Farmers of Forty Centuries | Page 7

cast for the Christmas
trade.
A low estimate of China's production of raw silk would be 120,000,000
pounds annually, and this with the output of Japan, Korea and a small
area of southern Manchuria, would probably exceed 150,000,000
pounds annually, representing a total value of perhaps $700,000,000,
quite equaling in value the wheat crop of the United States, but
produced on less than one-eighth the area of our wheat fields.
The cultivation of tea in China and Japan is another of the great
industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture if not
above it in the important part it plays in the welfare of the people.

There is little reason to doubt that this industry has its foundation in the
need of something to render boiled water palatable for drinking
purposes. The drinking of boiled water is universally adopted in these
countries as an individually available and thoroughly efficient
safeguard against that class of deadly disease germs which thus far it
has been impossible to exclude from the drinking water of any densely
peopled country.
Judged by the success of the most thorough sanitary measures thus far
instituted, and taking into consideration the inherent difficulties which
must increase enormously with increasing populations, it appears
inevitable that modern methods must ultimately fail in sanitary
efficiency and that absolute safety can be secured only in some manner
having the equivalent effect of boiling drinking water, long ago
adopted by the Mongolian races.
In the year 1907 Japan had 124,482 acres of land in tea plantations,
producing 60,877,975 pounds of cured tea. In China the volume
annually produced is much larger than that of Japan, 40,000,000
pounds going annually to Tibet alone from the Szechwan province and
the direct export to foreign countries was, in 1905, 176,027,255 pounds,
and in 1906 it was 180,271,000, so that their annual export must exceed
200,000,000 pounds with a total annual output more than double this
amount of cured tea.
But above any other factor, and perhaps greater than all of them
combined in contributing to the high maintenance efficiency attained in
these countries must be placed the standard of living to which the
industrial classes have been compelled to adjust themselves, combined
with their remarkable industry and with the most intense economy they
practice along every line of effort and of living.
Almost every foot of land is made to contribute material for food, fuel
or fabric. Everything which can be made edible serves as food for man
or domestic animals. Whatever cannot be eaten or worn is used for fuel.
The wastes of the body, of fuel and of fabric worn beyond other use are
taken back to the field; before doing so they are housed against waste
from weather, compounded with intelligence and forethought and
patiently labored with through one, three or even six months, to bring
them into the most efficient form to serve as manure for the soil or as
feed for the crop. It seems to be a golden rule with these industrial

classes, or if not golden, then an inviolable one, that whenever an extra
hour or day of labor can promise even a little larger return then that
shall be given, and neither a rainy day nor the hottest sunshine shall be
permitted to cancel the obligation or defer its execution.

I
FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN

We left the United States from Seattle for Shanghai, China, sailing by
the northern route, at one P. M. February second, reaching Yokohama
February 19th and Shanghai, March 1st. It was our aim throughout the
journey to keep in close contact with the field and crop problems and to
converse personally, through interpreters or otherwise, with the farmers,
gardeners and fruit growers themselves; and we have taken pains in
many cases to visit the same fields or the same region two, three or
more times at different intervals during the season in order to observe
different phases of the same cultural or fertilization methods as these
changed or varied with the season.
Our first near view of Japan came in the early morning of February
19th when passing some three miles off the point where the Pacific
passenger steamer Dakota was beached and wrecked in broad daylight
without loss of life two years ago. The high rounded hills were clothed
neither in the dense dark forest green of Washington and Vancouver,
left sixteen days before, nor yet in the brilliant emerald such as
Ireland's hills in June fling in unparalleled greeting to passengers
surfeited with the dull grey of the rolling ocean. This lack of strong
forest growth and even of shrubs and heavy herbage on hills covered
with deep soil, neither cultivated nor suffering from serious erosion, yet
surrounded by favorable climatic conditions, was our first great
surprise.
To