Farmers of Forty Centuries | Page 3

per square mile, but only one for almost three of
her people. We were maintaining, in 1900, 250,600,000 poultry, but
only 387 per square mile of cultivated field and yet more than three for
each person. Japan's coarse food transformers in the form of swine,
goats and sheep aggregated but 13 to the square mile and provided but
one of these units for each 180 of her people while in the United States
in 1900 there were being maintained, as transformers of grass and
coarse grain into meat and milk, 95 cattle, 99 sheep and 72 swine per
each square mile of improved farms. In this reckoning each of the cattle
should be counted as the equivalent of perhaps five of the sheep and
swine, for the transforming power of the dairy cow is high. On this
basis we are maintaining at the rate of more than 646 of the Japanese
units per square mile, and more than five of these to every man, woman
and child, instead of one to every 180 of the population, as is the case
in Japan.
Correspondingly accurate statistics are not accessible for China but in
the Shantung province we talked with a farmer having 12 in his family
and who kept one donkey, one cow, both exclusively laboring animals,
and two pigs on 2.5 acres of cultivated land where he grew wheat,
millet, sweet potatoes and beans. Here is a density of population equal
to 3,072 people, 256 donkeys, 256 cattle and 512 swine per square mile.
In another instance where the holding was one and two-thirds acres the
farmer had 10 in his family and was maintaining one donkey and one
pig, giving to this farm land a maintenance capacity of 3,840 people,
384 donkeys and 384 pigs to the square mile, or 240 people, 24
donkeys and 24 pigs to one of our forty-acre farms which our farmers
regard too small for a single family. The average of seven Chinese
holdings which we visited and where we obtained similar data indicates
a maintenance capacity for those lands of 1,783 people, 212 cattle or

donkeys and 399 swine,--1,995 consumers and 399 rough food
transformers per square mile of farm land. These statements for China
represent strictly rural populations. The rural population of the United
States in 1900 was placed at the rate of 61 per square mile of improved
farm land and there were 30 horses and mules. In Japan the rural
population had a density in 1907 of 1,922 per square mile, and of
horses and cattle together 125.
The population of the large island of Chungming in the mouth of the
Yangtse river, having an area of 270 square miles, possessed, according
to the official census of 1902, a density of 3,700 per square mile and
yet there was but one large city on the island, hence the population is
largely rural.
It could not be other than a matter of the highest industrial, educational
and social importance to all nations if there might be brought to them a
full and accurate account of all those conditions which have made it
possible for such dense populations to be maintained so largely upon
the products of Chinese, Korean and Japanese soils. Many of the steps,
phases and practices through which this evolution has passed are
irrevocably buried in the past but such remarkable maintenance
efficiency attained centuries ago and projected into the present with
little apparent decadence merits the most profound study and the time
is fully ripe when it should be made. Living as we are in the morning of
a century of transition from isolated to cosmopolitan national life when
profound readjustments, industrial, educational and social, must result,
such an investigation cannot be made too soon. It is high time for each
nation to study the others and by mutual agreement and co-operative
effort, the results of such studies should become available to all
concerned, made so in the spirit that each should become coordinate
and mutually helpful component factors in the world's progress.
One very appropriate and immensely helpful means for attacking this
problem, and which should prove mutually helpful to citizen and state,
would be for the higher educational institutions of all nations, instead
of exchanging courtesies through their baseball teams, to send select
bodies of their best students under competent leadership and by
international agreement, both east and west, organizing therefrom
investigating bodies each containing components of the eastern and
western civilization and whose purpose it should be to study

specifically set problems. Such a movement well conceived and
directed, manned by the most capable young men, should create an
international acquaintance and spread broadcast a body of important
knowledge which would develop as the young men mature and
contribute immensely toward world peace and world progress. If