beginning to recognize that they did a great deal, theywould deserve well of history for what they have accomplished for theelevation of woman through the introduction of Christianity. No otherreligion regards woman as man's equal. " The testimony I heard in the Philippines indicated that the femalepartner in the household is, if anything, superior in authority to theman. She is active in all the little business {165} affairs of thefamily, and white people sometimes arrange with Filipino wives for theemployment of husbands! The resources of the islands, as I have already said, are magnificentand alluring. In the provinces through which I travelled, less than 10per cent. Of the land seemed to be under cultivation, and statisticsshow that this is the general condition. A small area has sufficed toproduce a living for the tao, or peasant, and he has not cultivatedmore--a fact due in part to laziness and in part to poor means oftransportation. What need to produce what cannot be taken to market?This fact, in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipinounaggressiveness. According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms in thePhilippines, including the large plantations, is less than eightacres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane, tobacco, cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks for all the worldlike the banana plant (both belong to the same family), and thenewcomer cannot tell them apart. The fibre is in the trunk or bark. Sisal hemp, which I found much like our yucca or "bear grass, " is butlittle grown. Sugarcane is usually cultivated in large plantations, asin Louisiana, these plantations themselves called _haciendas_, andtheir owners _hacienderos_. The tobacco industry is an important one, and would be even if the export averaging half a million cigars forevery day in the year were stopped, for the Filipinos themselves areinveterate smokers. The men smoke, the women smoke, the childrensmoke--usually cigarettes, but sometimes cigars of enormousproportions. "When I first came here, " Prof. C. M. Conner said to me, "it amused me to ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, andhave him answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes, ' meaning the distance aman should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes!" Cocoanut-raisingis a very profitable industry--all along the Pasig River in Manila youcan see the native boats high-packed with the green, unhusked product, and two towns in Batanzas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is alsobelieved that {166} the rubber industry would pay handsomely. Therubber-producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising. Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes until abouttwenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cottonboll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befellSennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whosehigh-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horsesgay in harness made of the finest silver, but the blight which ruinedhis coffee plants was equally a blight to his fortunes and his homeand it is now given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In somesections, however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was muchinterested in seeing the shrubs in bearing. The Philippines are about the only place I have found since leavinghome where the people are not trying to grow cotton. In California, inthe Hawaiian Islands, in Japan, in Korea, and even in Manchuria as farnorth as Philadelphia, I have found the plants, and of course in Chinaproper. But I should add just here, that in Southern China, aboutCanton, I did not find cotton. As for the industry in the Philippines, a Southern man, now connected with the Agricultural Department inManila, said to me: "Cotton acts funny here. It runs to weed. Iplanted some and it opened five or six bolls a stalk and then quit:died down. " He showed me some "tree cotton, " about twenty feet high, and also some of the Caravonica cotton from Australia, which is itselfmuch like a small tree. When it comes to the lumber industry, not even Col. Mulberry Sellerswould be likely to overestimate the possibilities the Philippinesoffer. There are literally millions in it. The government is leasingimmense areas on a stumpage royalty of about 1 per cent. , and asrailways are built the industry will expand. Fortunately, there arestrict regulations to prevent the destruction of the forests. Theymust be used, not wasted. The authorities realize that while timber isa crop like other crops, it differs from the other crops in that theharvesting must {167} never be complete. The cutting of trees below acertain minimum size is forbidden. And now a word as to the activities of the American Government in theislands and the agencies through which these activities are conducted. The supreme governing body is known as the Philippine Commission, consisting of the Governor-General, who is ex-officio president, andseven other members (four Americans, three Filipinos) appointed by thePresident of the United States. Four of these commissioners (three ofthese are Americans) are heads of departments, having duties somewhatlike those of Cabinet officers in America. This commission is not onlycharged with the executive duties, but it acts as the Upper House orSenate of the Philippine Congress. That is to say, the voters elect anAssembly corresponding to our House of Representatives, but nolegislation can become effective unless approved by the PhilippineCommission acting as the Upper House. In the first two elections, those of 1907 and 1909, the advocates of early independence, opponentsof continued American supremacy, have predominated. The result hasbeen that the American members of the commission have had to killnumberless bills passed by the Assembly. On the other hand, some verynecessary and important measures advocated by the commission, measureswhich would be very helpful to the Filipinos, are opposed by theAssembly either through ignorance or stubbornness. Most of theAssembly members are of the politician type, mestizos or half-breeds(partly Spanish or Chinese), and very young. "In fact, " a Manila mansaid to me, "when adjournment is taken, it is hard for a passerby totell whether it is the Assembly that has let out or the High School!"The people in the provinces elect their own governors and cityofficials. In some respects the legislation for the Philippines adopted by theAmerican officials at Washington and Manila has been quiteprogressive. To begin with, our Republican National {168}Administration frankly recognized the blunders made in the Southduring Reconstruction days, and has practically endorsed the generalpolicy of suffrage restriction which the South has since adopted. Whenthe question came up as to who should be allowed to vote, even for thelimited number of elective offices, no American Congressman was heardto propose that there should be unrestricted manhood suffrage. Instead, the law as passed provides that in order to vote in thePhilippines one must be 23 years of age, a subject of no foreignpower, and must either (1) have held some responsible office beforeAugust 13, 1898, or (2) own $250 worth of property or pay $15 annuallyin established taxes, or (3) be able to speak, read, and write Englishor Spanish. Of course, the Filipinos, with a few exceptions, do not"speak, read, or write" English or Spanish; they have been taught onlytheir own dialect. I understand that only 2 per cent, of the peoplecan vote under these provisions. It should be said just here, however, that the government is nowmaking a magnificent effort to educate all the Filipinos, and theschools are taught in English. The fact that half a million boys andgirls had been put into public schools was the first boastedachievement of the American administration of the islands. It was, indeed, a great change from Spanish methods, but in the last three orfour years the officials have been rapidly waking up to the fact thatwhile they have been getting the Filipinos into the schools, they havenot been getting them into the right sort of schools. With the realization of this fact, a change has been made in the kindof instruction given. More and more the schools have been given anindustrial turn. When I visited the Department of Education in ManilaI found that old textbooks had been discarded and new text-booksprepared--books especially suited to Philippine conditions anddirected to practical ends. Instead of a general physiology describingbones, arteries, and nerve centres, I found a little book on {169}"Sanitation and Hygiene in the Tropics, " written in simple language, profusely illustrated, and with information which the pupil can use inbettering the health of himself, his family, and his neighborhood. Instead of a general book on agriculture, I found a book written so asto fit the special needs, crops, and conditions in the Philippines. Moreover, I found the officials exhibiting as their chief treasuresthe specimens of work turned out by the pupils as a result of thepractical instruction given them. "I really think, " said one of the officers, "that we have carried theidea of industrial education, of making the schools train forpractical life, much farther in the Philippines than it has beencarried in the United States. The trouble at home is that our teachersdon't introduce industrial education early enough. They wait until theboy enters the upper grades--if he doesn't leave school beforeentering them at all, as he probably does. In any case, they reachonly a few pupils. Our success, on the other hand, is due to the factthat we begin with industrial education in the earlier grades and geteverybody. " And right here is a valuable lesson for those of us who are interestedin getting practical training for white boys and girls in America aswell as for brown boys and girls in the Philippines. Another progressive step was the introduction of postal savings banksfor the Filipinos before any law was passed giving similar advantageto the white people of the United States. The law has worked well. Infact, the increase in number of depositors last year, from 8782 to13, 102--nearly 50 per cent, in a single twelve-month--would indicatethat the people are getting enthusiastic about it and that it isachieving magnificent results in stimulating thrift and the savinghabit. The government has also introduced the Torrens System of RegisteringLand Titles, as it has done in Hawaii. Formerly {170} the farmer orthe peasant paid 20 per cent, or more for advances or loans. With hisland registered under the Torrens system the bank will lend him moneyat a normal rate of interest, with nothing wasted in lawyers' fees forexpensive investigations of all previous changes in title since thebeginning of time. Judge Charles B. Elliott, now Secretary of Commerceand Police for the islands, was on the Minnesota Supreme Bench whenthe Torrens plan was put into force there, and he is enthusiasticabout its workings both in his home state in America and in thePhilippines. For the public health an especially fruitful work has been done by theAmericans, albeit the Filipino has often had much to say in criticismof the methods of saving life, and but little in praise of the workitself. "The hate of those ye better, the curse of those ye bless" mayusually be confidently counted on by those who bear the White Man'sBurden, and this seems to have been especially true with regard tohealth work in the East. In the Philippines the farmers object to thequarantine restrictions that would save their carabao from rinderpest;they object to the regulations that look to stamping out cholera, andI suppose the isolation and colonization of lepers, who formerly ranat large, has also been unpopular. In spite of opposition, vaccinationis now general; pock-marked Filipinos will not be so common in future. Nor is it likely that there will be many reports of cholera outbreakssuch as an ex-army nurse described to me a few days ago: "When I wasin Iloilo in 1902, " she said, "it was impossible to dig graves for thepoor natives as fast as they died. The men were kept digging, at thepoint of the bayonet, all night long--pits 100 feet long, 7 feet wideand 7 feet deep, in which the bodies of the dead were thrown andquick-limed--and yet I remember that on one occasion 235 corpses layfor forty-eight hours before we could find graves for them. " In Manila statistics show that 44 per cent. Of the deaths are {171} ofbabies under one year old, and the ignorance of the mothers as toproper methods of feeding and nursing has resulted in a shockinglyhigh death rate of little ones all over the Philippines. I noticedthat the new school text-book on sanitation and hygiene gives especialattention to the care of infants, and it is said that already theschool boys and girls are often able to give their mothers helpfulcounsel. In this fact we have another good suggestion for the schoolauthorities at home, where it is said that proper knowledge and carewould save the lives of a million infants a year. Hardly less important than the school work has been the road-buildingundertaken by the American officials. And in Philippine road work amost excellent example has been set for the states at home, in thatthe authorities have given attention not only to building roads but tomaintaining them after they are built. Too many American communitiesvote a heavy bond issue for roads and think that ends the matter. Inthe Philippines no such mistake has been made. "With the heavy rainshere, " the Governor-General said to me, "our entire investment in apiece of good road would be lost in four years' time if repair workwere not carefully looked after. " The system adopted for keeping up the roads is very interesting. Everywhere along the fine highways I travelled over there were atintervals piles or pens of crushed stone and other material forfilling up any hole or break. For each mile or so a Filipino isemployed--he is called a _caminero_--and his whole duty is to take awheelbarrow and a few tools and keep that piece of road in shape. Prizes of $5000 each are also offered to the province that maintainsthe best system of first-class roads, to the province that spends thelargest proportion of its funds on roads and bridges, and to theprovince that shows the best and most complete system of second-classroads. That the Filipinos are unfit to face the world alone there can belittle doubt. As to whether it is our business in that {172} case tomanage for them is another question. The Filipinos are, like ournegroes, a child-race in habits of thought, whatever they may be fromthe standpoint of the evolutionist. "I never get angry with them, however much they may obstruct my plans, " an American of rank said tome, "for I look on them as children. We are running a George JuniorRepublic; that's what it amounts to. " Another American, who has hadsome experience with the Assembly, said to me: "When you haveexplained and reiterated some apparently simple proposition, they willcome to you a day or so later with some elementary question amazingfor its childishness. " A large number of excellent measures for whichthe Assembly has received the credit were really instigated by thecommission--"personally conducted legislation, " it is called. The Filipinos come of a race which has achieved more than the negrorace, but on the whole they are probably hardly better fitted forself-government than the negroes of the South would be to-day if allthe whites should move away. As a Republican of some prominence athome said to me in Manila: "A crowd of ten-year-old schoolboys inChicago would know better how to run a government. " The mere fact that the Filipinos are not capable of managing wiselyfor themselves, of course, is not enough to justify a colonial orimperialistic policy on the part of the United States. It is not ourbusiness to go up and down the earth taking charge of everybody who isnot managing his affairs as well as we think we could manage for him. But, in any case, there is no use to delude ourselves as to what arethe real qualifications of Mr. Filipino. I believe that the United States should eventually withdraw from theislands, but when it does so there should be an understanding with thePowers that will prevent the natives from being exploited by someother nation. China Sea, off Manila Harbor. {173} XVIII ASIA'S GREATEST LESSON FOR AMERICA The prosperity of every man depends upon the prosperity (and thereforeupon the efficiency) of the Average Man. So I have argued for years, in season and out of season, in newspaperarticles and in public addresses; and the most impressive fact I havediscovered in all my travel through the Orient is the fundamental, world-wide importance of this too little accepted economic doctrine. It is the biggest lesson the Old World has for the New--the biggestand the most important. In America, education, democratic institutions, a proper organizationof industry: these have given the average man a high degree ofefficiency and therefore a high degree of prosperity as compared withthe lot of the average man in Asia or Europe--a prosperity heightenedand enhanced, it is true, by the exploitation of a new continent'svirgin resources, but, after all, due mainly, primarily, as we havesaid, to the high degree of efficiency with which the average man doeshis work. And while there may be "too much Ego in our Cosmos, " as Kipling'sGerman said about the monkey, for us to like to admit it, the plaintruth is that, no matter what our business, we chiefly owe ourprosperity not to our own efforts, but to the high standards ofintelligence, efficiency, and prosperity on the part of our people asa whole. We live in better homes, eat more wholesome food, wear betterclothing, have more leisure {174} and more recreation, endure lessbitter toil; in short, we find human life fairer and sweeter than ourfellow man in Asia, not because you or I as individuals deserve somuch better than he, but because of our richer racial heritage. Wehave been born into a society where a higher level of prosperityobtains, where a man's labor and effort count for more. In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told me that theaverage rate of wages throughout the empire for all classes of laboris probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it is probably not more, and inIndia much less. The best mill workers I saw in Osaka average 22 centsa day; the laborers at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10cents; wheelbarrow coolies in Shanghai $4 a month; linotype operatorsin Tokyo 45 cents a day, and pressmen 50; policemen 40; theironworkers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street-car conductors inSeoul make 35 cents; farm laborers about Nankou 10 cents; the highestwages are paid in the Philippines, where the ordinary laborer getsfrom 20 to 50 cents. Since writing the foregoing I have looked up the latest official statistics for Japan in the "Financial and Economic Annual for 1910, " the latest figures compiled to date being for 1908. In 1908 wages had increased on the whole 40 per cent, above 1900 figures, and I give herewith averages for certain classes of workmen for 1899 and 1908: Daily Wages in Cents 1899 1908 Farm laborer, male $0. 13 $0. 19 Farm laborer, female . 08-1/2 . 11-1/2 Gardener . 24 . 34 Weaver, male . 15 . 22 Weaver, female . 09 . 12 Shoemaker . 22-1/2 . 32-1/2 Carpenter . 25 . 40 Blacksmith . 23 . 34 Day laborer . 17 . 26-1/2 When I asked Director Matsui what he paid the hands I saw at work on the Agricultural College farm, he answered, "Well, being so near Tokyo, we have to pay 30 to 40 sen (15 to 20 cents) a day, but in the country, generally, I should say 20 to 35 sen" (10 to 13-1/2 cents a day). {175} Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these lowfigures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks areoften heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an Americanlaborer would regard as inhuman. Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He isdoing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such asour Southern negroes would refuse for ordinary labor. More than this, in most cases he is selling you not only his time but his life-blood. Run he must with his human burden, and faster than Americans wouldcare to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes hisheart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kindsof weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in thewinter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and theovertaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, Iwas told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the averageman. And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into therickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is notovercrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my lifeendangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for theprivilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. InHong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savagestruggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hiredas if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--andthis for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather thanfeel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellowbeing pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where noteven the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the menin order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as myrickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulnesssuch as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if hehad {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used toit! I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls thejinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded ifit were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Considerthe men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fittedthe wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were weltedwith corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many asummer's plowing. Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the worknot of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land inYokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-nakedhuman-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw theirheavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull animmense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or tenmen are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece ofmachinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the menbehind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone whilethe strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah!Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, stepby step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task thanthat of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at thewheel, forever climbing and never advancing. Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such asonly men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have thefreedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out tothem cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women withchildren strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handlepassengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, thewater-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsomeresidences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that everymassive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone wascarried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of humanmuscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles ofwomen! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in aresidence so splendid as that of the governor-general of HongKong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of thegovernor-general told me that the material used in the building wasbrought up the mountainside by women! Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a formerletter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories areherded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhousesfor American criminals! Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-deep to plantthe rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, and harvest itwith sickles. And after all this, they must often sell the rice theygrow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or poorer rice for their ownfood. The situation has probably improved somewhat since Col. CharlesDenby published his book five years ago, but in its general outlinesthe plight of the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then istrue to-day: "The average wage of an able-bodied young man is $12 per annum, with food and lodging, straw shoes, and free shaving--an important item in a country where heads must be shaved three or four times a month. His clothing costs about $4 per annum. In ten years he may buy one third of an acre of land ($150 per acre) and necessary implements. In ten years more he may {178} double his holdings and become part-owner in a water buffalo. In six years more he can procure a wife and live comfortably on his estate. Thus in twenty-six years he has gained a competence. " So much by way of a faint picture of existing industrial conditions inthe Orient. Let us now see what there is for us to learn from thesefacts. First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. Why is itthat the Oriental gets such low wages, and has such low earning power?"An overcrowded population, " somebody answers, "in China, for example, four hundred million people--one fourth the human race--crowded withinthe limits of one empire. This is the cause. " I don't believe it. There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of population, evenwith the most highly developed system of industry, might lead to sucha result, but I do not believe that this limit has been reached evenin China. The people in England live a great deal better to-day thanthey did when England had only one tenth its present population. Theaverage man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, and abetter income than he had in your grandfather's day when thepopulation was not nearly so dense. The United States with apopulation of ninety odd million pays its laborers vastly better thanit did when its population was only thirty million. The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little more thanhe consumes; there should be a margin, an excess which shouldconstitute his contribution to the "commonwealth, " to the race. Ourbuildings, roads, railroads, churches, cathedrals, works ofart--everything which makes the modern world a better place to live inthan the primitive world was: these represent the combinedcontributions of all previous men and races. And if society is so ableto handle men that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the more men the better the world. {179} My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not because oftheir dense populations, but because of their defective industrialorganizations, because they do not provide men Tools and Knowledge towork with. Ignorance and lack of machinery--these have kept Asia poor; knowledgeand modern tools--these have made America rich. If Asia had a Panama Canal to dig, she would dig it with picks, hoes, and spades and tote out the earth in buckets. Nothing but human boneand sinew would be employed, and the men would be paid little, becausewithout tools and knowledge they must always earn little. But Americaputs brains, science, steam, electricity, machinery into the BigDitch--Tools and Knowledge, in other words--and she pays good wagesbecause a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose only forceis the force of muscle. But Asia--deluded, foolish Asia--has scorned machinery. "The more workmachinery does, the less there will be for human beings to do. Menwill be without work, and men without work will starve. " With thisfolly on her lips she has rejected the agencies that would haverescued her from her never-ending struggle with starvation. Oftentimes, we know, the same cry has been heard in England--and alas!even in America; our labor unions even now sometimes lend a willingear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturerssought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and whenrailroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands ofdraymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would havetorn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese didalong the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time handcompositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine. And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen andcabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundredsof thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs andtelephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, anderrand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of thepopulation when old-fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands outthat labor has never been in greater demand and has never commandedhigher wages than to-day. With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it mustever be so--certainly as far ahead as we can look into the future. When a machine is invented which enables one man to do the work itformerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity formankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by theproduction of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the thingsof the mind and the spirit. And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said justhere, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality ofopportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean mostin human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackleswhich chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free tolabor where he can work best, but is also itself a productiveagency--a tool with which a man may work better. Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a manmay harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and getresults, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horseor steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge underheaven. Knowledge is power. {181} [Illustration: "SOCIETY BELLES" OF MINDANAO, PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. ] [Illustration: A STREET SCENE IN MANILA. ] {182} [Illustration: TWO KINDS OF WORKERS IN BURMA . ] One of the pleasures of being "on the road to Mandalay" was to see the-- "Elephints a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek" The elephants of Rangoon are as fascinating as the camels of Peking. But one never gets hardened to the every-day Oriental spectacle of human beings harnessed like oxen to weary burdens, many of which make those in the lower picture look light by comparison. {180 continued} All this doctrine Asia has rejected, or has never even got to thepoint of considering. In America a motorman or conductor by means oftools and knowledge--a street-car for a tool and the science ofelectricity for knowledge--transports forty people from one place toanother. These men are high-priced laborers considered from anOriental standpoint and yet {183} it costs you only five cents foryour ride, and five minutes' time. In Peking, on the other hand, ittakes forty men pulling rickshaws to transport the forty passengers;and though the pullers are "cheap laborers, " it costs you more moneyand an hour's time to get to your destination--even if you are solucky as not to be taken to the wrong place. Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! Men and womenweavers doing work that machines would do at home. Grain reaped withsickles instead of with horses and reapers as in America. Sixteen menat Hankow to carry baggage that one man and a one-horse dray wouldcarry in New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up themountainside at Hong Kong--and the Chinese threatened a general riotwhen the English built a cable-car system up the incline; theycompelled the owners to sign an agreement to transport passengersonly--never freight! No sawmills in the Orient, but thousands of menlaboriously converting logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. Nopumps, even at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes:often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, insome cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powersare given no chance to do. These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries wheremachinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary labor is as yetbut little better paid than in other lines because such industries arenot numerous enough to affect the general level of wages. The netresult of her policy of refusing the help of machinery is that Asiahas not doubled a man's chances for work, but she has more than halvedthe pay he gets for that work. And why? Because she has reduced hisefficiency. A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, andwhere the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and poor tools, they produce little, and each man's share is little. Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope foramong a people who earn 10 cents a day--the head {184} of a familygetting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant?Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among sucha people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if amanufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how muchcirculation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how muchincome? Very plain on the whole must be my two propositions: (1) That the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American much--a condition dueto the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples hisproductive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools andknowledge, machinery and education. The Oriental does not. (2) Your prosperity, in whatever measure you have it; the fact thatyour labor earns two, three, or ten times what you would get for it ifyou had been born in Asia; this is due in the main, not to yourpersonal merit, but to your racial inheritance, to the fact that youwere born among a people who have developed an industrial order, haveprovided education and machinery, tools and knowledge, in such mannerthat your services to society are worth several times as much as wouldbe the case if you were in the Orient, where education has neverreached the common people. Pity--may God pity!--the man who fancies he owes nothing to theschool, who pays his tax for education grudgingly as if it were acharity--as if he had only himself to thank for the property on whichthe government levies a pitiable mill or so for the advancement anddiffusion of knowledge among mankind. Pity him if he has notconsidered; pity him the more if, having considered, he is smallenough of soul to repudiate the debt he owes the race. But for whateducation has brought us from all its past, but for what it haswrought through the invention of better tools and the bettermanagement (through increased knowledge) of all the powers with whichmen labor, our close-fisted, short-sighted {185} taxpayer wouldhimself be living in a shelter of brush, shooting game with a bow andarrow, cultivating corn with a crooked stick! Most of what he has heowes to his racial heritage; it is only because other men prosper thathe prospers. And yet owing so much to the Past, he would do nothingfor the Future; owing so much to the progress the race has made, hewould do nothing to insure a continuance of that progress. "Line upon line; precept upon precept. " At the risk of possibleredundancy, therefore, let me conclude by repeating: Whateverprosperity you enjoy is largely due to what previous generations havedone for increasing man's efficiency by means of knowledge and tools;your first duty to your fellows is to help forward the same agenciesfor human uplift in the future. And while this is the first duty ofthe individual, it is even more emphatically the first duty of acommunity or a commonwealth. This is Asia's most important lesson for America. Singapore, Straits Settlements. {186} XIX THE STRAITS SETTLEMENTS AND BURMA The Straits Settlements and Burma I have seen in the dead of winter, and yet with no suggestion of snow, bare fields, or leafless trees. The luxuriant green of the foliage is never touched by frost, and inSingapore, only seventy-seven miles from the equator, summer andwinter are practically alike. "But you must remember that we are here in the wintertime, " afellow-traveller remarked when another had expressed his surprise atnot finding it hotter than it really was--the speaker evidentlyforgetting that at the equator December is as much a summer month asJuly, and immediately south of it what are the hot months with usbecome the winter months there. And Singapore is so close to theequator that for it "all seasons are summer, " and the _punkah wallas_(the coolies who swing the big fans by which the rooms are madetolerable) must work as hard on Christmas Day as on the Fourth ofJuly. The vegetation in the Straits Settlements is such as writers on thetropics have made familiar to us. The graceful cocoanut palms aresilhouetted against the sky in all directions; the dense, heavyfoliage of the banana trees is seen on almost every street; thesprawling, drunken banyan tree, a confusion of roots and branches, casts its dense shadows on the grateful earth; and all around the cityare rubber plantations, immense pineapple fields, and unclearedjungle-land in which wild beasts and poisonous serpents carry on theunending {187} life-and-death struggle between the strong and the weak. Singapore, in fact, is said to have been called "the Lion City" for along while because of the great number of lions found in theneighborhood. I saw the skins of elephants and tigers killed nearby, and also the skin of a Singapore alligator fifteen feet long. There is probably no place on earth in which there have been broughttogether greater varieties of the human species than in Singapore. Iwas told that sixty languages are spoken in the city, and if diversityof color may be taken as an indication of diversity of language, I amprepared to believe it. There are many Indians or Hindus, most of themabout as black as our negroes, but with the features of the Caucasianin the main--sharp noses, thin lips, and straight glossy black hair;but 72 per cent, of the population of Singapore is Chinese. It is interesting to observe that John Chinaman seems to flourishequally in the Tropics and in the Temperate Zone. Here in Singaporeunder an equatorial sun, or in Canton on the edge of the Tropics, heseems as energetic, as unfailing in industry, as he is in wintryMukden or northern Mongolia. For hours after sunset many of theChinese shops in Singapore present as busy an appearance as atmid-day, and the pigtailed rickshaw men, with only a loin-cloth abouttheir bare bodies, seem to run as fast and as far as they would ifthey were in Peking. The Chinese are a wonderful people, and I am more and more impressedwith the thought of what a hand they are to have in the world'saffairs a hundred years hence when they get thoroughly "waked up. "They were first brought to Singapore, I understand, as commonlaborers, but now their descendants are among the wealthiest men andwomen in the place and ride around in automobiles, while descendantsof their one-time employers walk humbly on the adjacent sidewalks. Itis a tribute to the untiring industry, shrewdness, and business skillof the Chinaman that nowadays when people {188} anywhere speak ofdesiring Celestials as laborers, they add, "Provided they are undercontract to return to China when the work is finished, and do notremain to absorb the trade and wealth of the country. " From Singapore we made a very interesting trip to Johore, a littlekingdom about the size of ten ordinary counties, and with a populationof about 350, 000. The soil and climate along the route are well suitedto the cultivation of rubber trees, and considerable areas haverecently been cleared of the dense jungle growth and set to youngrubber plants. One of my friends who has a rubber plantation north ofSingapore says that while rubber is selling now at only $1. 50 a poundas compared with $3 a pound a few months ago, there are still enormousprofits in the business, as the rubber should not cost over 25 cents apound to produce. Some of the older plantations paid dividends of 150per cent, last year, and probably set aside something for a rainy dayin addition. Yet not even these facts would have justified the wild speculation inrubber, the unreasoning inflation in values, which proved a veritable"Mississippi Bubble" for so many investors in Europe and Asia lastyear. Shares worth $5 or $10 were grabbed by eager buyers at $100each. I know of a specific instance where a plantation bought for$16, 000 was capitalized at $230, 000, or 20 for 1, and the stockfloated. When the madness had finally spent itself and people began tosee things as they were, not only individuals, but whole communities, found themselves prostrated. Shanghai will not recover for years, andsome of its citizens--the young fellow with a $1500 income whoincurred a $30, 000 debt in the scramble, for example--are left inpractical bondage for life as a result. The men who have gone into therubber-growing industry on a strictly business basis, however, arelikely to find it profitable for a long time to come. The cocoanut industry is also a profitable one, although the modestaverage of 10 per cent. , year in and year out, has {189} not appealedto those who have been indulging in pipe dreams about rubber. Wheretransportation facilities are good, the profits from cocoanutsprobably average considerably in excess of 10 per cent. , for the treesrequire little care, and it is easy for the owners to sell the productwithout going to any trouble themselves. In one section of thePhilippines, I know, the Chinese pay one peso (50 cents gold) a treefor the nuts and pick them themselves. And when we consider the greatnumber of the slim-bodied trees that may grow upon an acre, it is notsurprising to hear that many owners of cocoanut groves or plantationslive in Europe on the income from the groves, going to no troublewhatever except to have the trees counted once a year. Penang, where we spent only a day, is almost literally in the midst ofan immense cocoanut plantation, and I was much interested in seeingthe half-naked Hindus gathering the unhusked fruit for shipment. Thetall, limbless trunks of the trees, surmounted only by a top-knot offruit and foliage, are in nearly every case gapped and notched atintervals of about three feet to furnish toe-hold for the natives inclimbing. After tiffin on this winter day, instead of putting on gloves andovercoats, we went out on a grassy lawn, clad in linen and pongee aswe were, and luxuriated in the cool shade of the palm trees. The densefoliage of the tropical jungle was in sight from our place by theseaside, and in the garden not far away were cinnamon trees, cloves, orchids, rubber trees, the poisonous upas, and palms of all varietiesknown. Penang is a rather important commercial centre, and exports more tinthan any other place on earth. The metal is shipped in molten barslike lead or pig iron, and to one who has associated tin only withlight buckets, cups, and dippers, it is surprising how much strengthit takes to move a bar of the solid metal the size of a smallwatermelon. The imports of Penang are also not inconsiderable, and in walkingthrough the warehouses along the wharves I was {190} struck by thenumber of boxes, crates, bales, and bundles bearing the legend, "Madein Germany. " The Germans are today the most aggressive commercialnation on earth, and I find that their government and their businesshouses are searching every nook and corner of the globe for tradeopenings. Unlike our American manufacturers, it may be observed justhere, they are quick to change the style of their goods to meet evenwhat they may regard as the whims of their customers, and this is anadvantage of no small importance. If a manufacturer wishes to sellplows in the Philippines, for example, it would not be worth while forhim to try to sell the thoroughly modern two-handled American kind tobegin with. He should manufacture an improved one-handled sort atfirst and try gradually to make the natives see the advantages ofusing two handles. At present, as an American said to me in Manila, ifyou should seek to sell a Filipino a two-handled plow he wouldprobably say that two handles may be all right for Americans who arenot expert at plowing, but that the Filipino has passed that stage! I mention this only by way of illustrating the necessity of respectingthe _custombre_, or custom, of the country. The Germans realize this, and we do not. One day by steamer from Penang brought us to Rangoon, the capital andmost important city in Burma, and (next to Bombay and Calcutta) themost important in British India. We had heard much of the place, situated thirty miles up the river "on the road to Mandalay, " butfound that even then the half had not been told. If there were nothingelse to see but the people on the streets, a visit to Rangoon would bememorable, for nowhere else on earth perhaps is there suchbutterfly-like gorgeousness and gaudiness of raiment. At a littledistance you might mistake a crowd for an enormous flower-bed. Allaround you are men and women wearing robes that rival in brilliancyJoseph's coat of many colors. The varieties in form of clothing are as great as the varieties {191}in hue. The Burmese babies toddle about in beauty unadorned, and forthe grown-ups there is every conceivable sort of apparel--or the lackof it. Most of the laborers on the streets wear only a loin-cloth anda turban (with the addition of a caste-mark on the forehead in casethey are Hindus), but others have loose-fitting red, green, yellow, blue, striped, ring-streaked or rainbow-hued wraps, robes, shirts ortrousers: and the women, of course, affect an equal variety of colors. "The whackin' white cheroot" that the girl smoked in Kipling's "Roadto Mandalay" is also much in evidence here; or perhaps instead of thewhite cheroot it is an enormous black cigar. In either case it is aslarge as a medium-sized corncob, that the newly landed tourist ismoved to stare thereat in open-eyed amazement. How do Kipling's versesgo? "'Er petticoat was yaller, an' 'er little cap was green. An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen, An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot. An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot. " They are all there in Rangoon yet--the gorgeous coloring of the lady'sraiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols-- "Bloomin' idol made o' mud. Wot they called the Great Gawd Bud. " How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossibleto estimate--I saw them not only in the pagodas, but newly carved inthe shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior--and thegilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine ofthe entire Buddhist world, " glitters like a beacon for miles beforeyou reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the WashingtonMonument, it is gilded from top to bottom--with actual gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim--and around it are innumerable smaller pagodasand shrines glittering with mosaics of colored glass in imitation ofall the gems known to mortals. {192} Studied closely, they appearunduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you havefound a real Aladdin's palace, a dazzling, glittering dream ofOriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there cometo-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrimsnot only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shallnot soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whomtwo women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda aftermy second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of allthe millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia, " that itis a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies ofHinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the ShweDagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justicewith mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty whomade life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees BuddhistBurma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greatercheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially thehappier lives of the women--all a result, in the main, of thedifference in religion. And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough--itstemples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faithmingled with gross superstitions and charms to propitiate the "nats"or spirits which are supposed to inhabit streams, forests, villages, houses, etc. , and to have infinite power over the lives and fortunesof the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group ofyellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which piousBuddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntaryofferings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as inSiam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days andget his living in this way. The ordinary beast of burden in Rangoon is the Indian {193} bullock. Often pure white, usually with a well-kept appearance and with aclean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on theway to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of blackHindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts anddrays; and it may be that the small boys utilize the long-eared goats(they have heavy, drooping ears like a foxhound's) to pull their smallcarts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city thatinterested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants ofRangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memoryand affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerousas are the camels in China's capital, but those that one sees displayan intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make themfascinating. One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co. 's lumber yard atAhloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle theheavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. Itwas better than a circus. "Elephants a-pilin' teak In the sludgy, squdgy creek. " It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings inthe Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloonon the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and hestopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirtyor forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pullthrough the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, gettingdown on his knees sometimes to use his strength to better advantage, and one could hardly escape the conclusion that at times he "cussed"in violent Elephantese. The king of the group, a magnificent tusker, pushed the logs with his snout and tusks, while the others pulled themwith chains. But the most marvellous thing is how the barefooted, half-naked driver, or mahout, astride the great giant's shoulders, makes him {194} understand what to do in each case by merely kickinghis neck or prodding his ears. At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his logstuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about histrials, when the tusker's mahout bid that royal beast go help histroubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leavinggreat holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had beenuprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and therewas peace again in the camp. For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinarysized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were apiece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plankhe is remarkably careful about matching. Eying the pile at a distance, he looks to see if it is uneven or any single piece out of place, inwhich case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our partywas also much amused when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib"("Salute the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation asgracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit. One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the StraitsSettlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation andas help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting storiesconcerning them. He had two--one a tusker worth 2500 rupees, or$833-1/3, and the other a mutna (without tusks) worth 2250 rupees, or$750. On one occasion the mutna heard "the call of the wild, " and wentback to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn't likethe civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned homelater two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore othermarks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (asthey will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers. I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driveninto a stockade, the tamed elephants close in {195} on him, and themahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For aday or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of thegreat tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the riverwhere he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts setabout taming him--talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, halfhypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, andstroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In acouple of months "my lord the Elephant" is fully civilized, respondspromptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adoptssome useful occupation. In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts ofteak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend therubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants onwhich he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to theother, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion hehas run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On goodroads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make sevenmiles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, theyare likely to lose if set to heavy work. Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the greatquantity of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds aday will barely "jestify his stummuck, " as Uncle Remus would say, andwhen he gets hungry "he wants what he wants when he wants it, " andtrumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on aSingapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on boarda few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxedmutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vesselto pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land toenable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be broughtaboard for the elephants' breakfast. I haven't seen a white elephant yet, but in the Shwe Dagon {196}Temple I found a lively eight-months-old youngster, an orphan fromMandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guideand I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me thathe will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Whichwould be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't. I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impressionof Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned andlighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark andserious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. Oneship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They willwork through the Burman rice harvest--rice is the one great crop ofthe country--at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, andafter three or four months of this will return home. Because they areso poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) forbringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carryingthem back. Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very muchin Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in thewar with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within thewalls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sunnever sets on the English flag; and one finds much to remind him, too, that the sun never sets on the graves of that flag's defenders. Scattered through every zone and clime are they: countless thousandsof them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the placewhere those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls andlooked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silveryoutline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green ofthe jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of theTorrid Zone--more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climateever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197}it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered amongthe papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananaswelcomed it! With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Arabythe Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma. Rangoon, Bunna. {198} XX HINDUISM--AND THE HIMALAYAS If it were any other country but India, I might write last of thereligion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the firstthing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life--if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as "asacred disease. " Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entirelife of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Twochildren are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matterhow stupid or vicious, a privileged and "superior" being, to whom alllower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father andmother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter howgreat his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touchworks pollution worse than crime. And through the lifetime of each, Brahminism, or Hinduism, as the supreme religion of India is called, will exercise over him an influence more potent and incessant than anycivil government has ever exercised over its subjects. About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly acertain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hinduliterature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity andmust shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in itspractical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickeningcombination of superstition, idolatry, and {199} vice that nowdisgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of theearth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, "Samsara, " the beliefthat you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may havemillions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the gods and winrelease from life), and that what you are in your present life is theresult of actions in previous existence, and what you do in thispresent existence will influence all your future rebirths--this is adoctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked withsuch ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practicalHinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not onexalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but onrites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance ofcaste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickleor bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makesterrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; noChrist teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit. Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation ofGod, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existenceto hasten a final absorption into God--this also (although destructiveof the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, sofundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moralforce, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea ofSamsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu godsthemselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene andcriminal. Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy andpurer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism"powerless to be born, " is only the illusion which it would teach thatall else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a landwhose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all thehuman race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, everyeighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize inwhat manner Hinduism guides its 200, 000, 000 followers it is onlynecessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples. It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the firstHindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali, " as theEnglish-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, thebloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals andassassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kalias their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned theirmurderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of"religion. " The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in hercountenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from hermouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of aslaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Hergirdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that sheconstantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her bringsa little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after thepriestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terriblegoddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every fewminutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the placeruns ankle-deep in blood. In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were humansacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longerallow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! TheirKaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for athousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human headbedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta notmany years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice hasbeen attempted within a decade. From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} tothe edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Gangessystem), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrimswere washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. Onthe way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-likeshelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Smallpox, " as the priest called her, to whichsmallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priestassured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an annais worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give mea view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance--thereensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of"worshippers, " such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man gotfor the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got aswift glimpse of the idol's hideous head. Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like thedaughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back tomy hotel, properly edified, let us believe, by this spectacle of Hindu"religion. " It was Sunday morning. Could I have been otherwise than impressed when I went that afternoonto another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--andcompared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of amoney-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting aprescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of abloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods andgoddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was aconverted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whosecharacteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. Andinstead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was thefine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202}recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the wordsinto the strange tongue of the Bengali. At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly andoutrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he werean infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what atremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majorityof Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and howtremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the liveseven of those of "Deaf ear and soul uncaring" who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire topreach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious astemples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with openeyes and open mind. But let us now go to Benares, the fountain-head of the Hindu faith, the city which is to it what Mecca is to Mohammedanism and more thanJerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I mustgive more than a paragraph to my impressions of it. The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I foundsurprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storiedpilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win thefavor of the gods, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strangemingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined theancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leavingmassive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem towhisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares. For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old whenthe walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on thethrone of Israel. But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly {203} unlikethese beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one seecrowds like these--crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stonesteps leading up from the river's edge through the maze of buildingsand spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts andconditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with theirgorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into thebathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as thepoor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bringthe hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whosefaces no man ever sees except those that be of their ownhouseholds--they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body tobe gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, man-borne _palki_ and are taken within boats with closed sides, wherethey bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brownHindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men withlimbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or thatimpersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearestHindu approach to our idea of Heaven) by dying in the sacred place. A great many pilgrims--may God have pity, as He will, on their pooruntutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, erethey reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but manyother aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that theyhave reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quickwork of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of theGanges. "_Rama, nama, satya hai_" (The name of Rama is true): so Iheard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-cladfigure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body iswrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on lightbamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood aboveand beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that whichwas a breathing human being when the sun set the day before. Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief thataccompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimeshired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wailheart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--butsomehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show littleevidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked aHindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting andtalking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burninghuman flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see there, " he replied. And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them onlythe persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of thefunerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before thecremation is concluded it is the son's duty--in some places I visited, at least--to take a big stick and crack the skull in order to releasehis father's spirit! But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should theHindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself acurse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its coursethrough the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatestboon to be won from the propitiated gods, is "remerging in the generalsoul, " the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense andSelf; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, ofthat sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement inhuman bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a sonof God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsibleidentity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is apart of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Itsdoctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitablyneither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness ofthe individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christiancivilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristicof the social and political institutions of the Orient. {205} [Illustration: TYPES AT DARJEELING, NORTHERN INDIA, AND AT DELHI, CENTRAL INDIA. ] India has not a homogeneous population. There are almost as many races, types, and languages as in the continent of Europe. The right-hand figure in the upper picture bears a striking resemblance to a North American Indian. The instrument in his hands is a praying-wheel. {206} TWO RANGOON TYPES. [Illustration: Supi-yaw-lat and her "whackin' white cheroot. "] [Illustration: A Hindu girl. ] Rangoon is a city of gorgeous colors and varied human types. But one need not go far to find the Burmese girl Kipling has immortalized: "'Er petticoat was yaller and 'er little cap was green, An er name was Supi-yaw-lat--jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot. An' a wastin' Christian kisses on a 'eathen idol's foot'" {207 continued} But let us get back to Benares and its pilgrims. They do not all die, nor do they spend all their time bathing in the sacred waters of"Mother Gunga, " as the Ganges is called. Naturally there are manytemples in which they must worship, many priests whom they mustsupport. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the highpriest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for hisservices--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported byhis establishment alone (the Golden Temple). And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some greatcities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are"temples" in Benares--so-called "temples" that should minister toman's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides totheir foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. Nowonder that the Government of India, when it made a law againstindecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception forHindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to theendurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I wastold that the authorities do not allow such structures to be builtnow. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many partsof India are the resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls"dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defendedas proper. Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness asthey are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows pennedup in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holycesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge, " its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful godKrishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. Andthe famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali)I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and themost loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had themisfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while themonkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on theignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won aplace in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkeycompanions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmerswere juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to lookat them. That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindureligious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help hisargument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What youare speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. " Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get abetter taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to ahappier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary ofnorthern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highestmountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery onwhich the eye of mortal man may ever rest. Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse andwound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tourare likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point welooked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a viewwhose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left thereglittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twinattendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29, 002 feet high, the highestmountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the viewdirectly in front of us, for there only one third as far away asEverest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majestytoward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kinglypeaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored thepure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute ortwo had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm huesof its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms andrugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as thehighest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higheryet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above whichits further bulk of 11, 000 additional feet formed a dazzlingsilhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peakand imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot ofMount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of oneanother above its highest point--the massive bulk in either casestretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line ofeverlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga. Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was notmeet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was asuggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, ofinfinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spiritswith a certain eerie unworldliness. It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned laterthat it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed hisdream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in whichman's fretful spirit-- "From too much love of living From hope and fear set free"-- may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through all ourhuman realm of Time and Place. Lucknow, India. {210} XXI "THE POOR BENIGHTED HINDUS" GREAT indeed are the uses of Poetry. Consider by way of illustrationhow accurately and comprehensively some forgotten bard in four shortlines has pictured for us the true condition of the inhabitants ofEngland's great Indian Empire: "The poor, benighted Hindu, He does the best he kin do He sticks to his caste from first to last. And for pants he makes his skin do. " A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achievement inverse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of the people, towit, they are "poor, " the average annual income having been estimatedat only $10, and the average wages for day labor in the capital cityof India only 6 to 20 cents per diem; (2) as to their intellectualcondition, "benighted, " ninety men in each hundred being unable toread or write any language, while of every thousand Indian women 993are totally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man livingand dying within the limits of the caste into which he is born; and(4) as to the clothing, garb or dress of the inhabitants (or theabsence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently attiredafter the manner of our revered First Parents before they made theacquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also dispense generallywith trousers, shoes, and stockings, and other impedimenta of ourover-developed civilization. {211} Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from India Ishall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge upon the greatfundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetrypiece. If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the commonpeople because he made so many of them, " then the Creator must alsohave a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus, " for withinan area less than half the size of the United States more than300, 000, 000 of them live and move and have their being. That is tosay, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it wouldcontain 600, 000, 000 people. It is also said that when the far-flungbattle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion thatgreat empire had within its borders only half as many people as thereare in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, containhalf the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chineseand East Indians were the equals of the other races in militaryprowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, ofevery nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would berequired to defeat them. Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls forspecial study. And if we would study them we must not confineourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting asthese cities are. The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the peoplelive on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few largecentres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands andthousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes andCape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not themillions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significantsocial fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modernRajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents aday which is a laborer's wage for millions and millions of the people. For these reasons I have been no more interested in the famous citiesI have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may havenever found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a penpicture of one of these villages in north central India. As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass ofant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has beensuggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofedwith clay also--made flat on top with a little trench or gutter fordrainage. Perhaps the majority, however, have thick sloping roofs ofstraw, the eaves being hardly as high as a man's head. Very thick arethe mud walls of the houses, eighteen inches or more in most cases, and as the floor is also the bare earth, there is no woodwork aboutsuch a dwelling except the doors and a few poles to hold up the roof. In one or two small rooms of this kind without a window or chimney(oftener perhaps in one room than in two) a whole family lives, cooks, and sleeps. {213} [Illustration: A HINDU FAQUIR. ] [Illustration: SOME FASHIONABLE HINDUS. ] The faquirs do not like to be photographed, and this follow in the upper picture was snapped just in the act of rising from his bed of spikes. This is only one of many methods of self-torture practised in the hope of winning the favor of the gods. {214} [Illustration: HINDU CHILDREN--NOTICE THE FOREHEAD CASTE MARKS. ] {212 continued} The streets, if such they may be called, are often little more thancrooked water-rutted paths, so narrow that one may reach from the mudwalls of the houses on one side to the mud walls on the other, and socrooked that you are likely to meet yourself coming back before youget to the end. Or perhaps you wind up unexpectedly in some_mahullah_--a group of huts representing several families of kinsfolk. Enclosed by a mud wall, the little brown bright-eyed, black-haired, half-naked children are playing together in the little opening aroundwhich the houses are bunched, and the barefooted mothers are cooking_chapatis_, spinning cotton on knee-high spinning wheels, weaving insome wonderfully primitive way, gathering fuel, or are engaged inother household tasks. The equipment of one of these human ant-hills, called a home, is about as primitive as the building itself. There is, of course, a bed or cot: it is about {215} half knee-high, and the heavytwine or light rope knitted together after the fashion of a verycoarse fish-net is the only mattress. The coarse grain which servesfor food is stored in jars; the meagre supply of clothing hangs in onecorner of the room; there are no chairs, knives or forks. The stove orfireplace is a sort of small clay box for the fire, with an opening ontop for the kettle or oven. In one corner of the room is the fuel: afew small sticks and dried refuse from cow stalls that Americans usefor fertilizing their fields. "We have found rather bad results, " amissionary told me, "from providing Indian girls with mattresses, chairs, knives, forks, etc. , at our mission schools. Later, when theymarry our native workers, the $5-a-month income of the family (whichis about all they can expect) is insufficient to provide theseluxuries, and the girl's recollections of former comforts are likelyto prove a source of dissatisfaction to her. " At first you ask, "But why are there no windows in the houses? Surelythe people could leave openings in the clay walls that would givelight and ventilation?" The answer is that most of the year theweather is so hot that the hope of the owner is to get as nearlycave-like conditions as possible; to find, as it were, a cool place inthe earth, untouched by the fiery glare of the burning sun outside. Even in north central India in the houses of the white men, whereeverything has been done to reduce the temperature and with everypunkah-fan swinging the room's length to make a breeze, thetemperature in May and June is 106 or higher, and at midnight in theopen air the thermometer may reach 105. "It is then no uncommonthing, " a friend in Agra told me, "to find even natives struck downdead by the roadside; and the railways have men designated to take andburn the bodies of those who succumb to the heat in travel by thecars. " In such a warm climate the dress of the people, as has already beensuggested, is not very elaborate. In fact, the garb of the adult manis likely to be somewhat like the uniform of the {216} Gunga Din (theIndian _bhisti_ or water-carrier for the British regiment): "The uniform 'e wore Was nothin' much before An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind-- For a twisty piece o' rag And a goatskin water-bag Was all the field equipment 'e could find. " In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather fullycovered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of some gaudy hue tothe uniform just suggested. As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit will consistof, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-blue piece ofcloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite incompletely)around the head and upper part of the body, and a breast-cloth orpossibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This combination of hues, ofcourse, is only a specimen. The actual colors are variable but thebrilliancy is invariable. Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who boasted ofrings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find her gloryvanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not content with thesepreliminary beginnings of adornment, the barefooted Hindu womanwears--if she can afford it--a band or two of anklets, braceletshalfway from wrist to elbow, armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings ofimmense size, a necklace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ringas big around as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feetwill rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on theway to the barn. This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not madesolely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native has notgrown used to the idea of savings banks (although the government isnow gradually convincing him that the postal savings institutions aresafe), and when he earns a spare rupee he puts it into jewelry toadorn the person of himself or {217} his wife. If all the idletreasures which the poor of India now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into productive industry, a good deal might be doneto alleviate the misery for which the agitators profess to blame theBritish Government. Calcutta, India. {218} XXII HINDU FARMING AND FARM LIFE In the rural villages, of course, the majority of the inhabitants arefarmers, who fare afield each morning with their so-called plows orother tools for aiding the growth of their crops. The Indian plow is, I believe, the crudest I have found in any part of the wide world. Itconsists of a simple handle with a knob at the top; a block of woodwith an iron spike in it about an inch thick at one end and taperingto a point at the other; and a tongue to which the yoke of bullocksare attached. The pointed spike is, perhaps, sixteen inches long, butonly a fraction of it projects from the wooden block into which it isfastened, and the ordinary plowing consists only of scratching the twoor three inches of the soil's upper crust. The Allabahad Exposition was designed mainly to interest the farmersin better implements, and its Official Handbook, in calling attentionto the exhibit of improved plows, declared: "The ordinary Indian plow is, for certain purposes, about as inefficient as it could be. Strictly speaking it is not a plow at all. It makes a tolerably efficient seed-drill, a somewhat inefficient cultivator, but it is quite incapable of breaking up land properly. " The other tools in use on the Indian farm are fit companions for theprimitive plow. Some one has said that 75 cents would buy the completecultivating outfit of the Hindu ryot! I saw men cutting upbullock-feed with a sort of hatchet; the threshing methods arecenturies old; the little sugarcane mills {219} I found in operationhere and there could have been put into bushel baskets. The big oxcarts, which together with camel carts meet all the requirements oftravel and transportation, are also heavy and clumsy, having wheels asbig as we should use on eight-horse log-wagons at home. These wheelsare without metal tires of any kind, and the average cost of one ofthe carts, a village carpenter told me, is $25. As to the other crops grown by the Indian ryot, or farmer, I cannotperhaps give a better idea than by quoting the latest statistics as tothe number of acres planted to each as I obtained them from thegovernment authorities in Calcutta. Rice 73, 000, 000 Wheat 21, 000, 000 Barley 8, 000, 000 Millets 41, 000, 000 Maize 7, 000. 000 Other grains 47, 000, 000 Fodder crops 5, 000, 000 Oilseeds: linseed, mustard, sesamum, etc. 14, 000, 000 Sugarcane 2, 250, 000 Cotton 13, 000, 000 Jute 3, 000, 000 Opium (for China) 416, 000 Tobacco 1, 000, 000 Orchard and garden 5, 000, 000 It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246, 000, 000 acres undercultivation to supply 300, 000, 000 people (the United States last yearcultivated 250, 000, 000 acres to supply 90, 000, 000) only 28, 000, 000acres were cropped more than once during the year. With the warmclimate of India it would seem that two or more crops might be easilygrown, but the annual dry season makes this less feasible than itwould appear to the traveller. Even in January much artificialcrop-watering must be done, and no one can travel in India longwithout growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around themthe earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes draw upthe water in collapsible leather bags or buckets. A general system ofelevated ditches then distributes the water where it is needed. Concerning the drought, a resident of Muttra said to me that {220}there practically no rain falls from the middle of January to themiddle of June. "In the latter part of the drought, " he said, "thefields assume the appearance of deserts; only the dull green of thetree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous graybrown of thefar-stretching plains. The streams are dried up; the cattle hunt theparched fields in vain for a bit of succulence to vary their diet ofdry grass. But at last there comes the monsoon and the rains--and thenthe Resurrection Morning. The dead earth wakens to joyousfruitfulness, and what was but yesterday a desert has become averitable Garden of Eden. " But, alas! sometimes the rains are delayed--long, tragically longdelayed! The time for their annual return has come--has passed, andstill the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth as if it would setafire the grass it has already burned to tinder-dryness. The ryot'sscanty stock of grain is running low, the daily ration has beenreduced until it no longer satisfies the pangs of hunger, and witheach new sunrise gaunt Famine stalks nearer to the occupants of themud-dried hut. The poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answernot; unavailingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all theheartless Hindu deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial thevengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague-strickencattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens of thousands andhundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw several young men whom themission school rescued from starvation in the last great famine of1901-02 and heard moving stories of that terrible time. Many readerswill recall the aid that America then sent to the suffering, but inspite of the combined efforts of the British Government andphilanthropic Christendom, 1, 236, 855 people lost their lives. To get abetter grasp upon the significance of these figures it may bementioned that if every man, woman, and child in eight American statesand territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been {221} swallowed up ina night, the total loss of life would not have been so great as inthis one Indian famine. Appalling as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remembered thatthe loss would have been vastly greater but for the excellent systemof famine relief which the British Government has now worked out. Ithas built railways all over India, so that no longer will it bepossible for any great area to suffer while another district havingabundance is unable to share its bounty because of absence oftransportation. In the second place, the government has wiselyarranged to give work at low wages to famine sufferers--road building, railroad building, or something of the kind--instead of dispensing areckless charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended tohelp. Before the British occupation India was scourged both by famineand by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between neighboringstates. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the loss by drought ithas greatly reduced; and some authority has stated (I regret that Ihave not been able to get the exact figures myself) that for a centurybefore the British assumed control, war and famine kept the populationpractically stationary, while since then the number of inhabitants haspractically trebled. Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work in relievingfamine sufferers, is the excellent work the British Government isdoing in enabling the farmers to free themselves from debt. Thevisitor to India comes to a keener appreciation of Rudyard Kipling'sstories and poems of Indian life because of the accuracy with whichthey picture conditions; and the second "Maxim of Hafiz" is only oneof many that have gained new meaning for me since my coming: "Yes, though a Kafir die, to him is remitted Jehannum, If he borrowed in life from a native at 60 per cent. Per annum. "' When I first heard of "60 per cent, per annum, " and even of 70 percent, or 80 per cent. , as the ordinary rate of interest paid {222} bythe Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could not believeit, but further investigation proved the statement true. In the UnitedProvinces I found that in some cases the ryot has been little betterthan a serf. The merchant has "furnished him supplies, " addinginterest at the rate of one anna on each rupee at the end of eachmonth--6-1/4 per cent. , not a year but a month, and that compoundedevery 30 days! In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boystwenty years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years thereafterthey paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an Americanmissionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of 50, and intwo years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees more than they hadformerly paid as annual tribute to the money-lender. In many suchcases debts have been handed down from generation to generation, forthe Hindu code of honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debtsof his father; and son, grandson, and great-grandson have, staggeredunder burdens they were unable to get rid of. In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized undergovernment supervision have proved a godsend to the people, andthousands of ryots through their aid are now getting free of debt forthe first time in their lives, and their families for perhaps thefirst time in generations. Each member of a cooperative credit societyhas some interest in it; the government will lend at 4 per cent, anamount not greater than the total amount deposited by all the members;stringent regulations as to loans and their security, deposit ofsurplus funds, accounting, etc. , are in force, and altogether the planis working remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in asingle twelvemonth the total working capital of these societiesincreased more than 300 per cent. The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized countryin which some form of cooperative credit society, with government aid, has not been worked out. {223} Of great help to the small farmer also has been the action of thegovernment in regulating land-rents in crowded districts. The courtssee to it that no landlord raises rents unfairly. One Brahminfreeholder I met in a small village (he owned 250 acres, worth from$130 to $275 per acre) told me his rents were 32 to 40 rupees (or from$10 to $13) per acre. He grows wheat and cotton, and appeared to bequite intelligent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing savea turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching fromhis loins to his knees, the rest of his body being entirely naked. That the day laborer in India can have but small hope of buying landat $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices general) isindicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next village, the wageper month, I was told, "Four or five rupees ($1. 28 to $1. 60), thelaborer boarding himself. " "And how much is paid per day when a single day's labor is wanted?" Iasked. "Two annas and bread, " was the reply. (An anna is 2 cents. ) My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village. At hisschool he told me that the children of farmers were allowed tuitionfree; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas a month. Butso hard is the struggle to get enough coarse grain to keep soul andbody together (the peasant can seldom afford to eat rice or wheat)that few farm children are free from work long enough to learn to readand write. It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyedboys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall notsoon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squattedaround a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled yard just before Ileft Khera Kalan that afternoon. Outside a score of camels werecropping the leaves from the banyan trees (the only regularcommunication with the outside world is by camel cart) and the men ofthe village {224} were grinding sugarcane on the edge of thefar-reaching fields of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Notfar away was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic GrandTrunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange land ofAfghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which Alexander theGreat marched his victorious legions into India, and over whichcenturies later Tamerlane came on his terror-spreading invasion. Butthis has nothing to do with the little half-naked boys and girls weare now concerned with. They had gathered around the Padre to recitethe Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer in Hindustani. I asked howmany had been to school (only one responded), asked something abouttheir games, told them something about America, and then theirinstructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me, of course): "And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the boys andgirls of America for you?" "Tell them, Salaam, " was the quick chorus in reply. "And that is good enough, I guess, " remarked the American who is nowgiving his life to the Indian people, "for Salaam means. Peace be toyou. " So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and girls of theUnited States who read this article. "Salaam, "--Peace be to you. Little Ones. You will never even know how favored of Heaven you are inhaving been born in a land where famine never threatens death to youand your kindred, where the poor have homes that would seem almostpalatial to the average Indian child; where educational opportunitiesare within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is anaid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance tothem; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children shallnot rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage-scalehigher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to have comfortsand cherish ambitions; and where the humblest "boy born in a logcabin" may dream of the Presidency instead {225} of being an outcastwhose very touch the upper orders would account more polluting thanthe touch of a beast. Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing rings intheir noses and not much else, who send the message through me toyou--think of them to-night and be glad that to you the lines havefallen in pleasanter places. Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own homeland across theseas! Peace be to you! Jeypore, India. {226} XXIII THE CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA Of Hinduism as a religious or ecclesiastical institution we hadsomething to say in another chapter; of Hinduism as Social Fact baremention was made. And yet it is in its social aspects, in itsenslavement of all the women and the majority of the men who comewithin its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. ForHinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the innate, Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the other twice-borncastes, and upon the consequent inferiority of the lower castes, thewhole system of Brahminism rests. Originally there were but four castes: The Brahmin or priest caste whowere supposed to have sprung from the head of Brahma or God; theKshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his arms, the Vasiya ormerchant and farmer class who sprang from his thigh, and the Sudra orservant and handicraftsmen class who came from his feet. The idea ofsuperiority by birth having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these primary castes were themselves divided and subdividedalong real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority untilto-day the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India. You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hindus; youcannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any of them. Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis ofdemocracy--blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspiration and alleffort at change or improvement. {227} No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is born; buthe may fall to a lower one. There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move isbackward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You were born aBrahmin with wealth and power because you won the favor of the gods insome previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to alife of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previousexistence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If youare only a sweeper, be glad that you were not born a pig or a cobra. Kismet, Fate, has fixed at birth your changeless station in this life;and, more than this, it has written on your brow the things which musthappen to you throughout your whole existence. The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority and then saidto all the other classes: Rebel not at the inequalities of life. Theyare ordained of the gods. The good that the higher castes enjoy is thereward of their having conducted themselves properly in previousexistences. Submit yourself to your lot in the hope that withobedience to what the Brahmins tell you, you may possibly likewise winbirth into a higher caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so muchas with a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty andone lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape again. Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised acleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never hasthere been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadeningto all initiative. "_Jo hota so hota_, "--"What is happening was tohappen"--so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospitalto have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It iswritten on my forehead, " a man will often say with stoicalindifference when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to thebelief that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on everyman's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act {228} ofhis can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do the deed, " acriminal will say in the courts. "And I am impelled of the gods topunish you for it, " the judge will sometimes answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought by force to observe precautionsagainst it. "If we are to die, we shall die; why offend the gods byattempting interference with their plans?" The fatalism of the East asexpressed by Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India's millions: "We are no other than a Moving Row Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go. . . . "But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon this Checkerboard of Nights and Days. " It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; butfor this belief that all things are predestined, no people would everhave been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the castesystem. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in thetransmigration of the soul has also had a not inconsiderableinfluence. Though you have fared ill in this life, a million rebirthsmay be yours ere you finally win absorption into Brahma, and in thesemillion future lives the gods may deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most desire may be yours in your rebirth. "Youare interested in India; therefore you may have your next life as anIndian, " an eminent Hindu said to me. But Heaven forbid! At any rate, with this double layer of nourishing earth--the belief, first, that what you are now is the result of your actions in previouslives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which anymerit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the castesystem has flourished like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though itsinfluence has been more like that of the deadly upas. If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat with ortouch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in {229} intelligence and inmorals, but in some cases you may even demand that the low-caste manshall not pollute you by coming too near you on the road. On page 540of the 1901 "Census of India Report" will be found a table showing atwhat distances the presence of certain inferior classes becomecontaminating to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive tomen, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He must notworship in the temples; must not even approach them. Usually it istaken for granted that no Pariah will take such a liberty, but in someplaces I have seen signs in English posted on the temple gates warningtourists who have low-caste servants that these servants cannot enterthe sacred buildings. Not only are these creatures of inferior orders vile in themselves, but the work which they do has also come to be regarded as degrading. A high-caste man will not be caught doing any work which is "beneathhim. " The cook will not sweep; the messenger boy would not pick up abook from the floor. The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at theAmerican Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick upa slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would walkhalf a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is no uncommonthing to find that your servant will carry a package for you, but willhire another servant if a small package of his own is to be moved. "Ihad a boy for thirteen years, the best boy I ever had, till he died ofthe plague, " a Bombay Englishman said to me, "and he shaved meregularly all the time. But when I gave him a razor with which toshave himself, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' ifhe had done barber's work for anybody but a European!" "I have a good sweeper servant, " a Calcutta minister told me, "but ifI should attempt to promote him beyond his caste and make ahouse-servant of him, every other servant I have would leave, including my cook, who has been a Christian twenty years!" The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well {230}illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit to aschool for the Dom caste conducted by some English people in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the Ganges ghats, and do other"dirty work. " Incidentally they form the "thief caste" in Benares, andwhenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom isguilty. For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to theGypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice to sleepon the ground just outside the police station nearly all the yearround, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibiin case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anythingbelonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their mostvaluable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowingfull well that not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them. "We had a servant, " a Benares lady said to me, "who lost his placerather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet while a Dom hadhold of the other end. The new bearer, his successor, did risk helpingmove a box with a Dom handling the other side of it, but he wasoutcasted for the action, and it cost him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, he could not visit kinsmen or friendsnor could friends or kinsmen have visited him even to help at afuneral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunnedhim. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of theBrahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassior messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on thefloor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution thatwould come from actual contact with the chiprassi. " Moreover, thereare social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided tothis lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business ofhis family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a morerespectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged! Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta {231} tellshow one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeperproudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowestamong all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a deadanimal! My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this asuitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of awell-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activitiesof those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorialright. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are knownto be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your houseat night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice thatmine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left hisshoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as therobbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring oneof their number as chowkidar. " In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carryingthings with a much higher hand. "There's where they live, " Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we werecoming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them atribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god oftheir own whom they always consult before making a raid. If hesignifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with theverdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the greatmajority of cases. " India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down rootsfrom a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in theearth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs androots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion theIndian caste system has {232} developed. Instead of the four originalcastes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and thesystem now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what socialstation the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave(or from the time the conch shell announces the birth of a man-childtill the funeral pyre consumes his body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may notfollow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced thatshe hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, achorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any suchembarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief islargely decided for him before he knows his own name. "But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, as I have alsoasked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems tobe that it is weakening, and yet in no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but it will die hard. A few weeks ago, aParliament of Religions was held in connection with the AllabahadExposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as thepresiding officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" theMaharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting inpart to so specious an argument as the following: "If education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fitting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R's and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Under the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it. It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have followed the same trade for centuries will be a better carpenter than one who is new to the trade--all other advantages being equal. " {233} In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society, " we havethe keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that hissons were "ordained" of Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stopa gully with, " and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, nomatter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system isrotting down in other places and some time or other this "ordained"theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to theruin it has long and richly merited. The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies ofcaste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbowsunder any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars--andthey prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart toreach a place which is but a few hours by train. Consequently thepriests have had to wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as theyhad to get around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to thestrict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which has beenhandled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have seen Brahmins hiredto give water to passersby), but the priests decided that the paymentof water-rates might be regarded as atonement for the possibledefilement, and consequently Hindus now have the advantages of thecity water supply. Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather severely. TheHindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving the boundaries ofIndia, but the folk have progressed from technical evasion of the lawto open violation of its provisions. In Jeypore I saw the half-acre oftrunks and chests which the Maharaja of that province used fortransporting his goods and chattels when he went to attend thecoronation of the King of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of theHindus, claims descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and whenhe was named to go to London, straightway declared that the {234}caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way. Finally, however, he was convinced that by taking all his household with him, his servants, his priests, material for setting up a Hindu temple, asix-months' supply of Ganges water, etc. , he might take enough ofIndia with him to make the trip in safety, and he went. Now many aregoing without any such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to thepriests usually enables them to resume caste relations upon theirreturn. Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu merchant ofAmritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi friend of mine on avoyage from Europe, said just before reaching Bombay: "Well, I shallhave to pay for all this when I get home, and I shall be lucky if Iget off without making a pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places ofour religion. And in any case I shall never let my wife know that Ihave broken caste by eating with foreigners. " My impression is, however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of foreigntravel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of the most eminentHindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. "Caste has kept me from goingabroad until now, " he told me, "but I have made up my mind to let itinterfere no longer. Just as soon as business permits, I shall go toEurope and possibly to America. " Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As in theolden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. In Muttra Ifound a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as sexton of a Christianchurch whose members are sweepers--outcast folk whom as a Hindu hewould have scorned to touch. On the other hand, the acceptance ofChristianity frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a lowcaste, even though it does not give him the privileges of a highercaste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher regardfrom all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad some years ago the sonof a poor sweeper who became a Christian, and was a youth of such finepromise that a way was {235} found for him to attend OxfordUniversity. Returning, he became a teacher in Moradabadad MissionSchool and won such golden opinions from his townspeople that when hedied the whole city--Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike--stoppedfor his funeral. In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly doomed. It is too purely artificial to endure after the people acquire even amodicum of education. Perhaps it was planned originally as a means ofpreserving the racial integrity and political superiority of the Aryaninvaders, but for unnumbered centuries it has been simply a giganticengine of oppression and social injustice. At the present time noblood or social difference separates the great majority of castes fromthe others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so highan authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in thebeginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race andblood. If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent theintermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restrictingthe right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which heis fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the South's lowest ranks, becomes aworld-figure; had he been born in India's lowest caste, he would haveremained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South's effort topreserve race integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd. Bombay, India. {236} XXIV THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Comptonremarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in theircradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; theyare sometimes promised in marriage (contingent upon sex) before theyare born. "You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when anAmerican Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in thenegative, "Why not? Couldn't they get anybody to have you?" "Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow, " is anIndian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman ishard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder if she be a widow. Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men within its reach; of the womenwithin its reach it enslaves all. I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of acivilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept thisstandard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" whoalways carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; andthe attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as asystem. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea thatwoman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "DharmaSastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the natureof woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to drawfrom the right path, not a fool {237} only, but even a sage. " And the"Code of Hindu Laws, " drawn up by order of the Indian Government forthe guidance of judges, declares: "A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on. " "Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar. " In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has beendivided into "the three subjections. " In childhood she must be subjectto her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sonsor--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen. Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of agod. "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands, "says Manu, "no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wifehonors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven. " And a recentHindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (theHindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to worship the gods. " Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on thewomen. The women may no more rise above their caste than the malemembers of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's mostserious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. Nowonder they look old before they are thirty! If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a tripthrough the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enactedby the British Government a few years ago decrees that while themarriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not goto her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it isdoubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi Iattended an elaborate {238} and costly Hindu wedding-feast and wastold that the bride was "eleven or twelve" and would go to herhusband's home (he lives with his father, of course) the followingweek. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he wassixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer withher parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met inIndia was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bridebeing a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. InSecunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby whohad been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was aten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man ofthirty. In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manunamed eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father whodelays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve isregarded as having committed a crime--though it must always beremembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two youngerthan boys and girls in the United States. One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increaseswith the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases areexpensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitementas circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was inAgra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, isthe same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast (if such astrenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindumerchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafeninghullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until itwould have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half thetime Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came twogorgeously clad small boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers;and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums soas {239} to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to themeaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-oldsmall boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and whoought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his wayto be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brotherof the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were notmerely "playing wedding" instead of being principal participants in aserious ceremony! The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couplewho came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no onecould have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friendand I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folkabout us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us evento end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was anice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparentlypleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been athree or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we weretold, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feastsarranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invitedand, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000rupees, or $1633, was none too high. Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or afather with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strainhis credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that amongthe humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages forlife to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-brokeror middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story thatthe bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a youngelephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also bepaid for his indispensable services. {240} Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves herchildhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose faceshe may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life ofa Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yetfrom her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestionof the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not sogalling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating atthe same table with her husband, but must be content with what heleaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the peopleto a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of mygirls are engaged to be married, " Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Homein Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, afterthe Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiorswhile the boys are seated. " Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that herhusband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If shelives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husbandis authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and innearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W. J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife andinsisted that the first should not only support herself but contributethe bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife istantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parentsof her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; andanother cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For nomatter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--hisbride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the verysimple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, andwidows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay ofa Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent tohis native village and caste with power to negotiate. {241} [Illustration: THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE. ] The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the building itself. {242} [Illustration: GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE. ] Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or _bhisti_, is attired more nearly after the manner described in Kipling's poem: "The uniform 'e wore Was nothing much before An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind. For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag Was all the field equipment 'e could find. " {243} "My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry a very younggirl, " he said to the agent, "get an older one therefore--oh, itdoesn't matter if she is twenty-four. " The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received thismessage: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about two of twelveeach?" The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to thetroubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she isresponsible through some evil committed either in this existence or aprevious one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelestindignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereavedand unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife isyet a prattling girl in her mother's home, she can never remarry, butis doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of hisfather and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved;and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation thegods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school Ivisited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, onefive years old and one six. Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped thepractice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's dutyto burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper fora woman after her husband's death, " said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thusburns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35, 000, 000years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preservean inviolable chastity. " This rite of self-immolation was known assuttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the sutteesnumbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stonewith carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where awidow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find thesegruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indianroadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows inIndia is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declarethat they would prefer the suttee. And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that akind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blackenthe skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customsand sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu andMohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (inthe case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windowsof their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strictletter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing goodby stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for hiswomenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about. Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta oneday, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly andlovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just buddinginto maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable, " my friend saidto me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it. " Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless whilethe country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monumentever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, themonarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yetMohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman inalmost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status ofwoman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religionsof the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end byreferring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that Isaw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayasfrom Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the TajMahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon. The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Purein Heart May Enter the Garden of God, " {245} is enough to assure onethat Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace, " whose dust it wasbuilt to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was inform and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictureswhich are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there arerecords to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of theprince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the secondAlexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan, " and we may see inAgra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the ArabianNights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts, "Mumtaz-i-Mahal, " they called her--"Pride of the Palace. " And seventimes Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood--that wayalong which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach andinfinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitterconflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seventimes she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of Deathand brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did notreturn. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrowwhich not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she shouldhave the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So theTaj was built--"in memory of a deathless love, " and in a garden whichis always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue offountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-ladies tending theirprincess, " there stands this dream in marble, "the most exquisitebuilding on earth. " With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in ourthoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Tajitself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in adarkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhoodof the country in which it is so incongruously placed. Madras, India. {246} XXV MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK There are many show places and "points of interest" in India that havea hundred times more attention in the guide books, but there is asimple tomb in Lucknow--it cost no more than many a plain farmer'stombstone in our country burying-places--which impressed me more thananything else I saw excepting only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal andthe view of Benares from the river. It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died so gloriousa death in the great mutiny of 1857. No commander in all India hasplanned more wisely for the defence of the men and women under hiscare; and yet the siege had only begun when he was mortally wounded. He called his successor and his associates to him, and at last, havingomitted no detail of counsel or information that might enable them tocarry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate his ownimmortal epitaph: Here Lies HENRY LAWRENCE Who Tried to Do His Duty May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul. And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime, " mark hislast resting place; and one feels somehow that not even the greatAkbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a worthier monument. {247} There are many places in India to which I should like to give aparagraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and its palaces inwhich the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor worthy of the monarchsin the Arabian Nights--no wonder the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall ofPublic Audience, bears the famous inscription in Persian: "If there be Paradise on earth. It is this, oh, it is this, oh, it is this!" In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the presentcity and the monuments and memorials which commemorate "the oldfar-off unhappy things" of conquered dynasties and romantic epochs, there is also material for many a volume. Then there is Cawnpore with its tragic and sickening memories of theEnglish women and children (with the handful of men) who werebutchered in cold blood by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant; and I wasgreatly interested in meeting in Muttra one of the few living men, aChristianized Brahmin, who as a small boy witnessed that terriblemassacre which for cruelty and heartlessness is almost without aparallel in modern history. In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural triumphsplendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj had not alreadymade it so; the Great Temple in Madura is one of the most impressiveof the strictly Hindu structures in India; in Madras I found a curiousreminder of early missionary activity in the shape of a cathedralwhich is supposed to shelter the remains of the Apostle Thomas; andthe ruins of the once proud and imperial but now utterly desertedcities of Amber and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholyinterest. But all these have been often enough described, and thereare things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to which wecan better give attention. {248} One thing concerning India, which should perhaps have been said in thebeginning, but which has not had attention until now, is the fact thatit is no more a homogeneous country than Europe is--has perhaps, indeed, a greater variety of languages, peoples, and racial andtraditional differences than the European continent. I have alreadycalled attention to the fact that there are 2378 castes. There arealso 40 distinct nationalities or races and 180 languages. For anutterly alien race to govern peacefully such a heterogeneousconglomeration of peoples, representing all told nearly one fifth ofthe population of the whole earth, is naturally one of the mostdifficult administrative feats in history, and Mr. Roosevelt probablydid not give the English too high praise when he declared: "In Indiawe encounter the most colossal example history affords of thesuccessful administration by men of European blood of a thicklypopulated region in another continent. It is the greatest feat of thekind that has been performed since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat than was performed under the RomanEmpire. " I was interested to find that the American-born residents of Indiagive, if anything, even higher praise to British rule than the Britishthemselves. "I regard the English official in India, " onedistinguished American in southern India went so far as to say to me, "as the very highest type of administrative official in the world. More than this, 90 per cent. Of the common people would prefer totrust the justice of the British to that of the Brahmins. " In Delhi anAmerican missionary expressed the opinion that the AmericanGovernment, if in control of India, would not be half so lenient withthe breeders of sedition and anarchy as is the British Government. It should be said, however, that there are now fewer of thesemalcontents, and these few are less influential than at any time forsome years past. In Madras I was very glad to get an interview withMr. Krishnaswami Iyer, one of the most distinguished of the Hinduleaders. {249} [Illustration: BATHING IN THE SACRED GANGES AT BENARES. ] {250} [Illustration: THE BATTLE-SCARRED AND WORLD-FAMOUS RESIDENCY AT LUCKNOW. ] The writer was shown through the historic fortress by William Ireland, one of the few living survivors of the great siege. In Muttra the writer also met Isa Doss, a Hindu (now a Christian preacher) who saw the massacre of the English women and children by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant. {251} "Lord Morley's reforms, " he declared, "have been so extensive and havesatisfied such a large proportion of our people that the extremists nolonger have any considerable following. We no longer feel that it isEngland's intention to keep us in the condition of hopeless helots. The highest organization for the government of the country is theBritish Secretary of State and his council; Lord Morley placed twoIndians there. In India the supreme governmental organization is theGovernor-General and his council; he put an Indian there. In threelarge provinces--Bombay, Madras, and Bengal--Indians have been addedto the executive councils. " "For the first time, too, our people are really an influential factorin the provincial and imperial legislative councils. We have hadrepresentation in these councils, it is true, for fifty years; but itwas not until 1892 that representation became considerable, and eventhen the right of the people to name members was not recognized. So-called constituencies were given authority to make nominations, butthe government retained the right to reject or confirm these atpleasure. " "Now, however, through Lord Morley's and Lord Minto's reforms, thenumber of Indians on these councils has been more than doubled--in thecase of the Imperial Council actually trebled--and the absolute rightgiven the people to elect a large proportion, averaging about 40 percent. Of the total number, without reference to the wishes of thegovernment. In fact, with two fifths of all the members chosen by thepeople and a considerable number of other members chosen frommunicipal boards, chambers of commerce, universities, etc. , we now seethe spectacle of Provincial Councils with non-official members in themajority. In Bombay the non-official element is two thirds of thewhole; and in Madras also the non-official members could defeat thegovernment if they chose to combine and do so. But of course thegreater willingness of the government to cooperate with the people hasbrought {252} about a greater willingness on the part of the people tocooperate with the government. " "The appointment of Indians to the highest offices charged with theresponsibility of government; the increased representation given thepeople on the legislative and executive councils; the recognition ofthe right of the people to elect instead of merely to nominatemembers; and the surrender of majority-control to the non-officialelement--all these are very substantial gains, but the spirit back ofthem is worth more than the reforms themselves. While there is afeeling in some quarters that the government has not gone far enough, the large majority of my educated countrymen regard the advance assufficient for the present and look forward with hope to a furtherexpansion of our powers and privileges. " If I may judge by what I gathered from conversation with Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, I should say that no one has given a moreaccurate and clear-cut statement of the feelings of the Indian peoplethan has Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer in these few terse sentences. "The wealth of the Indies" has been a favorite phrase with romanticwriters from time immemorial; and a book now before me speaks in themost matter-of-course way of "the prosperous and peaceful empire. " Yetthe Indian is really one of the poorest men on earth. The wealth withwhich the Moguls and kings of former ages dazzled the world was wrungfrom the hard hands of peasants who were governed upon the theory thatwhat the king wanted was his, and what he left was theirs. Even thesplendid palaces and magnificent monuments, such as the Taj Mahal, were built largely by forced, unpaid labor. In some cases it is saidthat the monarch did not even deign to furnish food for the men whomhe called away from the support of their families. An ignorant people is always a poor people, and we have already seenthat only 10 per cent. Of the men in India can read or write, and ofthese 10 per cent. The majority are Brahmins. {253} Then, again, thepeople use only the crudest tools and machinery; and a third factor inkeeping them poor is the system of early marriage. When it is a commonthing for a boy of fifteen or sixteen to be the father of a growingfamily, it is easy to see that not much can be laid up for rainy days. Owing to the absence of diversified industries, the crudeness of thetools, the ignorance of the men behind the tools, and the over-crowdedpopulation of folk hard-pressed by poverty, the wages are what anAmerican would call shamefully low. An Englishman who had lived in aninterior jungle-village, five days by bullock-cart from a railway, told me that twenty years ago laborers were paid 2 rupees (64 cents) amonth, boarding themselves, or 4 rupees ($1. 28) a year and grain. Thewages have now advanced, however, to 5 rupees ($1. 60) a month wherethe man boards himself; and for day labor the wages are now five annas(10 cents) instead of two annas (4 cents) twenty years ago. In Madura a well-educated Hindu with whom I was talking rang thefamiliar changes on the "increasing cost of living, " and pointed outthat in four or five years the cost of unskilled labor has increasedfrom eight to twelve cents. "And in some towns, " he declared, lookingat the same time as if he feared I should not believe his story, "they are demanding as much as 8 annas (16 cents) a day!" In Bombay Iwas told that coolies average 16 to 20 cents a day; spinners in jutefactories, $1. 16 a week, weavers, $1. 82. In a great cotton factory Ivisited in Madras, employing about 4000 natives (all males) theaverage wages for eleven and a half hours' work is $3. 84 to $4. 85 amonth. In Ahmedabad, another cotton manufacturing centre, about thesame scale is in force. Miners get 16 to 28 cents a day. Servants, $3. 20 to $3. 84 a month. The women in Calcutta (some of them with their babies tied out tostakes while they worked) whom I saw carrying brick and mortar ontheir heads to the tops of three and four story buildings, get 3 to 4annas a day--6 to 8 cents. In {254} Darjeeling the bowed andtoil-cursed women laden like donkeys, whom I found bringing stone ontheir backs from quarries two or three miles away managed to make 12to 16 cents a day for their bitter toil up steep hills and down, foreight long hours. Women who carried lighter loads of mud, making 50trips averaging 20 miles of travel, earned only 8 cents, as did alsothe women with babies strapped on their backs, who nevertheless toiledas steadily as the others. "As for the men I pay these strong, brawny Bhutia fellows 8 annas (16cents) a day, " the contractor told me, "but those Nepalese who are notso strong get only 5 annas for shovelling earth. " Director of Agriculture Couchman of the Madras Presidency gave me thefollowing as the usual scale of wages for farm work: men 6 to 8 cents;women 4 to 6; children 3 to 5, the laborers boarding themselves. With this Mr. Couchman, whom I have just mentioned, I had a veryinteresting interview in Madras which should shed some light on Indianagriculture. "In Madras Presidency, " he told me, "we cultivate 10, 000, 000 acres ofrice, which is the favorite food of the people. As it is expensivecompared with some cheaper foods, however, the people put 4, 500, 000acres to a sort of sorghum--not the sorghum cultivated for syrup orsugar but for the seed to be used as a grain food--and also grow4, 000, 000 acres of millet the seed of which are used as a grain food. " "Then we grow 2, 000, 000 acres in cotton, but cotton in India is grownonly on black soils. We want some for red soils, and we are alsoseeking to increase the yield and the length of staple in theindigenous varieties. In both these points the Indian cotton nowcompares very badly with the American. Our average yield is only about50 to 100 pounds lint per acre, and the staple is only three quartersto five eights of an inch in length, and not suitable for spinningover 20s in warp. " {255} [Illustration: BURNING THE BODIES OF DEAD HINDUS. ] [Illustration: AN INDIAN CAMEL CART. ] {256} [Illustration: TRAVEL IN INDIA. ] How the author and his friends made the trip from Jeypore to Amber {257} "Of course, with our dense population, land is high and our system offarming expensive. Good irrigated wet land, used chiefly for rice, isworth from $166 to $500 per acre, renting for $20 to $25; dry landsells for $17 to $133 per acre and rents for from $3 to $5. It iscommonly said that a man and his family should make a living on twoacres, and the usual one-man farm consists of 5 to 10 acres of wetland or 30 to 50 of dry. The wet land farmers are generally renters, the others owners. Of course, you have noticed that no horses are usedon the farms, nothing but bullocks; nor do I think that horses will beused for a long time to come. We are making some progress inintroducing better methods of farming. Little, of course, can be donewith bulletins where such a small percentage of the people can read, but demonstration farms have proved quite successful, and thegovernment is much pleased with the results obtained from employingprogressive native farmers to instruct their neighbors. " The advancing price of cotton has proved a matter of hardly lessinterest to India than to America, and for several years the crop hasbeen steadily increasing. The 1910-11 crop (the picking ended in May)was almost 4, 500, 000 bales of 400 pounds each. The necessity forgrowing food crops, however, is so imperative that the cotton acreagecannot be greatly increased--at least not soon. During our Civil War, it will be remembered, India did her uttermost; and Bombay laid thefoundations of her greatness in the high prices then paid for thefleecy staple. Hers is still a great cotton market and down one of hermain streets from morning to night one sees an almost continuous lineof cotton carts, drawn by bullocks and driven by men almost as blackas our negroes in the South. I was very much interested in seeing howmuch better the lint is baled than in America. In the first place thebagging is better--less ragged than that we commonly use--and in thenext place it is held in place by almost twice as many encirclingbands or ties as our bales. {258} All in all, I regret to say good-by to India. Its people are poor; itsindustries primitive; its religion atrocious; its climate generallyoppressive, and yet, after all, there is something fascinating aboutthe country. For one thing, there is a large infusion of Aryan bloodamong the people, and after one has spent several months among thefeatureless faces of the Chinese and Japanese, these Aryan-type facesare strangely attractive. The speech of the people, too, ispicturesque beyond that of almost any other folk, as readers ofKipling have come to know. It is very common for a beggar to call out, "Oh, Protector of the Poor, you are my father and mother, help me, help me. " "I salute you, " said our old guide at the Kutab Minar, speaking in hisnative Hindustani, which my friend interpreted for me. "I know thatyou are the kings of the realm, but I have eaten your salt before, andI am willing to eat it again. " At the end, of course, he wished a tip. "But ask him why I should givehim anything, " I said to my friend. Replying, he mentioned first the number of his children, the blindnessof his wife, and then dropped into the picturesque native plea:"Besides, you are my father and mother, the king of the realm, and ifI may not look to you, to whom shall I look?" "Well, so much lying ought to be worth four annas, " I said, and lefthim happier with the coin. There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would never doto write about India without saying something about lions, tigers, andsnakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come to this topic. I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those incages--though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men and womenbefore they caught him, and whose titanic fury as he lunged againsthis cage-bars, gnashing at the men before him, I shall never forget. Ajackal howled at my room-door in Jeypore one night; between Jeyporeand Bombay monkeys {259} were as thick as rabbits were in the oldcounty where I was reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented mefrom getting interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; enroute to Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods nearwhere he had evidently been caught; and near Khera Kalan I saw wilddeer leaping with their matchless grace across the level plains. "In my district, " one missionary told me, "five or six people a monthare killed by tigers and panthers and even more by snakes. One panthercarried off a man from my kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in thejungle. It is customary when a body is found in this condition forhunters to gather around it and await the return of the tiger orpanther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other way sosure for getting a man-eater. " As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night with a friendin Madura I was shown a place near the house where a deadly cobra hadbeen seen (his bite kills in twenty minutes), while upon retiring Iwas given the comforting assurance that it was not safe to put my footon the floor at night without having a light in the room! As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed to agrassy mound near the roadside and said. "See that grave over there? There's rather an interesting storyconnected with it which I'll tell you. One day about four years agothree snake-charmers came to my house, and as I had an American friendand his son with me, I decided for the boy's sake to have them trytheir art. Only two of the men had flutes, but one went into my gardenand one took up his post on another side of the house, and began toplay. It wasn't long before one called out, 'Cobra!' and sure enoughthere was the snake, which he captured; but on coming back he declaredthat he had been bitten. In fact, he showed a bruise, but I knew thatsnake-charmers counterfeit these bites, so I would not believe him. Then the other charmer also cried {260} 'Cobra!' and captured anothersnake. They showed me the fangs of each serpent, and I gave them fourannas. 1 also offered them four annas more if they would kill theserpents; but of course they would not. 'Man kill cobra, cobra killman, ' is one of their sayings. And so they left, but the man whocaptured the first snake hadn't gone twenty steps before he fell inconvulsions and died. He had really been bitten, and that is his gravewhich you see there. " Madura, India. {261} XXVI WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US But, after all, what may the Orient teach us? The inquiry is apertinent one. Perhaps it is all the more pertinent because, whileacknowledging that the old East may learn much from the young West, weare ordinarily little inclined to look to the Orient for instructionfor ourselves. In fact, we are not inclined to look anywhere. That the germ and promise of all the new Japan was in the oath takenby the young Mikado in 1868, "to seek out knowledge in all the world, "we are ready to admit, and we are also ready to admit the truth ofwhat Dr. Timothy Richard said to me in Peking last November. "Thisrevolutionary progress in China has come about, " he remarked, "becausefor twenty years China has been measuring herself with othercountries. It is a comparative view of the world that is remaking theempire. " In our own case unfortunately, certain natural conditions as well, perhaps, as the excessive "Ego in our Cosmos, " conspire to keep usfrom this corrective "comparative view of the world. " We are nothemmed about by rival world-powers, whose activities we are compelledto study, as is the case with almost every European nation. Barringthe Philippines (and their uncertain value) we have no far-flungbattle line to lure our vision beyond borders. And thus far ourgrowing home markets have been so remunerative that not even commercehas induced as to look outward, with the incidental results of {262}bringing us to realize our defects and remedy them, our strong pointsand emphasize them. For these reasons, I made my trip through the Orient with an increaseddesire to bring home the lessons its long experience should teach us. And now that I come to summarize these lessons I find a single noterunning through all--from beginning to end. And this keynote may begiven in a single word. Conservation: the conservation not only of ournatural resources, but of racial strength and power, of industrialproductiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of finer things ofthe spirit. Taking up first the matter of natural resources, I may mention thathardly anything that I saw on my entire trip burned itself more deeplyinto my memory than the heavy penalty that the Celestial Empire is nowpaying for the neglect of her forests in former years. In the country north of Peking I found river valley after river valleyonce rich and productive but now become an abomination ofdesolation--covered with countless tons of sand and stone brought downfrom the treeless mountainsides. So long as these slopes wereforest-clad, the decaying leaves and humus gave a sponge-likecharacter to the soil upon them, and it gave out the water graduallyto the streams below. Now, however, the peaks are in most cases onlyenormous rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the countryroundabout; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by gorgesthrough which furious torrents rush down immediately after eachrainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock and infertilegully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant oncecultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is nowable to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock inheaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants from the generalsoil-wreck. Especially memorable was the ruin--if one may call it such--of a oncedeep river, its bed now almost filled with {263} sand and rock, that Icrossed on my little Chinese donkey not far from the Nankou Pass andthe Great Wall. Even the splendid arches of a bridge, built to spanits ancient flood, were almost submerged in sand. Instead of theconstant stream of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is ineach rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit behind, and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a desert. So itwas when I saw it last fall; and the old stone bridge, almostsand-covered like an Egyptian ruin, was at once a melancholy monumentto the gladness and fertility of a vanished era, and an argument forforest-conservation that should carry conviction to all who see it. The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou Pass I foundthis argument translated into even more directly human terms. For ofthe scores of awkward-moving camels and quaint-looking Mongolianhorses and donkeys that I saw homeward-bound after their southwardtrip, a great number were carrying little bags of coal--dearly boughtfuel to be sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quantitiesjust large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme weather tokeep the poor peasants from actually freezing. Only in the rarestcases are the Chinese able to use fuel for warming themselves; theycan afford only enough for cooking purposes. Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps--in any case, not faraway--are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation, but which withwise care of the tree-growth would have provided fuel for thousandsand tens of thousands, and at a fraction of the price at which wood orcoal must now be bought. Japan, Korea, and India--the whole Orient in fact--bear witness to theimportance of the forestry messages which Gifford Pinchot and TheodoreRoosevelt have been drumming into our more or less uncaring ears for adecade past. When I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get intothe northern part of the island of Hondo because of the {264} flooddamage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of mine hadbeen endangered in the same disaster. The dams of bamboo-bound rocksthat I found men building near Nikko and Miyanoshita by way of remedymay not amount to much; but there is much hope in the generalprogramme for reforesting the desolated areas, which I found theJapanese Department of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting. Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the Japaneselumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to themorrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reachedSeoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Hanjust outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this wascalled the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as youcan see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearlyfilled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was doneby overflows right here in Seoul. " Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in Occidentallands need to give more earnest heed is the conservation of theindividual wealth of the people. The wastefulness of the averageAmerican is apparent enough from a comparison of conditions here withconditions in Europe--when I came back from my first European trip Iremarked that "Europe would live on what America wastes"--but acomparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient is evenmore to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan we find aglorification of the Japanese character that is unquestionablyoverdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wastefuldisplay of fashion's fevered followers in America and the ideals ofsimple living that distinguished old Japan, there is a rebuke for uswhose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old Japanese sage like BaronShibusawa, who, like Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one ofPlutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention theextravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more {265}than anything else in traveling in our country. "To spend so muchmoney in making a mere railroad station palatial as you have done inWashington, for example, seems to me uneconomic, " he declared. What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with whom I talked, be it remembered, was the wastefulness of expenditures not for genuinecomforts but for fashion and display--the vagaries of idle rich womenwho pay high prices for half-green strawberries in January but arehunting some other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripein May, and who rave over an American Beauty in December but have noeyes for the full-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. It issuch unnatural display that most grates against the "moral duty ofsimplicity of life, " as Eastern sages have taught it. "When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo, " a Japanesenewspaper man said to me, "my father gave me six yen a month, $3American money. I paid for room, light, and food $1. 20 a month; fortuition, 50 cents; for paper, books, etc. , 30 cents; and this left me$1 for pocket money expenditures, including the occasional treat ofeating potatoes with sugar!" In such Spartan simplicity the victors ofMukden, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred. The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb atNikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giantcryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in twomemorable sayings the Japanese conception of the essential immoralityof waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor asbeing itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood ofthe toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow. When virtual dictator of Japan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an oldsilk kakama. "I am doing this, " he said, "not because of the worth ofthe garment in itself, but because of what it needed to produce it. Itis the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I valueit. If we do not think while {266} using these things, of the toil andeffort required to produce them, then our want of consideration putsus on a level with the beasts. " Again, when opposing unnecessarypurchases of costly royal garments, he declared. "When I think of themultitudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel itmy duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in mypossession. " No wonder Hearn declares of this "cosmic emotion of humanity" which welack that "we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it at a later datesimply to save ourselves from extermination. " The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of warand the wastes of excessive military expenditures is another lessonthat one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. While ourAmerican jingoes are using Japan as a more or less effective bogy towork their purposes, peace advocates might perhaps even morelegitimately hold it up as a "horrible example" to point their moralas to how war drains the national revenues and exhausts the nationalwealth. In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 30per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great proportion of thisenormous national expenditure growing out of past wars andpreparations for future wars. No wonder venerable Count Okuma, oncePremier of the Empire, said to me: "I look for internationalarbitration to come not as a matter of sentiment but as a matter ofcold financial necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to buildup the civilization of to-day: it is unthinkable that its advantagesmust be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-productivearmies and navies. That would be simply the Suicide of Civilization. " For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. TimothyRichard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, in thesame conversation from which a fragment was quoted in the beginning ofthis article: {267} "The world is going to be one before you die, sir, " he said as wetalked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. "We areliving in the days of anarchy. Unite the ten leading nations; let alltheir armaments be united into one to enforce the decrees of theSupreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal ofrecalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessarythe maintenance of any very large armaments by these united nations, let them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff dutiesagainst the countries that would perpetuate present conditions. " All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national wealthfrom the wastes of war I regard as one of the most important lessonsthat we may get from the Orient. And yet I would not have the UnitedStates risk entering upon that military unpreparedness which mustprove a fool's paradise until other great nations are brought toaccept the principle of arbitration. The proper programme is toincrease by tenfold--yes, a hundredfold--our personal and nationalefforts for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long asthe community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we cannot secedeand set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it takes two to make aquarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. We must be in terribleearnest about bringing in a new era, and yet we cannot commit thefolly of trying to play the peace game by ourselves. It is notsolitaire. Even more important, whether we consider it from the standpoint of thegeneral welfare or as a matter of national defence, is theconservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether thewars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. Theprizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind. "The first requisite, " said Herbert Spencer, "is a good animal, " andnot even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the goodanimal--the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268}concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring--frombecoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and betweenraces. It has been so from the dawn of history and it will ever be so. And just here we may question whether the growth of wealth and luxuryin the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in allother nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may beargued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children areluxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children aredrudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that inour case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--withthe pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with thehard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very youngis certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even inthis matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according totheir lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensiveenough for the problem to be serious; but in both Japan and India Ifound the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance ofconserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for theprotection of both child and women workers. My recollection is thatthe four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that Ifound at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legalprotection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our Americanstates. For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Orientalas the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms ofself-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, thetide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the UnitedStates have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance amongus than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in riddingChina of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too lateto see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too lateto see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of theYangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as thefollowing concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs: "In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine . .. Or instruments for its use, except by foreign medical practitioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited. " And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily bonded. TheChinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little given to other formsof intemperance, is afire with new enthusiasm for athletics and formilitary training; and he is already so physically adaptable that Ifound him as hardy and untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sunin Singapore as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. Itmade me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" in the endmay not prove to be the Chinese! Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if werealized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle forindustrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force inwarding off some of the evils that now threaten us. In his address tothe German navy, Emperor William recently urged the importance oftemperance because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men, unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that somesuch patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the anti-opiummovement in awakening China. Certainly the Japanese with their almostfanatical love of country are easily influenced by such appeals, andkeep such reasons in mind in the training of their young. "For thesake of the Emperor you must not drink the water from these condemnedwells; for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitaryprecautions--lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the {270}Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the Japanese sanitary officers inthe war with Russia; and when the struggle ended Surgeon-GeneralTakaki was able to boast in his official report: "In the Spanish-American War fourteen men died from disease to one from bullets. We have established a record of four deaths from disease to one from bullets. " In studying these Eastern peoples one is also led inevitably to suchreflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his Romanes lecturesa few months ago. Not only are the Orientals schooled from their youthup to endure hardness like good soldiers, but their natural increasecontrasts strikingly with the steadily decreasing birth-rate of ourFrench and English stocks. In Japan I soon came to remark that itlooked almost as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and fortywithout a baby on her back as it would to see a camel without a hump;and Kipling's saying about the Japanese "four-foot child who walkswith a three-foot child who is holding the hand of a two-foot childwho carries on her back a one-foot child" came promptly to mind. Inview of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the lastfifty years Japan has increased in population, through the birth ratealone, "as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rateplus her enormous immigration. " The racial fertility of the Chinese isalso well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his spirit when hedies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As forIndia, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or awidow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" willrecall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not alsoa mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen. Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new book, "TheConflict of Color"--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment ofracial relations if present tendencies continue--when he asserts thatwhile the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow orbrown double in sixty, and the black in forty. This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racialrelations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualitiesthat have given the white race the leadership thus far? And what maywe do for the conservation of these qualities? There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons for whiteleadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is thetonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white menhave lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism ofthe East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual, our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with theOriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard forthe family and the State. And even more important perhaps is the factthat the white man has had a religion that has taught--even ifsomewhat confusedly at times--that "man is man and master of hisfate, " that he is not a plaything of destiny, but a responsible son ofGod with enormous possibilities for good or evil, whereas the Orientalhas been the victim of benumbing fatalism that has made himindifferent in industry and achievement, though it has given him agreater recklessness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggeratethe influence which our radically different estimate of woman has hadupon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not onlywoman's own direct contributions to progress, but also the indirectinfluence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything, but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal of Englishchivalry-- "To love one maiden only, cleave to her, To worship her by years of noble deeds"-- has been the inspiration of the best that men of our race havewrought, it needs only a glance at our literature to {272} suggest. These things are indeed basic and fundamental and the question oftheir conservation, the preservation of the ideals of the Occident ascompared with those of the Orient, is supremely important not only tous as a nation but to all our human race. But when one comes toconsider only the sheer economic causes of the difference betweenOriental poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible toescape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that it ismainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education and machinery. In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; in theOccident he is producing as much as possible. That is the case in anutshell. With better knowledge and better tools, half the people now engaged infood-production in Asia could produce all the food that the entirerural population now produces, and the other half could be releasedfor manufacturing--thereby doubling the earning power and the spendingpower of the whole population. It is universal education and modern machinery, far more than virginresources, that have made America rich and powerful. Let her makehaste then to learn this final lesson that the Orient teaches--thenecessity of conserving in the fullest degree all the powers that havegiven us industrial supremacy: the power of the trained brain and thecunning hand reinforced by all the magic strength that we may get fromour Briarean "Slave of the Lamp, " modern machinery. We must thoroughlyeducate all our people. Was it not an Oriental prophet who wrote: "Mypeople are destroyed for lack of knowledge?" In China only 1 per cent, of the people can now read and write, and the highest hope of thegovernment is that 5 per cent, may be literate by 1917. In India only5 per cent, can read and write. In Japan for centuries past, theeducation of the common man has also been neglected, but she is nowcompelling every child to go into the schools, {273} and her industrialsystem will doubtless be revolutionized at a result. In no case must we forget that education, if it is to be effective, must train for efficiency, must link itself with life and work, mustbe practical. I had thought of the movement for relating the school toindustry as being confined to America and Europe. But when I landed inJapan I found the educational authorities there as keenly alive to theimportance of the movement as ours in America; in China I found thatthe old classical system of education has been utterly abandonedwithin a decade; in the Philippines it was the boast of theCommissioner of Education that the elementary schools in the islandsgive better training for agriculture and industry than those in theUnited States; and in India the school authorities are earnestly atwork upon the same problem. Knowledge and tools must go hand in hand. If this has been importantheretofore it is doubly important now that we must face in anever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are strongwith the strength that comes from struggle with poverty and hardship, and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets in thecoming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and racialreadjustment. THE END {274} {275} INDEX American commerce abroad, 87-8, 91-2American goods sold lower abroad, 101Ancestor worship, Japan, 7-8Area and population, Manchuria, 78; Philippines, 163; India, 211Artistic Japanese, 40, 48-9 Beans in Manchuria, 75-6Beasts, India's wild, 258-60Benares, 202Boxer troubles, 125-26 Camels in China, 116-17Canton, 142Caste system, 226-35; effect on labor, 229; robber caste, 231; defended, 232Child marriage in India, 237-8Children, Hindu, 223-4China, premonitions of revolution, 93, 102-6. China Sea, 153Chinese hardiness, 187-8Chinese immigration, 114-15Christian vs. Hindu philosophy, 199, 204-5Christian vs. Oriental philosophy, 271Cocoanut planting, 189Confucianism, 103Conservation of forests, 262-4Cooperative credit societies, Japan, 25; India, 222Crops-- Rice, 23-5; cotton, 23, 76, 140, 168, 254-7; India's crops, 219Currency reform in China, 97-98 Diseases and sanitation, 56-64, 72, 135, 170-71Dress, Japanese, 10-11; Indian, 216 Education, 272; Japanese, 17; Chinese, 99, 109-11; Filipino, 168-9; Indian, 210Elephants, Stories about, 193-5Extravagance, American, 264-6 Factory child labor, 268; Japan, 33Family government, 7, 149Famines in India, 218-20 Farm animals, Japan, 22; Manchuria, 74; Philippines, 159Farming-- Japan, 21-28; Manchurian, 76; Chinese, 122, 126-8, 140-41, 177; Philippine, 155-6, 165; Indian, 218-23, 255-7; tools, 23, 190, 218; houses, 26, 127, 156, 212Fatalism, 227-8Filipino character, 172Filipino houses, 156Foot binding. Chinese, 133-84Funeral and burial customs, 77, 124, 128, 144-5, 203-4, 243 Ganges, 203German commercial activity, 190Government, Japanese, 4; Korea's corrupt, 65-7; Chinese, 108Great Wall, 120-21 Himalayas, The, 208-9Hindu gods and goddesses, 200Hindu village described, 212 {276} India, English rule in, 248-52India's diversity of races, 248Individual, repression of, 55-6Industrial efficiency, 37, 40, 141 Japan control in Korea, 67-8; Manchuria, 78-92Japanese city described, 9-11Japanese-Russian War, 70-72; 90-91 Korea, 60-69 Language-- Japanese spoken, 3; written, 9-10; Chinese, 129-30Lawrence, Sir Henry, 246Love of nature, Japanese, 27 Machinery, Asia's refusal to use, 183Manchuria's fertility, 73-4Manila, 154Manufacturing, Japan, 31, 34-47Marriage customs, Japanese, 5-7, 139; Korean, 63; Chinese, 134; Indian, 236-43Missionary work, 59, 69; Japan, 61; Korea, 68; Philippines, 164Moral standards, 134, 136Music, 5 Odd customs, Japan, 3-6, 12; Korean, 65Okuma, Count, interviewed, 44-5; 266Open door in Manchuria, The, 78-92Opium, China's crusade against, 94-6; 108 Parcels post, 101Peking, Glimpses of, 123-25Perry's Expedition, 58Persecution of Christians, 51-2, 125-6Philippine government, 167-70Philippine resources, 165-7Philippine scenery, 155-6"Pidgin English, " 150-51Politeness, Japanese, 12, 13Postal savings banks, 169Poverty of Oriental people, 175, 210, 252Practical education, 99, 273Punishments, Chinese, 145-6 Racial fertility, 7, 11, 270-71Railways, Manchurian, 83-6; Chinese, 139-40Rangoon, 190-91Religions, Shintoism, 49; Buddhism, 49-50, 151, 122-3; Confucianism, 130-31; Hinduism, 198-208, 227Roads, 74; in Philippines, 171Rubber speculation, 188 School term, Japan, 17-18Size of farms, Japan, 21; China, 126Slavery in China, 132Social gradations, Japanese, 16"Squeeze" system in China, 96, 112Story, A Chinese, 146-7Superstitions, 77, 128-9 Taj Mahal described, 244-5Tariff-- Japanese, 30, 44-6; Chinese, 112Taxes in Japan, 30Torrens land titles, 98, 169-70Tropical vegetation, 186 Wages-- Japan, 29, 34, 36, 42, 174; China, 126, 141, 174, 177; Burma, 196; India, 210, 223, 253-4War spirit, 267; Japan, 35, 72, 266; China, 111-12Wedding, A Hindu, 239Welfare work in Japanese factories 31-3Woman's degraded position, 271; Japan, 6, 52-6; India, 236-44Women laborers, 39, 43, 177, 253-4Wu Ting Fang interviewed, 139 Yang-bans, The, 66Yangtze River, 138-9