once rich and productive but now become an abomination of
desolation--covered with countless tons of sand and stone brought down
from the treeless mountainsides. So long as these slopes were
forest-clad, the decaying leaves and humus gave a sponge-like
character to the soil upon them, and it gave out the water gradually
to the streams below. Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only
enormous rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country
roundabout; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by gorges
through which furious torrents rush down immediately after each
rainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock and infertile
gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant once
cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now
able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in
heaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants from the general
soil-wreck.
Especially memorable was the ruin--if one may call it such--of a once
deep river, its bed now almost filled with {263} sand and rock, that I
crossed on my little Chinese donkey not far from the Nankou Pass and
the Great Wall. Even the splendid arches of a bridge, built to span
its ancient flood, were almost submerged in sand. Instead of the
constant stream of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in
each 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 it
was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone bridge, almost
sand-covered like an Egyptian ruin, was at once a melancholy monument
to the gladness and fertility of a vanished era, and an argument for
forest-conservation that should carry conviction to all who see it.
The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou Pass I found
this argument translated into even more directly human terms. For of
the scores of awkward-moving camels and quaint-looking Mongolian
horses and donkeys that I saw homeward-bound after their southward
trip, a great number were carrying little bags of coal--dearly bought
fuel to be sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quantities
just large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme weather to
keep the poor peasants from actually freezing. Only in the rarest
cases are the Chinese able to use fuel for warming themselves; they
can afford only enough for cooking purposes.
Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps--in any case, not far
away--are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation, but which with
wise care of the tree-growth would have provided fuel for thousands
and tens of thousands, and at a fraction of the price at which wood or
coal must now be bought.
Japan, Korea, and India--the whole Orient in fact--bear witness to the
importance of the forestry messages which Gifford Pinchot and Theodore
Roosevelt have been drumming into our more or less uncaring ears for a
decade past. When I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into
the northern part of the island of Hondo because of the {264} flood
damage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of mine had
been endangered in the same disaster. The dams of bamboo-bound rocks
that I found men building near Nikko and Miyanoshita by way of remedy
may not amount to much; but there is much hope in the general
programme for reforesting the desolated areas, which I found the
Japanese Department of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting.
Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the Japanese
lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to the
morrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reached
Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han
just outside the ancient walls, remarked, "When I was young this was
called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you
can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly
filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done
by overflows right here in Seoul."
Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in Occidental
lands need to give more earnest heed is the conservation of the
individual wealth of the people. The wastefulness of the average
American is apparent enough from a comparison of conditions here with
conditions in Europe--when I came back from my first European trip I
remarked that "Europe would live on what America wastes"--but a
comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient is even
more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan we find a
glorification of the Japanese character that is unquestionably
overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful
display of fashion's fevered followers in America and the ideals of
simple living that distinguished old Japan, there is a rebuke for us
whose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old Japanese sage like Baron
Shibusawa, who, like Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one of
Plutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the
extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more {265}
than anything else in traveling in our country. "To spend so much
money in making a mere railroad station palatial as you have done in
Washington, 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 genuine
comforts but for fashion and display--the vagaries of idle rich women
who pay high prices for half-green strawberries in January but are
hunting some other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe
in May, and who rave over an American Beauty in December but have no
eyes for the full-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. It is
such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral duty of
simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it.
"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo," a Japanese
newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me six yen a month, $3
American money. I paid for room, light, and food $1.20 a month; for
tuition, 50 cents; for paper, books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me
$1 for pocket money expenditures, including the occasional treat of
eating potatoes with sugar!" In such Spartan simplicity the victors of
Mukden, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred.
The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at
Nikko situated at the end of a twenty-five mile avenue of giant
cryptomerias, is the Mecca of all tourists, has expressed in two
memorable sayings the Japanese conception of the essential immorality
of waste, of the regard that is due every product of human labor as
being itself in some sense human or at least a throb with the blood of
the toiler who has wrought it and moist with the sweat of his brow.
When virtual dictator of Japan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an old
silk kakama. "I am doing this," he said, "not because of the worth of
the garment in itself, but because of what it needed to produce it. It
is the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I value
it. If we do not think while {266} using these things, of the toil and
effort required to produce them, then our want of consideration puts
us on a level with the beasts." Again, when opposing unnecessary
purchases of costly royal garments, he declared. "When I think of the
multitudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel it
my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my
possession."
No wonder Hearn declares of this "cosmic emotion of humanity" which we
lack that "we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it at a later date
simply to save ourselves from extermination."
The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of war
and the wastes of excessive military expenditures is another lesson
that one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. While our
American jingoes are using Japan as a more or less effective bogy to
work their purposes, peace advocates might perhaps even more
legitimately hold it up as a "horrible example" to point their moral
as to how war drains the national revenues and exhausts the national
wealth. In the Mikado's empire the average citizen to-day must pay 30
per cent, of his total income in taxes, the great proportion of this
enormous national expenditure growing out of past wars and
preparations for future wars. No wonder venerable Count Okuma, once
Premier of the Empire, said to me: "I look for international
arbitration to come not as a matter of sentiment but as a matter of
cold financial necessity. Nations have labored for centuries to build
up the civilization of to-day: it is unthinkable that its advantages
must be largely sacrificed for the support of enormous non-productive
armies and navies. That would be simply the Suicide of Civilization."
For the lesson of all this I may quote the words of Dr. Timothy
Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, in the
same conversation from which a fragment was quoted in the beginning of
this article:
{267}
"The world is going to be one before you die, sir," he said as we
talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. "We are
living in the days of anarchy. Unite the ten leading nations; let all
their armaments be united into one to enforce the decrees of the
Supreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal of
recalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessary
the maintenance of any very large armaments by these united nations,
let them protect themselves by levying discriminating tariff duties
against the countries that would perpetuate present conditions."
All this I endorse. The necessity of preserving the national wealth
from the wastes of war I regard as one of the most important lessons
that we may get from the Orient. And yet I would not have the United
States risk entering upon that military unpreparedness which must
prove a fool's paradise until other great nations are brought to
accept the principle of arbitration. The proper programme is to
increase by tenfold--yes, a hundredfold--our personal and national
efforts for arbitration, at the same time remembering that so long as
the community of nations recognizes the Rule of Force we cannot secede
and set up a reign of peace for ourselves. If it takes two to make a
quarrel, it also takes two to keep a peace. We must be in terrible
earnest about bringing in a new era, and yet we cannot commit the
folly of trying to play the peace game by ourselves. It is not
solitaire.
Even more important, whether we consider it from the standpoint of the
general welfare or as a matter of national defence, is the
conservation of our physical stamina and racial strength. Whether the
wars of the future are commercial or military it doesn't matter. The
prizes will go to the people who are strong of body and clear of mind.
"The first requisite," said Herbert Spencer, "is a good animal," and
not even the success of a Peace Court will ever prevent the good
animal--the power of physical vigor and hardness with its {268}
concomitant qualities of courage, discipline, and daring--from
becoming a deciding factor in the struggle between nations and between
races. 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 luxury
in the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all
other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be
argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are
luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are
drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in
our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--with
the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the
hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young
is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even in
this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according to
their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive
enough for the problem to be serious; but in both Japan and India I
found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of
conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the
protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that
the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I
found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legal
protection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our American
states.
For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Oriental
as the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms of
self-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, the
tide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the United
States have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance among
us than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding
China of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too late
to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too late
to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the
Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the
following 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. The
Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little given to other forms
of intemperance, is afire with new enthusiasm for athletics and for
military training; and he is already so physically adaptable that I
found him as hardy and untiringly energetic beneath an equatorial sun
in Singapore as in the rigorous climate of north-central Manchuria. It
made me wonder if the "meek who are to inherit the earth" in the end
may not prove to be the Chinese!
Perhaps if the United States were a less powerful nation, or if we
realized more fully the keenness of the coming world-struggle for
industrial supremacy, we might find our patriotism a stronger force in
warding off some of the evils that now threaten us. In his address to
the German navy, Emperor William recently urged the importance of
temperance because of the empire's need of strong, clear-headed men,
unweakened by dissipation; and there can be little doubt that some
such patriotic motive has had not a little to do with the anti-opium
movement in awakening China. Certainly the Japanese with their almost
fanatical love of country are easily influenced by such appeals, and
keep such reasons in mind in the training of their young. "For the
sake of the Emperor you must not drink the water from these condemned
wells; for the sake of the Emperor you must observe these sanitary
precautions--lest you start an epidemic and so weaken the {270}
Emperor's fighting forces!" So said the Japanese sanitary officers in
the war with Russia; and when the struggle ended Surgeon-General
Takaki 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 such
reflections as Mr. Roosevelt gave utterance to in his Romanes lectures
a few months ago. Not only are the Orientals schooled from their youth
up to endure hardness like good soldiers, but their natural increase
contrasts strikingly with the steadily decreasing birth-rate of our
French and English stocks. In Japan I soon came to remark that it
looked almost as unnatural to see a woman between twenty and forty
without 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 walks
with a three-foot child who is holding the hand of a two-foot child
who carries on her back a one-foot child" came promptly to mind. In
view of these things it is not surprising to learn that in the last
fifty years Japan has increased in population, through the birth rate
alone, "as fast as the United States has gained from the birth rate
plus her enormous immigration." The racial fertility of the Chinese is
also well known; a Chinaman without sons to worship his spirit when he
dies is not only temporarily discredited but eternally doomed. As for
India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a
widow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will
recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also
a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen.
Mr. Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new book, "The
Conflict of Color"--the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of
racial relations if present tendencies continue--when he asserts that
while the white races double {271} in eighty years, the yellow or
brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.
This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial
relations, leads us very naturally to inquire, What are the qualities
that have given the white race the leadership thus far? And what may
we do for the conservation of these qualities?
There are, of course, certain basic and fundamental reasons for white
leadership that I need not elaborate. For one thing, there is the
tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men
have lived and developed as contrasted with the stifling absolutism of
the East. There is also our emphasis upon the worth of the Individual,
our conception of the sacredness of personality, as compared with the
Oriental lack of concern for the individual in its supreme regard for
the family and the State. And even more important perhaps is the fact
that the white man has had a religion that has taught--even if
somewhat confusedly at times--that "man is man and master of his
fate," that he is not a plaything of destiny, but a responsible son of
God with enormous possibilities for good or evil, whereas the Oriental
has been the victim of benumbing fatalism that has made him
indifferent in industry and achievement, though it has given him a
greater recklessness in war. It would also be difficult to exaggerate
the influence which our radically different estimate of woman has had
upon Western civilization. And here we have to consider not only
woman's own direct contributions to progress, but also the indirect
influence of our regard for woman, not as an inferior and a plaything,
but as a comrade and helpmeet. How frequently the ideal of English
chivalry--
"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 have
wrought, it needs only a glance at our literature to {272} suggest.
These things are indeed basic and fundamental and the question of
their conservation, the preservation of the ideals of the Occident as
compared with those of the Orient, is supremely important not only to
us as a nation but to all our human race. But when one comes to
consider only the sheer economic causes of the difference between
Oriental poverty and Occidental plenty, it seems to me impossible to
escape the conviction, already expressed and elaborated that it is
mainly a matter of tools and knowledge, education and machinery.
In the Orient every man is producing as little as possible; in the
Occident he is producing as much as possible. That is the case in a
nutshell.
With better knowledge and better tools, half the people now engaged in
food-production in Asia could produce all the food that the entire
rural population now produces, and the other half could be released
for manufacturing--thereby doubling the earning power and the spending
power of the whole population.
It is universal education and modern machinery, far more than virgin
resources, that have made America rich and powerful. Let her make
haste then to learn this final lesson that the Orient teaches--the
necessity of conserving in the fullest degree all the powers that have
given us industrial supremacy: the power of the trained brain and the
cunning hand reinforced by all the magic strength that we may get from
our Briarean "Slave of the Lamp," modern machinery. We must thoroughly
educate all our people. Was it not an Oriental prophet who wrote: "My
people 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 the
government is that 5 per cent, may be literate by 1917. In India only
5 per cent, can read and write. In Japan for centuries past, the
education of the common man has also been neglected, but she is now
compelling every child to go into the schools, {273} and her industrial
system 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, must
be practical. I had thought of the movement for relating the school to
industry as being confined to America and Europe. But when I landed in
Japan I found the educational authorities there as keenly alive to the
importance of the movement as ours in America; in China I found that
the old classical system of education has been utterly abandoned
within a decade; in the Philippines it was the boast of the
Commissioner of Education that the elementary schools in the islands
give better training for agriculture and industry than those in the
United States; and in India the school authorities are earnestly at
work upon the same problem.
Knowledge and tools must go hand in hand. If this has been important
heretofore it is doubly important now that we must face in an
ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are strong
with the strength that comes from struggle with poverty and hardship,
and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets in the
coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and racial
readjustment.
THE END
{274}
{275}
INDEX
American commerce abroad, 87-8, 91-2
American goods sold lower abroad, 101
Ancestor worship, Japan, 7-8
Area and population,
Manchuria, 78;
Philippines, 163;
India, 211
Artistic Japanese, 40, 48-9
Beans in Manchuria, 75-6
Beasts, India's wild, 258-60
Benares, 202
Boxer troubles, 125-26
Camels in China, 116-17
Canton, 142
Caste system, 226-35;
effect on labor, 229;
robber caste, 231;
defended, 232
Child marriage in India, 237-8
Children, Hindu, 223-4
China, premonitions of revolution, 93, 102-6.
China Sea, 153
Chinese hardiness, 187-8
Chinese immigration, 114-15
Christian vs. Hindu philosophy, 199, 204-5
Christian vs. Oriental philosophy, 271
Cocoanut planting, 189
Confucianism, 103
Conservation of forests, 262-4
Cooperative credit societies,
Japan, 25;
India, 222
Crops--
Rice, 23-5;
cotton, 23, 76, 140, 168, 254-7;
India's crops, 219
Currency reform in China, 97-98
Diseases and sanitation, 56-64, 72, 135, 170-71
Dress,
Japanese, 10-11;
Indian, 216
Education, 272;
Japanese, 17;
Chinese, 99, 109-11;
Filipino, 168-9;
Indian, 210
Elephants, Stories about, 193-5
Extravagance, American, 264-6
Factory child labor, 268;
Japan, 33
Family government, 7, 149
Famines in India, 218-20
Farm animals,
Japan, 22;
Manchuria, 74;
Philippines, 159
Farming--
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, 212
Fatalism, 227-8
Filipino character, 172
Filipino houses, 156
Foot binding. Chinese, 133-84
Funeral and burial customs, 77, 124, 128, 144-5, 203-4, 243
Ganges, 203
German commercial activity, 190
Government,
Japanese, 4;
Korea's corrupt, 65-7;
Chinese, 108
Great Wall, 120-21
Himalayas, The, 208-9
Hindu gods and goddesses, 200
Hindu village described, 212
{276}
India, English rule in, 248-52
India's diversity of races, 248
Individual, repression of, 55-6
Industrial efficiency, 37, 40, 141
Japan control in
Korea, 67-8;
Manchuria, 78-92
Japanese city described, 9-11
Japanese-Russian War, 70-72; 90-91
Korea, 60-69
Language--
Japanese spoken, 3;
written, 9-10;
Chinese, 129-30
Lawrence, Sir Henry, 246
Love of nature, Japanese, 27
Machinery, Asia's refusal to use, 183
Manchuria's fertility, 73-4
Manila, 154
Manufacturing, Japan, 31, 34-47
Marriage customs,
Japanese, 5-7, 139;
Korean, 63;
Chinese, 134;
Indian, 236-43
Missionary work, 59, 69;
Japan, 61;
Korea, 68;
Philippines, 164
Moral standards, 134, 136
Music, 5
Odd customs,
Japan, 3-6, 12;
Korean, 65
Okuma, Count, interviewed, 44-5; 266
Open door in Manchuria, The, 78-92
Opium, China's crusade against, 94-6; 108