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{xvii}

ILLUSTRATIONS

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WHERE HALF THE WORLD IS WAKING UP

Only about one farmer in three has a horse or an ox; in most cases all the work must be done by hand and with crude tools. {23} It is pitiful--or rather I should say, it would be pitiful if they did not appear so contented--to see men breaking the ground not by plowing but by digging with kuwas: long-handled tools with blades perhaps six inches wide and two feet long. At the Agricultural College farm in Komaba I saw about thirty Japanese weeding rice with the kama--a tool much like an old-fashioned sickle except that the blade is straight: the right hand quickly cut the roots of the weed or grass plant and the left hand as quickly pulled it up. With the same sickle-like kamas about thirty other Japanese were cutting and shocking corn: they are at least too advanced to pull fodder, I was interested to notice!

With land so scarce, it is of course necessary to keep something on the ground every growing day from year's end to year's end. Truckers and gardeners raise three crops a year. Rice, as a rule, is not sown as with us, but the plants are transplanted as we transplant cabbage or tomato plants (but so close together, of course, that the ripening fields look as if they had been sown), in order that the farmer may save 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 rice plants are growing large enough to transplant. Riding through the country almost anywhere you will notice the tender young plants of some new crop showing between the rows of some earlier-planted crop now maturing or newly harvested.

The crops in Japan are not very varied. Rice represents half the agricultural values. Next to rice is the silkworm industry, and then barley, wheat, vegetables, soy beans, sweet potatoes, and fruits. There is especial interest in fruit growing just now. Sweet potatoes grow more luxuriantly than in any other country I have ever seen, and are much used for food. I have seen one or two little patches of cotton, but evidently only for home spinning, although I hear it said that in Korea, which has just been formally annexed as Japanese territory, cotton can be profitably grown. A much {24} cultivated plant, 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 as potatoes are.

Every particle of fertility of every kind, as I have said, is religiously saved, and in recent years a considerable demand for commercial fertilizers has sprung up, $8 to $10 worth per acre being a normal application.

So much for the farming country as it has impressed me around Tokyo. A few days ago I saw a somewhat different agricultural area--280 miles of great rice-farming land between Miyanoshita and Kyoto. This country is different from that around Yokahoma and north of Tokyo in that it is so much more rolling and mountainous (majestic Mount Fuji, supreme among peaks, was in sight several hours) and greater efforts are therefore necessary to take care of the soil.

But when such effort is necessary in Japan, it is sure to be made. The population is so dense that every one realizes the essential criminality of soil-waste, of the destruction of the one resource which must support human life as long as the race shall last.

Much of the land is in terraces, or, perhaps I should say, tiers. That is to say, here will be a half-acre or an acre from eighteen inches to six feet higher (all as level as a threshing-floor) than a similar level piece adjoining. While the levelling is helpful in any case for the preservation of fertility and the prevention of washing, the tier system is necessary in many cases on account of the irrigation methods used in rice growing. While the lower plot is flooded for rice, upland crops may be growing on the adjacent elevated acre or half-acre.

The hillside or mountain slopes are also cultivated to the last available foot, and in dry seasons you may even see the men and women carrying buckets uphill to water any suffering crop. In nearly all cases the rows are on a level. Where there was once a slanting hillside the Japanese here dig it down or grade it, and the mountainsides are often enormous steps or {25} stairs; one level terrace after another, each held in place by turf or rock wall.

Rice growing, as it is conducted in Japan, certainly calls for much bitter toil. The land must be broken by hand; into the muddy, miry, water-covered rice fields the farmer-folk must wade, to plant the rice laboriously, plant by plant; then the cultivation and harvesting is also done by hand, and even the threshing, I understand. When we recall that the net result of all this bitter toil is only a bare existence made increasingly hard by the steady rise in land-taxes, and that the Japanese people know practically none of the diversions which give joy and color to American and English country life, it is no wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the country.

True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most communities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (corresponding somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns), by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylock money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per cent, for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for helping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judicious committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here commands 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 farmers would do well to adopt.

It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the farmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day, much after the fashion of the workers on the largest American plantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story houses are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of a story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and no chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the fact that the men put on heavy woolens, and the women pile on cotton padding until they look almost like walking feather beds.

True as are the things that I have said in this article, I fear that my average reader would get a very gloomy and false conception of Japanese farm life if I should stop here. The truth is that, so far as my observation goes, I have seen nothing to indicate that the rural population of Japan is not now as happy as the rural population in America. 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 will really produce greater average happiness than the old rural seclusion and isolation (a doubt, however, which I do not share). "Our farm people," he said, "are hard-working, frugal, honest, cheerful, and while their possessions are small, there is little actual want among them. A greater {27} number than in most other countries are home-owners, and, altogether, they form the backbone of an empire."

Doctor Soyeda went on to give a noteworthy illustration of the affection 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 of the ancestral land," and to say it of a man is almost equivalent to reflecting upon his character or honor! I wish that we might develop in America such a spirit of affection for our farm homes.

I wish, too, that we might develop the Japanese love of the beautiful in nature. No matter how small and cramped the yard about the tiny home here, you are almost sure to find the beauty of shrub and tree and neatly trimmed hedge, and in Tokyo the whole population looks forward with connoisseur-like enthusiasm to the season for wistaria blooms in earliest spring, to the cherry blossom season in April, to lotus-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 give the 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 beautiful trees along a road or street, even if trees without blossoms, would give distinction to any small village or to any farm. Every one who has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the cedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great Shogun Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.

Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day is coming. Their children are going to school, as the {28} older folk could 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 America should 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 broad patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Land of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is providing ten-months schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, how otherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our American farm boys and girls will not be outdistanced in twentieth-century achievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only as hopeless "heathen?"

Tokyo, Japan.

With all the markets of the Orient right at Japan's doors and labor to be 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 labor averaging only 22 cents--it is simply useless for Europe and America to attempt to compete with her in any line she chooses to monopolize. Now that she has recovered from her wars, she will doubtless forge to the front as dramatically as an industrial power as she has already done as a military and maritime power, while other nations, helpless in competition, must simply surrender to the Mikado-land the lion's share of Asiatic trade--the richest prize of twentieth-century commerce.

In some such strain as this prophets of evil among English and American manufacturers have talked for several years. For the last few months, professing to see in Japan's adoption of a high protective tariff partial confirmation of their predictions, they have assumed added authority. Their arguments, too, are so plausible and the facts as to Japan's low wage scale so patent that the world has become acutely interested in the matter. I account myself especially fortunate, therefore, in having been able to spend several weeks under peculiarly favorable circumstances in a first-hand study of Japanese industrial {35} conditions. I have been in great factories and business offices; I have talked with both Japanese and foreign manufacturers who employ laborers by the thousand; I have had the views of the most distinguished financial leaders of the empire as well as of the great captains of industry; I have talked with several men who have served in the Emperor's cabinet, including one who has stood next to the Mikado himself in power; and at the same time I have taken pains to get the views of English and American consular officials, commercial attaches and travelers, and of newspaper men both foreign and native.

And yet after having seen the big factories and the little factory-workers in Tokyo and Osaka, after having listened to the most ambitious of Japan's industrial leaders, I shall leave the country convinced of the folly of the talk that white labor cannot compete with Japanese labor. I believe indeed that the outlook is encouraging for manufacturing in the Mikado's empire, but I do not believe that this development is to be regarded as a menace to English or American industry. Any view to the contrary, it seems to me, must be based upon a radical misconception of conditions as they are.

In the very outset, the assumed parallel between Japan's rise as a military power and her predicted rise as an industrial power should be branded as the groundless non sequitur that it is. "All our present has its roots in the past," as my first Japanese acquaintance said to me, and we ignore fundamental facts when we forget that for centuries unnumbered Japan existed for the soldier, as the rosebush for the blossom. The man of martial courage was the goal of all her striving, the end of all her travail. Society was a military aristocracy, the Samurai the privileged class. And at the same time commerce was despised as dishonorable and industry merely tolerated as a necessary evil. In the Japan of Yalu, Liao-yang, and Mukden we have no modern Minerva springing full-armed from the head of Jove, but rather an unrecognized Ulysses {36} of ancient skill surprising onlookers merely ignorant of the long record of his prowess. Viewed from the same historical 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 such advantages as many of our people have been led to believe. In America it has long been my conviction that cheap labor is never cheap; that so-called "cheap labor" is a curse to any community--not because it is cheap but because it is inefficient. The so-called cheap negro labor in the South, for example, I have come to regard as perhaps the dearest on the continent. Here in Japan, however, I was quite prepared to find that this theory would not hold good. By reason of conditions in a primitive stage of industrial organization, I thought that I might find cheap labor with all the advantages, in so far as there are any, and few of the disadvantages, encountered elsewhere. But it is not so. An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investigations have convinced me that the remark is as applicable 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 the Department of Finance, indicate a daily wage (American money) of 40 cents for carpenters, 31-1/2 cents for shoemakers, 34 cents for blacksmiths, 25-1/2 cents for compositors, 19-1/2 cents for male farm laborers, and 22 cents for male weavers, and 12 cents for female. In the cotton factories I visited, those of the better sort, the wages run from 5 cents a day for the youngest children to 25 cents a day for good women workers. In a mousselaine mill I was told that the average wages were 22-1/2 cents, ranging from 10 cents to a maximum of 50 cents for the most skilled employees. And this, be it remembered, was {37} for eleven hours' work and in a factory requiring a higher grade of efficiency than the average.

But in spite of the fact that such figures as these were well known to him, it was my host in the first Japanese house to which I was invited --one of the Emperor's privy councillors, and a man of much travel and culture who had studied commercial conditions at home and abroad rather profoundly--who expressed the conclusion that Japanese factory labor when reduced to terms of efficiency is not greatly cheaper than European, an opinion which has since grown rather trite in view of the number of times that I have heard it. "In the old handicrafts and family industries to which our people have been accustomed," my host declared, "we can beat the world, but the moment we turn to modern industrial machinery on a large scale the newness of our endeavor tells against us in a hundred hindering ways. Numbers of times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, our political and military achievements are but the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient generations 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 this distinguished Japanese whose name, if I should mention it, would be familiar to many in America and England. In the Tokyo branch of the Kanegafuchi Spinning Company (a company which controls 300,000 spindles) the director, speaking from the experience of one of the greatest and best conducted industries in Japan, declared: "Your skilled factory laborers in America or England will work four sides of a ring frame; our unskilled laborer may work only one." A young Englishman in another factory declared: "It takes five men here to do work that I and my mate would take care of at home." An American vice-consul told me that it takes three or four times as much Japanese as foreign labor to look after an equal number of looms. A Japanese expert just back from Europe declared recently that "Lancashire labor is more expensive than ours, but really cheaper." Similarly the Tokyo correspondent of the London Times summing up an eight-column review of Japanese industry, observed: "If we go to the bottom of the question and consider what is being paid as wages and what is being obtained as the product of labor in Japan, we may find that Japanese labor is not cheaper than in other countries."

{38}

My own conviction is that in actual output the Japanese labor is somewhat cheaper than American or European labor, but not greatly so, and that even this margin of excess in comparative cheapness represents mainly a blood-tax on the lives and energies of the Japanese people, the result of having no legislation to restrain the ruinous overwork of women and little children--a grievous debt which the nation must pay at the expense of its own stamina and which the manufacturers must also pay in part through the failure to develop experienced and able-bodied laborers. The latest "Japan Year Book" expresses the view that "in per capita output two or three skilled Japanese workers correspond to one foreign," but under present conditions the difficulty here is to find the skilled workers at all. When Mr. Oka, of the Department of Commerce and Agriculture, told me that the average Japanese factory hand remains in the business less than two years, I was astonished, but inquiry from original sources confirmed the view. With the best system of welfare work in the empire, the Kanegafuchi Company keeps its laborers two and a half {39} to three years, but in a mill in Osaka of the better sort, employing 2500 hands, I was told that only 20 per cent, had been at work as long as three years. Under such conditions, the majority of the operatives at any time must be in a stage of deplorable inexperience, and it is no wonder that the "Year Book" just quoted goes on to confess that "one serious defect of the production is lack of uniformity in quality--attributed to unskilled labor and overwork of machinery."

The explanation of this situation, of course, is largely to be found in the fact that Japanese industries are women's industries--there being seven times as large a proportion of women to men, the Department of Commerce informs me, as in European and American manufacturing. These women workers are mostly from the country. Their purpose is only to work two or three years before getting married, and thousands of them, called home to marry the husbands their parents have selected, or else giving way physically under strain, quit work before their contracts expire. "We have almost no factory laborers who look on the work as a life business," was an expression often repeated to me.

Not only in the mills, but in numerous other lines of work, have I seen illustrations of the primitive stage of Japan's industrial efficiency. As a concrete illustration I wish I might pass to each reader the box of Kobe-made matches on the table before me (for match-making of this sort is an important industry here, as well as the sort conducted through matrimonial middlemen without waiting for the aid or consent of either of the parties involved). I have never in my life seen such a box of matches in America. Not in a hundred boxes at home would you find so many splinters without heads, so many defective matches. And in turning out the boxes themselves, I am told that it takes five or six hands to equal the product of one skilled foreign laborer. "It takes two or three Japanese servants to do the work of one white servant" is the general verdict of housekeepers, while it has also been brought to my {40} attention that in shops two or three clerks are required to do the work of one at home. A Japanese newspaper man (his paper is printed in English) tells me that linotype compositors set only half as many ems per hour as in America. In short, the general verdict as I have found it is indicated by what I have written, and the most enthusiastic advocate of Japanese cheap labor, the captain of the steamer on which I came from America, rather spoiled his enthusiasm for getting his ship coaled at Nagasaki for 7-1/2 cents a ton, by acknowledging that if it rained he should have to keep his ship waiting a day to get sufficient hands.

Moreover, while the Japanese factory workers are forced into longer hours than labor anywhere else--eleven hours at night this week, eleven hours in the day next week--I am convinced that the people as a whole are more than ordinarily averse to steady, hard, uninterrupted toil. "We have a streak of the Malay in us," as a Japanese professor said to me, "and we like to idle now and then. The truth is our people are not workers; they are artists, and artists must not be hurried." Certainly in the hurried production of the factory the Japanese artistic taste seems to break down almost beyond redemption, and the people seem unable to carry their habits of neatness and carefulness into the new environment of European machinery. "Take the Tokyo street cars," said an ex-cabinet officer to me; "the wheels are seldom or never cleaned or oiled, and are half eaten by rust." The railroads are but poorly kept up; the telephones exhaust your patience; while in the case of telegraphing, your exasperation is likely to lose itself in amazed amusement. A few days ago, for example, I sent a telegram from Osaka to Kobe, took my rickshaw across town, waited for a slow train to start, and then reached Kobe and the street destination of my message before it did.

In considering the failure of Japanese labor to bring forth a satisfactory output, however, one thing more should be said, and that is that we should not put the blame wholly on the {41} wage-earner. Not a small proportion of the responsibility lies at the door of inexpert managers. The family system of production has not only been the rule for generations with that minority of the people not engaged in farming, but it is still the dominant type of Japanese industry, and it will take time even to provide opportunities for training a sufficient corps of superintendents in the larger lines of production.

In further illustration of my argument that cheap labor is not proving so abnormally profitable, I may question whether Japanese factories have paid as good dividends, in proportion to prevailing rates of interest on money, as factories in England and America. Baron Shibusawa, the dean of Japanese financiers and one of the pioneers in cotton manufacturing, is my authority for the statement that 12 per cent, would be a rather high estimate of the average rate of dividend, while figures furnished by the Department of Finance show that for ten years the average rate of interest on loans has been 11.25 per cent.

The fact that Western ideas as to Japan's recent industrial advance have been greatly exaggerated may also be demonstrated just here. While the latest government figures show that in twelve years the number of female factory operatives increased from 261,218 to 400,925 and male factory operatives from 173,614 to 248,251, it is plain that a manufacturing population of 649,000 in a country of 50,000,000 souls is small, and the actual progress has not been so great as the relative figures would indicate. Moreover, many so-called "factories" employ less than ten persons and would not be called factories at all in England or America. The absence of iron deposits is a great handicap, the one steel foundry being operated by the government at a heavy loss, and in cotton manufacturing, where "cheap labor" is supposed to be most advantageous, no very remarkable advance has been made in the last decade. From 1899 to 1909 English manufacturers so increased their trade that in the latter year they imported $222 worth of raw {42} cotton for every $100 worth imported ten years before, while Japan in 1909 imported only $177 worth for each $100 worth a decade previous--though of course she made this cotton into higher grade products.

It must also be remembered that the wages of labor in Japan are steadily increasing and will continue to increase. More significant than the fact of the low cost per day, to which I have already given attention, is the fact that these wages represent an average increase per trade of 40 per cent, above the wages eight years previous. The new 1910 "Financial and Economic Annual" shows the rate of wages of forty-six classes of labor for a period of eight years. For not one line of labor is a decrease of wages shown, and for only two an increase of less than 30 per cent.; sixteen show increases between 30 and 40 per cent., seventeen between 40 and 50 per cent., eight from 50 to 60 per cent., three from 60 to 70 per cent., while significantly enough the greatest increase, 81 per cent., is for female servants, a fact largely due to factory competition. In Osaka the British vice-consul gave me the figures for the latest three-year period for which figures have been published, indicating in these thirty-six months a 30 per cent, gain in the wages of men in the factories and a 25 per cent, gain in the wages of women.

Of no small significance in any study of Japanese industry must also be the fact that there are in Japan proper a full half million fewer women than men (1910 figures: men, 25,639,581; women, 25,112,338)--a condition the reverse of that obtaining in almost every other country. Now the young Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of having descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early marriages for their sons. And what with this competition for {43} wives, the undiminished demand for female servants, and a half million fewer women than men to draw from, the outlook for any great expansion of manufacturing based on woman labor is not very bright. Moreover, with Mrs. Housekeeper increasing her frantic bids for servants 81 per cent, in eight years, and still mourning that they are not to be had, it is plain that the manufacturer has serious competition from this quarter, to say nothing of the further fact that the Japanese girls are for the first time becoming well educated and are therefore likely to be in steadily increasing demand as office-workers. Upon this general subject the head of one of Osaka's leading factories said to me: "I am now employing 2500 women, but if I wished to enlarge my mill at once and employ 5000, it would be impossible for me to get the labor, though I might increase to this figure 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 manufacturers if they are to continue to get labor. The Kobe Chronicle quotes Mr. Kudota, of the Sanitary Bureau, as saying that "most of the women workers are compelled to leave the factories on account of their constitutions being wrecked" after two or three years of night work, consumption numbering its victims among them by the thousands. Either the mills must give better food and lodging than they now provide or else they must pay higher wages directly which will enable the laborers to make better provision for themselves.

Yet another reason why wages must continue to advance is the steady increase in cost of living, due partly to the higher standard developed through education and contact with Western civilization, but perhaps even more largely to the fearful burden of taxation under which the people are staggering. A usual estimate of the tax rate is 30 per cent, of one's income, while Mr. Wakatsuki, late Japanese Financial Commissioner to London, is quoted as authority for the statement {44} that the people now pay in direct and indirect taxes, 35 per cent, of their incomes. And I doubt whether even this estimate includes the increased amounts that citizens are forced to pay for salt and tobacco as a result of the government monopoly in these products, or the greatly increased prices of sugar resulting from the government's paternalistic efforts to guarantee prosperity to sugar manufacturers in Formosa.

Higher still, and higher far than anything the nation has ever yet known, must go the cost of living under the new tariff law. From a British textile representative I learned the other day that a grade of English woollens largely used by the Japanese for underwear will cost over one third more under the new tariff, while the increased duty on certain other lines of goods is indicated by the table herewith:

PERCENTAGE OF DUTY TO COST OF ARTICLE

Neither a nation nor an individual can lift itself by its bootstraps. The majority of the thoughtful people in the empire seem to me to realize even now that through the new tariff Japanese industry, as a whole, is likely to lose much more by lessened ability to compete in foreign markets than it will gain by shackled competition in the home markets. Farseeing old Count Okuma, once Premier, and one of the empire's Elder Statesmen, seemed to realize this more fully than any other man I have seen. "Within two or three years from the time the new law goes into force," he declared, "I am {45} confident that its injurious effects will be so apparent that the people will force its repeal. With our heavy taxes the margin of wages left for comfort is already small, and with the cost of living further increased by the new tariff, wages must inevitably advance. This will increase the cost of our manufactured products, now exported mostly to China, India, and other countries requiring cheap or low-grade goods, and where we must face the competition of the foremost industrial nations of the world. As our cost of production increases, our competition with Europe will become steadily more difficult and a decrease in our exports will surely follow. It is folly for one small island to try to produce everything it needs. The tariff on iron, for example, can only hamper every new industry by increasing the cost of machinery, and must especially hinder navigation and shipbuilding, in which we have made such progress." Not a few of the country's foremost vernacular dailies are as outspoken as Count Okuma on this point, and the Kobe Chronicle declares that, with diminished exports to Japan, "British manufacturers will find compensation in the lessened ability of the Japanese to compete in China; and Japan will find that she has raised prices against herself and damaged her own efficiency."

That such will be the net result of Japan's new policy seems to me to admit of no question. Unfortunately, certain special lines of British and American manufacture may suffer, but, on the whole, what the white man's trade loses in Japan will be recompensed for in China and India. Even after Japan's adoption of the moderately protective tariff of 1899 her export of yarns to China--in the much discussed "market right at her doors"--dropped from a product of 340,000 bales to a recent average of 250,000 bales. From 1899 to 1908, according to the latest published government figures, the number of employees in Japanese cotton factories increased only 240--one third of 1 per cent.--or from 73,985 to 74,225, to be exact, while I have already alluded to the figures showing the {46} comparative English and Japanese imports of raw cotton from 1890 to 1909 as furnished me by Mr. Robert Young, of Kobe, Japan in this period going from $30,000,000 to $54,000,000, or 77 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, of course, was largely, and in Japan's case almost wholly, due to the increased price of the cotton itself, but the figures are none the less useful for the purposes of comparison.

In the frequent attempts of the Japanese Government to stimulate special industries by subsidies and special privileges there is, it seems to me, equally as little danger to the trade of Europe and America in general (though here, too, special industries may suffer now and then), because Japan is in this way simply handicapping herself for effective industrial growth. Just at this writing we have an illustration in the case of the Formosan sugar subsidy which seems to have developed into a veritable Frankenstein; or, to use a homelier figure, the government seems to be in the position of the man who had the bear by the tail, with equal danger in holding on or letting go. Already, as a result of the system of subsidies, bounties and special privileges, individual initiative has been discouraged, a dangerous and corrupting alliance of government with business developed, public morals debased (as was strikingly brought out in the Dai Nippon sugar scandal), 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 of looking to the government for assistance in all and everything, oblivious of independent enterprise . . . has now grown to the chronic stage, and unless it is cured the health and vitality of the nation will ultimately be sapped and undermined."

As for increasing complaints of "low commercial morality" brought against Japanese merchants, that is not a matter of concern in this discussion, except in so far as it may prove a form of Japanese commercial suicide. But to one who holds {47} the view, as I do, that the community of nations is enriched by every worthy industrial and moral advance on the part of any nation, it is gratifying to find the general alarm over the present undoubtedly serious conditions, and it is to be hoped that the efforts of the authorities will result in an early change to better methods.

Such is a brief review of the salient features of present-day Japanese industry, and in no point do I find any material menace to the general well-being of American and European trade. It is my opinion that the Japanese will steadily develop industrial efficiency, but that in the future no more than in the present will Japan menace European and American industry (unless she is permitted to take unfair advantages in Manchuria, Korea, etc.), for just in proportion as efficiency increases, just in the same proportion, broadly speaking, wages and standards of living will advance. The three--efficiency, wages, cost of living--seem destined to go hand in hand, and this has certainly been the experience thus far. And whatever loss we may suffer by reason of Japan gradually supplanting us in certain cruder forms of production should be abundantly compensated for in the better market for our own higher-grade goods that we shall find among a people of increasing wealth and steadily advancing standards of living.

In any fair contest for the world's trade there seems little reason to fear any disastrous competition from Japan. Perhaps she has been allowed to make the contest unfair in Manchuria or elsewhere, but that, as Mr. Kipling would say, is another story.

Kobe, Japan.

This is my last letter from Japan, and my next letter will be from Korea--if the cholera doesn't get me. It has been raging in Osaka and in Kobe, both of which cities I have thought it necessary to visit in order to get first-hand information about industrial conditions. Ordinarily, the cholera victim lives only a few hours. The first day's record here in Kobe, I believe, showed six cases and five deaths. Gradually, however, cholera is being stamped out, just as we have eradicated yellow fever in Cuba and the South, and just as we shall eventually come to recognize the prevalence of typhoid in any town as a disgrace--an evidence of primitive and uncivilized {57} sanitary conditions. A friend of mine who came to Osaka in 1879 tells me that there were 10,000 cholera victims in that one city that year--the yellow flag on almost every street, and all through the night the sound of men hurrying past with new victims for the hospitals or with new corpses for the burning. In the thirteen years 1878-91 more than 313,000 Japanese died of the scourge.

I regret to say good-by to Japan. It is a tremendously interesting country. For just as America represents the ultimate type of Occidental civilization, so does Japan represent the ultimate type of Oriental civilization.

More than this, it is here that the full tides of Oriental and Occidental life are now meeting for the first time in human history. For centuries uncounted the yellow man advanced across the plains and peaks of Asia, finding at last in these outlying islands his farthermost outpost, and so tarried here in the Farthest East, "the Land 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:

But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the white man, 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 that hemmed him in and found a new continent to people. Westward still the course of empire then continued until in our time the white man planted his civilization on the Pacific Coast.

There was no more West.

Then it was, as if in obedience to a cosmic, racial instinct deeper than reason, the white man sent his messengers across the new-found ocean and awakened the Sleepy World {58} of the Yellow Man by the booming of Perry's guns off Yokahoma.

The Kingdom of Heaven, we are told, cometh not with observation, and the deeper meaning of the greatest events in human history may often escape the attention of contemporaries. My father and yours, perhaps, heard little and thought less of Perry's exploit, and yet it marked not merely a new historical epoch, but a new act in the long drama of human evolution itself. Curious, too, it is to observe how the strange world-destiny that shapes our ends gave to it a stage-setting in keeping with its dramatic significance. Not to England, nor to any other great naval and commercial Power of the time, but to the young United States--the nation that had found the ultimate West--came the unlikely but strangely fitting task of opening the Farthest East to Western trade and thought.

When at last the world has grown old and nations and empires not yet formed shall themselves have gone the mortal way common alike to human creatures and human creations, I think the far historian will record few events either more dramatic or more pregnant with undreamed-of meaning than Perry's entrance into Japanese waters just five years after the discovery of gold in California had ended the world-old drama of our westward march.

So to-day, as I have said, the full tides of Orient and Occident have rushed together in Japan, and it is not merely a land of curious customs and strange phenomena, but a land in which the contrasts exist side by side, and most interesting of all, a land of strangely mingling social and industrial currents. East and West have met, and we wait to see what forces in each shall prevail when the shock of their 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 European dress jostles his brother in native garb, as streams of men in coats and trousers and shoes mingle with men wearing kimonas, hikamas, and getas, so in the minds of the people the teachings of modern science and Confucian classic meet; the faith of the Christian grapples with the faith of the Buddhist; the masterful aspirations of Western civilization surge against the old placidity of the East.

What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to build 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 of Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident. Many others, like the iconoclasts of the French Revolution, would sweep away all religion, but they will find that they are fighting against an ineradicable instinct of human nature, the innate craving of the divine in man.

In my own brief stay in Japan I have seen enough to convince me of the truth of both the foregoing observations. I confess that I came to the country with a distinct doubt as to the wisdom of stressing mission work here--came thinking the field less promising then elsewhere. But I go away with no such feeling. What I have seen and heard has dispelled my doubts. Speaking simply as a journalist and a student of social and industrial conditions, I believe that to-day Japan needs nothing more than Christian missionaries--men who are willing to forget dogma and tradition and creedal differences in emphasizing the fundamental teachings of and who have education, sympathy, and vision to fit them for the stupendous task of helping mold a new and composite type of human civilization, a type which may ultimately make conquest of the whole Oriental half of our human race.

Kobe, Japan.

So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles of snowy trenches.

I have heard all sorts of war traditions in Mukden: that at one time the Japanese thought themselves beaten in the battle and had ordered a retreat, when, a Russian force giving way, they turned quickly to press the advantage and snatched victory from what they had thought was ruin. There are many stories, too, of the inefficiency of the Russian officers, stories made all the more probable in the light of the Russian Commander Kuropatkin's memoirs to the same general effect. "Why, the English would put one of their admirals against the wall and shoot him like a common seaman for such gross neglect of duty as went entirely unpunished among Russian generals," was one man's comment as he talked with me. "The Rooshians were good fighters--fought 'and to 'and with the butt of their muskets--and if they 'ad 'ad good commanders the Japs would never have won," said an Englishman who had seen service in India. A railway man also told me of the debauchery and profligacy of the Russian officers, disreputable women travelling regularly with them to and fro, drunkenness being also common. About the same charges were reported to me by a Japanese officer. In fact, it is said that the Japanese contrived to get a very considerable quantity of champagne to the Russian headquarters one day, and the next day made a slaughter-pen of the Russian camp while the Cossack commanders were still hopelessly befuddled from too much drinking!

The truth is that the Japanese, from camp-followers to commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not. From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced Japan to cede 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 bided her time as deliberately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in Japan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced Japan {72} to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tremendous interest in the military drills in all the Japanese schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: "We are getting ready to lick Russia."

It should also be observed that when the war came on the Japanese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as battleships and army drill and munitions of war were concerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper medical attendance.

"When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equipment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first Japanese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to the best of Japanese surgeons and cared for in the most approved of modern military hospitals." So said a frank Scotchman to me yesterday, and in the light of the official statistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to America. When the war with Russia ended, Baron Takaki, Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, boasted that whereas in the Spanish-America War "fourteen men died from preventable diseases to one man killed on the field of battle," the Japanese had lost only one man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the Japanese, as usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the white man's inventions and getting as much or more--more in this case--out of them than the white man himself.

The Japanese record, showing in such amazing fashion what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general public health activities at home. Every State should spend five times as much for this public health work as at present.

In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces {73} of the 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's bones--are seen on fields where contending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the Japanese railroad monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territory on the coast, Japan has obtained power bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control.

Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness of Japan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources have only been touched.

A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, in charge of the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a Minnesota man, I believe), and found him enthusiastic over his corn crop just harvested. "I have been so surprised by the growth of corn this year," he declared, "that I could hardly believe my own eyes. I have never seen finer seed ears anywhere." Among American states, only Iowa, he declares, is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section could beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could be said of the northern country but for its colder climate. About Harbin, where the South Manchuria Railway joins the Trans-Siberian Line, one may see cuts thirty feet deep and the soil rich to the bottom. Most of Manchuria is level--strikingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat Belt--and the {74} soil is of wind-drift origin "like a great snow-blanket," very easily tilled. The plowing is done with a steel-tipped wooden beam such as I have already written of seeing in Korea, and only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the fat harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods.

It has been a positive joy to me in traveling through the country here in 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 pull fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses almost surrounded by well-stuffed barns, and corn cribs packed until the overflowing yellow ears spill out the ampler cracks. The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain being used for food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and running over with

"The garnered largess of the fruitful year"

not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchurian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses.

One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and practically no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike Japan, however, Manchuria does have its farm vehicles: great heavy two-wheeled carts drawn by from two to eight horses, donkeys, and asses. Sometimes there is a big horse or two, then one or two donkeys half the size of the horses, and a couple of little asses or burros half the size of the donkeys--and maybe a bull thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole Blamed Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in China are ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America or anywhere else to get any better by letting them alone three thousand years. The Chinese have tried it, and it doesn't work. The October roads are so bad in many places that if {75} the carts had four wheels instead of two not even the combined aggregation in the team could pull them out of the mud. A little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay so for five or six months--and then the Manchurian farmers go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the larger markets--sometimes two or three hundred miles from home.

The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, the foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, the symbol of its wealth, is the bean--the common soja, or soy bean as we know it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and what cotton is to our Southern States, that the bean is to Manchuria: supreme among products. There is no class of people not affected by the prosperity or the adversity of his Majesty the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies one meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not only "know beans," but can talk beans too. If the present rate of progress is maintained, it will not be long until no one will enumerate the world's great crops--wheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc.--without including beans. The first beans were shipped to Europe only about four years ago, and the London Times correspondent estimates that next year Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very great measure the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil being extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cottonseed oil, while the residue called "bean cake" is about the equivalent of cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. Parker says, to cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock feed, but is now chiefly used for fertilizing purposes. My first acquaintance with the bean cake was in Japan, where I found it enriching the earth for vegetable-growing, Japan importing an average of half a million tons a year to put under its crops. Manchuria also uses not a little for the same purpose. The more intelligent Manchurian farmers, however, are learning 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 American farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producer without first getting its other value as a meat-producer.

I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me to believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongolia alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly a great grass plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr. Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges and brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness. This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.

The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high as the little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is the general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through the experiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of level cultivation. He also wishes to introduce better plows. "The truth is," he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make enough to subsist on."

In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and in Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the climate here is obviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that the Japanese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea.

This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete {77} without some mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields--thick-dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved and twisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. They contain not vegetables, however, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is a 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, except the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they are about three or four feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famous sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave proper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent gates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acre in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high and surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up about twenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superstition as to the existence of a sort of devil or "fung-shui" in the ground, and to disturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more "woes unnumbered" than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to exist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs, and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to run twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it.

Mukden, Manchuria.

Concerning Manchuria and all the issues involved in the present struggle for its possession, all kinds of misconceptions are rife. That it is a small country; that it is an infertile country; that it must be already well developed in point of population and consumption of goods: this is only the ABC of Manchurian misinformation.

In answer, it need only be said that Manchuria is larger than all our New England, Middle, and South Atlantic States from Maine to Georgia inclusive, and that into its borders all of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales), together with all of the German Empire, could be crowded, and still leave a gap so big that Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland would lack thousands of square miles of filling it: while as to population Manchuria has only 18,000,000 people as compared with {79} 118,000,000 in the European countries just mentioned. And after having travelled in all of them as well as in Manchuria I should say that the Asiatic area is the more fertile.

The possibilities of such an empire situated in the fairest portion of Asia's temperate zone are simply illimitable. No one who has been through the fruitful lands of the American Corn Belt and Wheat Belt and goes later through Manchuria can fail to note the similarity between them in physical appearance and natural resources, and it may well be that what the settlement of the West has meant in America these last fifty years the development of Manchuria will mean in Asia these next fifty.

In itself the sheer creation of such a country--larger far than Great Britain and Germany, as rich as Illinois and Manitoba--would appeal at once to American commerce and industry, but you have only begun to grasp the significance of Manchuria when you compare it to the creation of such an empire in some favored portion of the sea.

Manchuria means all this, but it means more: Its possession would give such vastly increased influence to any Power possessing it as to make that Power a menace to the commercial rights of all other nations in Asia--rights of almost vital importance both to Europe and America. England and Germany, of course, are already dependent upon foreign trade for their prosperity, and President McKinley was never so seerlike as when, in his last speech at Buffalo, he reminded the American people that their own future greatness depends upon the development of trade beyond the seas. And it was to Asia, the greatest of continents, and especially to China, the greatest of countries on this greatest of continents, that he looked, as we must also look to-day. In Secretary Hay's memorial address on McKinley, which I had the good fortune to hear, the dead President's determined efforts to maintain the ancient integrity of the Dragon Empire were fittingly mentioned as one of his most distinguished services to his people and his time. {80} To keep the immense area of China from spoliation by other nations and to preserve to all peoples equal commercial rights within boundaries are absolutely essential to the proper future development of both European and American commerce and industry.

This is why the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of very real concern to every Occidental citizen; this is why the other nations after the ending of the Russo-Japanese War were careful to see that these belligerents guaranteed a continuance of the Open Door policy; this is why it is of importance to us to know whether this pledge is being kept.

In centering my attention upon Japan in this article let me say in the outset, I am not to be understood as being one whit more tolerant of Russian than of Japanese aggression in Manchuria--I am not. In the Russo-Japanese War my sympathies were all with Japan, my present friendships with numbers of her sons I prize very highly, but I cannot blind myself to the fact that she is apparently "drunk with sight of power" in the Orient.

As conditions are to-day, the reason for giving primary attention to Japan's position in Manchuria rather than Russia's must be self-evident. In the first place, the territory embraced in her sphere of influence is more important and contains two thirds the population. Then again: Northern Manchuria being cold and inhospitable, Japan's sphere not only covers the fairer and more favored section agriculturally, but from the standpoint of military strategy (as a mighty war taught all the world) Japan is vastly better placed. With Port Arthur in her possession, and the new broad-gauge line from Antung and Mukden enabling her to rush troops across the Sea of Japan and through Korea to Manchuria without once getting into foreign waters or on foreign soil, she could ask nothing better. And finally and most significant of all, Russia has {83} suffered perhaps the greatest humiliation in her history by reason of Manchurian aggression; she has learned Japan's point of vantage; and whatever advance she makes in the near future will be only by Japanese sufferance and connivance.

Japan's primary commercial advantage over all other nations in South Manchuria, her railway monopoly, together with the use she is making of this monopoly and her plans to maintain it, we must now consider more in detail.

When the war with Russia ended, Japan succeeded Russia in the control of what is now the South Manchurian Railway, running from Dairen (formerly Dalny) to Chang-chun, 438 miles, through the very heart of the country, and she also obtained from China the right "to maintain and work the military line constructed between Antung and Mukden and" --as if of secondary importance--"to improve the said line so as to make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial goods of all nations." The stipulation with regard to the South Manchurian Railway 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 the total cost--"all capital and all moneys owed on account of the line and interest." And just here Japan is playing a wily game.

Consider, for example, the Antung-Mukden line just referred to, now regarded as a part of the South Manchurian system. Although running through a very mountainous and sparsely settled area, it is of immense importance to Japan {84} from a strategic standpoint, connecting Mukden as it does with the Japanese railway in Korea leading directly to Fusan, and thus enabling Japan to transport troops across her own territory to Manchuria without taking any of the risks involved in getting out of her own waters and boundaries. The paramount military importance of the line is further indicated by the fact that no one had thought of a commercial line here at all. Simply as a matter of war-time necessity Japan stretched a 2-1/2-foot narrow-gauge line across these mountain barrens to transport her troops in 1905. It is interesting to see, therefore, how she has now interpreted her right to "work, maintain and improve"--especially "improve"--this line. In October I spent two days travelling over its entire length (188 miles), most of the time on the narrow-gauge part, and I was amazed to see on what a magnificent scale the new broad-gauge substitute line is now building. In striking contrast to the traditional Japanese tendency to impermanence in building, this line is constructed regardless of expense as if to last for a thousand years. Tunnel after tunnel through solid rock, the most superb masonry and bridges wherever streams intervene, the best of ballast to make an enduring roadbed--all these indicate the style of the new, not "improved" but utterly reconstructed, line which is building for Japan's benefit at China's expense--at China's expense directly if she buys it back in 1932, at China's expense indirectly if she doesn't.

It will be remembered, of course, that according to her agreement with China, Japan was to begin the work of "improving" the Antung-Mukden line within two years. Whether she was strangely unable to make any sort of beginning in the period, or whether she purposely delayed it in order to show her contempt for Chinese sovereignty in Manchuria, it is difficult to say; what is known is only that the Mikado's government let its treaty rights lapse, and then when China objected to 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 Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia jointly promised the rest of the world "to exploit their respective railways in Manchuria exclusively for commercial and industrial purposes and in no wise for strategic purpose."

That Japan (in the event no other method of getting control of Manchuria appears) hopes to make the railroads too expensive for the hard-pressed Peking government to buy back is self-evident. She is looking far ahead, as those interested in the continuance of the Open Door policy must also look far ahead. The real Open Door question is not a matter of the last four or five years or of the next four or five years, but whether after a comparatively short time the Door is to be permanently closed as in Korea. If it be said that Japan is only human in laying many plans to gain so rich an empire, let it also be said that other nations are only human if they wish to protect their own interests.

For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly obvious plan to make the railways too expensive for China to purchase when the lease expires, and just here some comparisons may be in order. In Japan proper the government-owned railway stations are severe and inexpensive structures in which not one yen is wasted for display and but little for convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the disreputable condition and appearance of the leading station (Shimbashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists must inevitably have their general impressions of the country unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is its appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, also under the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of the investment held by the government and one {86} sixth by individual Japanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsome stations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, have been erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railway company," the system has built a magnificent modern city--street railways, waterworks, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and beautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, not content with the best of equipment for every phase of legitimate railway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such as Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for the Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities of Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet the hotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, for example, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipment anywhere in the Far East.

In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected not only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevant enterprises--hotels, parks, cities--in which the railway companies have embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for lines built not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategic importance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation! As an Englishman said 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 when taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in improving my $1000 house--and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes."

More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep her absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facilities. In Article IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocally engaged not to "obstruct any general measures, common to all countries, which China may take for the development of the commerce and industry of Manchuria," but in December of the same year Japan caused China to yield a secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in the {87} neighborhood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, under threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for the Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been made with an English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia on the same pretext prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun line across Mongolia and Manchuria, although a hundred miles or more away from the South Manchurian line.

V

That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and expects to continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as yet too weak to protect herself, Japan is virtually master of the situation. Let us ask then--since this is in an American book--whether the Open Door policy is being enforced even now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria is to be laughed at. I tried it once in a Standard Oil office and the man in front of me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his merriment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy, Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a question as to the extent of that condition.

The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early treaties before the discriminations began. The military railroads, which Japan was in honor bound to all the world to use only for war purposes, were used for transporting Japanese goods before the military restrictions with regard to the admission of other foreign goods were removed. The Chinese merchant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece goods" and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods coming over were quickly taken up and a market for these particular "chops" or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies largely on the chop) was established. By the time European and American goods came back their market in many cases {88} had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trademark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness of Japanese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not mention some recent case of trademark infringement.

Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, when the Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the one great octopus of Japanese business and commerce) secured freight rates that practically stifled foreign business competitors. The railway company now asserts that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and establish permanent trade connections.

Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Government and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competitors are virtually in the plight of having to ship goods over a line owned by a rival--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 (the treaty provides that China shall appoint a Japanese {89} collector at this port), ignorantly or knowingly, allow Japanese goods to be smuggled through to Manchuria--although consuls of three nations a few months ago thought the matter serious enough to suggest an investigation--but the evasion of likin taxes in the interior is an admitted fact.

More flagrant still is another violation of international treaty rights. Under Chinese regulations foreign merchants are not allowed to do business in the Manchurian interior away from the twenty-four open marts, but it has been shown that several thousand Japanese are now stationed within the prohibited area, and Japan's reply to the Chinese Viceroy's protest is that he should have objected sooner and that it is now too late. Meanwhile, many Chinese merchants both in the interior and along the South Manchurian Railway, themselves paying the regular likin and consumption taxes, are finding themselves unable to compete with the Japanese, who refuse to pay these taxes. Thus Japan is gradually rooting out the natives who stand in her way, and, day by day, 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 themselves virtual masters of the country. Inside their railway areas and concessions they have their own government; in the majority of cases while in Manchuria I found it more convenient to use the Japanese telegraph or the Japanese postal system than the Chinese; and where I stopped at the little towns along the line it was a Japanese officer who came to inquire my name and nationality. When I was in Mukden the German consul there had just had two Chinese meddlers arrested for spying on his movements, only to find that they were acting under the direction of Japanese officials who claimed immunity for them! The fact that they have their soldiers back of them, and that they can be tried only in their own courts, also gives the Japanese unlimited assurance in bullying the natives. At Mukden the Japanese bellboy struck my Chinese rickshaw {90} man to get his attention. At Taolu some weeks ago some Japanese merchants who were there doing business illegally (for it is not an open mart) were interfered with, with the result that the Japanese authorities when I was in Mukden were preparing a formal demand for satisfaction, including indemnity for any injury to an unlawful business!

Manifestly, the new masters of Manchuria propose to teach the natives their place. "If a Chinaman is killed by a Japanese bullet," as a Chinaman of rank said to me in Manchuria, "the fault is not that of the man who fired the bullet: the Chinaman is to blame for getting in the way of it!"

Those who apologize for Japanese aggressiveness in Manchuria, those who excuse or sympathize with her evident purpose to make Manchuria walk the way of Korea, have but one argument for their position--the pitiably abused and threadbare plea that the Japanese have won the country by the blood they shed in the war with Russia. The best answer to this is also a quotation from the distinguished and witty Chinaman just mentioned. "The Japanese," said he, "claimed they were fighting Russia because she was preparing to rob China of Manchuria; now they themselves out-Russia Russia. It is much as if I should knock a man down, saying, 'That man was about to take your watch,' and then take the watch myself!"

The aptness of the simile is evident. My sympathy, and the sympathy of every other American acquaintance of mine as far as I can now recall, was with Japan in her struggle because of our hot indignation over Russian aggressiveness. But if Japan had said, "I am fighting to put Russia out only that I may myself develop every identical policy of aggrandizement that she has inaugurated," it is very easy to see with what different feelings we should have regarded the conflict.

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Moreover, Japan's legitimate fruits of victory do not extend to the control or possession of Manchuria. As one of the ablest Englishmen met on my tour in the Far East pointed out, Japan's purposes in inaugurating the war were four: (1) to get a preponderating influence in Korea; (2) to get the control of the Tsushima Straits, which a preponderating influence in Korea would give her; (3) to drive Russia from her ever-menacing position at Port Arthur; and (4) to arrest (as she alleged) the increasing influence and power of Russia in Manchuria.

All these things she has gained. Furthermore, she now has actual possession of Korea. The menace of a great Russian navy has been swept away. Again, she has become (with the consent of England) the commanding naval power in the eastern Pacific; and she has gained an influence in South Manchuria at least equal to that which Russia had previous to the war.

And yet one hears the plea that unless she gets Manchuria her blood will have been spilt without result! Unless she can do more in the way of robbing China than she went to war with Russia for doing, she will not be justified!

Among representatives of five nations with whom I discussed the matter in Manchuria I found no dissent from the opinion that Japan will never get out of Manchuria, unless forced to do so by a speedily awakened China or by the most emphatic and unmistakable attitude on the part of the Powers. Chinese, English, Americans, Germans--all nationalities--in Manchuria agree that thus far the way of Manchuria has been the way of Korea and that only favoring circumstances--a rebellion fomented in China or whatever excuse may serve--is needed for the same end to be reached.

Then with Japanese customs duties to complete the shutting out of foreign goods, now made only partially possible by the discrimination of a railway monopoly, and with the entire Chinese Empire and foreign trade rights within it menaced by the added preeminence of Japan, the people of Europe and America {92} may wake up too late to find out at last that the Open Door in Manchuria is a matter of somewhat more general importance than the disturbances in Turkey or the change of government in Portugal.

Be it said, in conclusion, however, that if the white nations take heed in time all this may be prevented. China's waking up may serve the same purpose, but it is doubtful whether she will develop sufficient military strength for this. In any case there need be and should be no war, and in describing conditions as I found them my purpose is to help the cause of peace and not that of bloodshed. For if the Powers realize the seriousness of the situation and give evidence of such feeling to Japan that she will realize the bounds of safety, there will be no trouble. But a continued policy of ignorance, indifference, or inactivity means that Japan will probably go so far that she cannot retreat without a struggle. Truth is in the interest of peace.

Mukden, Manchuria.

Mr. Money-Changing Banker, fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, prevents currency reform in China--yes, that is true. But before we assume superior airs let us see if Mr. Title-Changing Lawyer, also fattening needlessly at the expense of the people, does not go to our next legislature and stifle any measure for reforming land-title registration. And in saying this I am not to be understood as making any wholesale condemnation of either Chinese bankers or our American lawyers. The ablest advocates of the Torrens system I know are lawyers, men who say that lawyers ought to be content with the really useful ways of earning money and not insist on keeping up utterly useless and indefensible means of getting fees out of the people. Such lawyers, indeed, deserve honor; my criticism is aimed only at those who realize the wisdom of a changed system but are led by selfishness to oppose it.

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After all, however, the most revolutionary and iconoclastic reform in the new China is the changed policy of the schools. For thousands of years the education has been exclusively literary. The aim has been to produce scholars. A thorough knowledge of the works of the sages and poets, and the ability to write learned essays or beautiful verses, this has been the test of merit. When Colonel Denby wrote his book on China five years ago he could say:

But now all this is changed. The ancient system of selecting public officials by examination as to classical scholarship was abolished the year after Colonel Denby's book was published, and the new ideal of the school is to train men and women for useful living, for practical things, and to combine culture with utility. Japanese education now has the same aim. There, in fact, even the study of the languages is made to subserve a practical end. Where the American boy studies Latin and soon forgets it, the Japanese boy studies English and continues to read English and speak it on occasion the rest of his life, increasing his efficiency and usefulness in no small measure as a result. In Japan, too, I found the keenest interest in the teaching of agriculture to boys and domestic science to girls; and in all these things China is also moving--blunderingly, perhaps, but yet making progress--toward the most modern educational ideas.

As a matter of fact, much as America has talked these last ten years of making the schools train for more useful living, China and Japan have actually moved relatively much farther away from old standards than we have done, and if they should continue the same rate of advance for the next thirty years we may find their schools doing more for the efficiency {100} of the people than our American schools are doing. And when I say this let not the cry go up that I am decrying culture. Already I anticipate the criticism from men who cling to old standards of education with even more tenacity than absurdly conservative China has done. I am not decrying culture, but I am among those who insist that culture may come from a study of useful things as well as from a study of useless things; that a knowledge of the chemistry of foods may develop a girl's mind as much as a knowledge of chemistry that is without practical use; and that a boy may get about as much cultural value from the knowledge of a language which does put him into touch with modern life as from the knowledge of a language which might put him into touch with ancient life but which he will probably forget as soon as he gets his diploma. Slow-moving and tradition-cursed China and Japan, as we thought them a generation ago, have already committed themselves to making education train for actual life. Has America given anything more than a half-hearted assent to the idea?

The practical value of this article, I am reminded just here, has to do almost entirely with legislation. You may wish to remind your member of the legislature of the parallel between the wasteful and antiquated money-transfer system in China and the equally wasteful and antiquated title-transfer system at home; you may wish to inform your member of the legislature and your school officials of the advance of practical education in the Orient; and you may wish to remind both your member of the legislature and your congressman of China's successful crusade against the opium evil as an incentive for more determined American effort against the drink evil. Let me conclude this letter, therefore, with two more facts with which you may prod your representatives in Washington. (Which reminds me to remark, parenthetically, that every reform the Chinese are getting to-day comes as a result of persistently bringing pressure on their officials; and this {101} parenthetical observation may be as full of suggestion as any idea I have elaborated at greater length.)

The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington are just these:

First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I mailed a package by parcels post to another country for about half what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called "heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?

Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average tariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30 per cent. less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here, after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of buying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; a missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made in Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world, and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy it 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 held up in such fashion remains to be seen.

Peking, China.

Mr. Currie, the English superintendent of the International Cotton Mills at Shanghai, told me as I went through his factory that the Chinese men and women he employs average about 12 cents a day (American money), but that from his experience in England he would say that English labor at 80 cents or a dollar a day is cheaper. "You'd have more for your money at the week's end. One white girl will look after four sides of a ring spinning frame; it takes six Chinese, as you see. Then, again, the one white girl would oil her own machine; the Chinese will not. In the third place, in England two overseers would be enough for this room, while here we must have seven."

Hong Kong.

In order to see what the Philippine country looks like, I left Manila Thursday and made the long, hot trip to Daguban, travelling through the provinces of Rizal, Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Pangasinan. The first four of these are known as Tagalog provinces; the fifth is inhabited by Ilocanos and Pampangans. Three dialects or languages are spoken by the {155} tribes in the territory covered. Not far beyond Daguban 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 Filipinoland generally. Rather sparsely settled, only the smaller part of the land is under cultivation, the rest grown up in horse-high tigbao or Tampa grass, or covered with small forest trees. Among trees the feathery, fern-like foliage of the bamboo is most in evidence; but the broad-leaved banana ranks easily next. The high topknot growth of the cocoanut palm and the similar foliage of the tall-shanked papaya afford a spectacle unlike anything we see at home. About Daguban especially many cocoanuts are grown, and the clumps of trees by the Agno River reminded me of the old Bible pictures of the River Nile in the time of Pharaoh--especially when I looked at the plowing going on around them. For the Filipino's plow is modelled closely on the old Egyptian implement, and hasn't been much changed. A properly crooked small tree or limb serves for a handle, another crooked bough makes the beam, and while there is in most cases a steel-tipped point, some of the poorer farmers have plows made entirely of wood. A piece of wood bent like the letter U forms the hames; another piece like U with the prongs pulled wide apart serves as a singletree. Then, with two pieces of rope connecting primitive hame and single-tree, the Filipino's harness is complete.

Before going into any further description of the plows, however, let us get our picture of the typical country on the Island of Luzon as I saw it on this hot December day. Great fields of rice here and there, ripe for the harvest, and busy, perspiring little brown men and women cutting the crop with old-fashioned knives and sickles; the general appearance not unlike an American wheat or oat harvest in early summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of {156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight boats 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 the world except in America. Surrounded in most cases by the massive luxuriance of a banana grove, the Filipino's hut stands on stilts as high as his head, and often higher. One always enters by a ladder. In most instances there are two rooms, the larger one perhaps 10 x 12 feet, 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 larger Filipino home. And it is made, of course, not of ordinary lumber, but of bamboo--the ever-serviceable bamboo--which, as my readers probably know, strongly resembles the fishing-pole reeds that grow on our river banks. The sills, sleepers, and scaffolding of the house are made of larger bamboo trunks, six inches or less in diameter; the split trunks form the floor; the sides are of split bamboo material somewhat like that of which we make our hamper baskets and split-bottom chairs; the roofing is of nipal, which looks much like very long corn shucks.

In short, imagine an enormous hamper basket, big enough to hold six or eight hogsheads, put on stilts, and covered with shucks: such in appearance is the Filipino's house. Around it are banana trees bent well toward the ground by the weight of the one great bunch at the top, and possibly a few bamboo and cocoanut trees. For human ornaments there are rather small and spare black-haired, black-eyed, brown-skinned men, women, and children in clothing rather gayly colored--as far as it goes: in some cases it doesn't go very far. The favorite color with the women-folk is a sort of peach-blossom mixture of pink and white or a bandanna-handkerchief combination of red and white. Bare feet are most common, {159} but many wear slippers, and not a few are now slaves enough to fashion to wear American shoes. The men, except the very poorest, wear white, nor is it a white worn dark by dirt such as Koreans wear, but a spotless, newly washed white. Nearly every Filipino seems to have on clothes that were laundered the day before. A sort of colored gauze is frequently the only outer garment worn by either men or women on the upper part of the body.

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Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low figures; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness: tasks such as an American laborer would regard as inhuman.

Take, for example, the poor fellow who pulls the jinrikisha. He is doing the work that horses and mules do at home, and for wages such as our 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 would care to run without a burden; and the constant strain overtaxes his heart and shortens his days. More than this, he must go in all kinds of weather, and having become thoroughly heated, must shiver in the winter wind or driving rain during waits. The exposure and the overtaxing of the heart are alike ruinous. The rickshaw man's life, I was told in Japan, is several years shorter than that of the average man.

And yet so many men are driven by the general poverty into the rickshaw business that I have hardly found a city in which it is not overcrowded. In Peking on one occasion I almost thought my life endangered by the mob who jostled, tugged, and fought for the privilege of earning the 15 or 20 cents fare my patronage involved. In Hong Kong two runners, wild-eyed with the keenness of the savage struggle for existence, menaced the smaller, younger man I had hired as if they would take me by force from his vehicle to their own--and this for a climb so steep that I soon got out and walked rather than feel myself guilty of "man's inhumanity to man" by making a fellow being pull me. Fiercer yet was the competition in Hankow, where not even the brutal clubbing of the policeman was enough to keep the men in order. In wintry Newchwang I think I suffered almost as much as my rickshaw man did merely to see him wading through mud and foulness such as I should not wish my horse to go through at home--though if he had {176} not waded I should have had to, and he was the more used to it!

I mention the hard life of the Oriental laborer who pulls the jinrikisha because it is typical. The business would not be crowded if it were not that the men find life in other lines no better. Consider the men who carried me in my sedan chair in Canton. As each man fitted the wooden shafts over his shoulders I could see that they were welted with corns like a mule's shoulders chafed by the hames through many a summer's plowing.

Consider, too, the thousands of Chinese and Japanese who do the work not of carriage horses, but of draft horses. From the time you land in Yokahoma your heart is made sick by the sight of half-naked human-beings harnessed like oxen to heavily laden carts and drays. Bent, tense, and perspiring like slaves at the oar, they draw their heavy burdens through the streets. One or two men wearily pull an immense telegraph pole balanced on a two-wheeled truck. Eight or ten men are harnessed together dragging some merchant's heavy freight. Four to a dozen other men carry some heavy building-stone or piece of machinery by running bamboo supports from the shoulders of the men behind to the shoulders of the men in front: you can see the constant, tortuous play of the muscles around each man's rigid backbone while the strained, monotonous, half-weird chorus, "Hy-ah! Hullah! Hee-ah! Hey!" measures their tread and shifts the strain from man to man, step by step, with the precision of clock work. On the rivers in China, too, one sees boats run by human treadmill power: a harder task than that of Sisyphus is that of the men who sweat all day long at the wheel, forever climbing and never advancing.

Nor do the women and children of the Orient escape burdens such as only men's strong shoulders should bear. Children who should have the freedom that even the young colt gets--how my heart has gone out to them cheated out of the joys {177} of childhood! And the women with children strapped on their backs while they steer boats and handle passengers and traffic about Hong Kong! Or leave, if you will, the water-front at Hong Kong and make the hard climb up the steep, bluff-like, 1800-foot mountainside, dotted with the handsome residences of wealthy Englishmen: you can hardly believe that every massive timber, every ton of brick, every great foundation-stone was carried up, up from the town below, by the tug and strain of human muscle--and not merely human muscle, but in most cases the muscles of women! Probably no governor in any state in America lives in a residence so splendid as that of the governor-general of Hong Kong--certainly no governor's residence is so beautifully situated, halfway up a sheer mountain-slope--and yet the wife of the governor-general told me that the material used in the building was brought up the mountainside by women!

Hardly better fare the women in the factories. I mentioned in a former letter the mills in Shanghai where women work 13-1/4 hours for 12 cents a day; and in most cases the women in Eastern factories are herded together in crowded compounds little better than the workhouses for American criminals!

Or consider the rice farmers who wade through mud knee-deep to plant the rice by hand, cultivate it with primitive tools, and harvest it with sickles. And after all this, they must often sell the rice they grow, and themselves buy cheaper millet or poorer rice for their own food. The situation has probably improved somewhat since Col. Charles Denby published his book five years ago, but in its general outlines the plight of the typical Chinese farmer as described by him then is true 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 in the Orient. Let us now see what there is for us to learn from these facts.

First of all, we may inquire why such conditions obtain. Why is it that 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 within the limits of one empire. This is the cause."

I don't believe it.

There is a limit no doubt beyond which increase of population, even with the most highly developed system of industry, might lead to such a result, but I do not believe that this limit has been reached even in China. The people in England live a great deal better to-day than they did when England had only one tenth its present population. The average man in your county has more conveniences, comforts, and a better income than he had in your grandfather's day when the population was not nearly so dense. The United States with a population of ninety odd million pays its laborers vastly better than it did when its population was only thirty million.

The truth is that every man should be able to earn a little more than he consumes; there should be a margin, an excess which should constitute his contribution to the "commonwealth," to the race. Our buildings, roads, railroads, churches, cathedrals, works of art--everything which makes the modern world a better place to live in than the primitive world was: these represent the combined contributions of all previous men and races. And if society is so able to handle men that they produce any fraction more than they consume, the more men the better the world.

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My conviction is that the Oriental nations are poor, not because of their dense populations, but because of their defective industrial organizations, because they do not provide men Tools and Knowledge to work with.

Ignorance and lack of machinery--these have kept Asia poor; knowledge and 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 bone and sinew would be employed, and the men would be paid little, because without tools and knowledge they must always earn little. But America puts brains, science, steam, electricity, machinery into the Big Ditch--Tools and Knowledge, in other words--and she pays good wages because a man thus equipped does the work of ten men whose only force is the force of muscle.

But Asia--deluded, foolish Asia--has scorned machinery. "The more work machinery does, the less there will be for human beings to do. Men will be without work, and men without work will starve." With this folly on her lips she has rejected the agencies that would have rescued 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 willing ear to such nonsense. There were riots in England when manufacturers sought to introduce labor-saving methods in cotton-spinning; and when railroads were introduced among us there were doubtless thousands of draymen, stage-drivers, and boatmen who, if they had dared, would have torn up the rails and thrown them into the rivers, as the Chinese did along the Yangtze-Kiang. With much the same feeling the old-time hand compositors looked upon the coming of the typesetting machine.

And yet with all our engines doing the work of millions of draymen and cabmen, with all our factory-machines doing the {180} work of hundreds of thousands of weavers and spinners, with all our telegraphs and telephones taking the place of numberless messengers, runners, and errand boys, and with a population, too, vastly in excess of the population when old-fashioned methods prevailed, the fact stands out that labor has never been in greater demand and has never commanded higher wages than to-day.

With a proper organization of industry it seems to me that it must ever 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 it formerly required two men to do in producing some sheer necessity for mankind, an extra man is released or freed to serve mankind by the production of some comfort or luxury, or by ministering to the things of the mind and the spirit.

And it is the duty of society and government, it may be said just here, to facilitate this result, to provide education and equality of opportunity so that each man will work where his effort will mean most in human service. Knowledge or education not only cuts the shackles which chain a man down to a few occupations, not only sets him free to labor where he can work best, but is also itself a productive agency--a tool with which a man may work better.

Take the simple fact that cowpeas gather nitrogen from the air: a man may harness this scientific truth, use it and set it to work, and get results, profits, power, from it, as surely as from a harnessed horse or steam engine. And so with every other useful bit of knowledge under heaven. Knowledge is power.

They are all there in Rangoon yet--the gorgeous coloring of the lady's raiment, her cheroots, and the heathen idols--

How many images of Buddha there are in the city it would be impossible to estimate--I saw them not only in the pagodas, but newly carved in the shops which supply the Buddhist temples in the interior--and the gilded dome of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, "the most celebrated shrine of the entire Buddhist world," glitters like a beacon for miles before you reach the city. Nearly two thirds the height of the Washington Monument, it is gilded from top to bottom--with actual gold leaf, Rangoon citizens claim--and around it are innumerable smaller pagodas and shrines glittering with mosaics of colored glass in imitation of all the gems known to mortals. {192} Studied closely, they appear unduly gaudy, of course, but your first impression is that you have found a real Aladdin's palace, a dazzling, glittering dream of Oriental splendor and magnificence. To these shrines there come to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there. I am glad for his sake, and for the sake of all the millions to whom Buddha's doctrine is "the Light of Asia," that it is a religion at least without the degrading, blighting tendencies of Hinduism, and that the smiling faces of the images about the Shwe Dagon present at least some faint idea of a God who tempers justice with mercy and made human life good rather than a God of cruelty who made life a curse and a mockery. Every traveller who sees Buddhist Burma after having seen Hindu India comments on the greater cheerfulness and hopefulness of the Burman people, and especially the happier lives of the women--all a result, in the main, of the difference in religion.

And yet Burman Buddhism, in all conscience, is pitiable enough--its temples infested by fortune-tellers, witches, and fakirs, its faith mingled 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 fortunes of the people. A common sight on the morning streets is a group of yellow-robed priests with their begging bowls, into which pious Buddhists put food and other offerings; without these voluntary offerings the priest must go hungry. A curious custom in Burma, as in Siam, requires every youth to don the priestly robe for a few days and get 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 a clean, glossy coat of short hair, he looks as if he should be on the way to a Roman sacrifice with garlands about his head. Teams of black Hindus, three quarters naked, are also seen pulling heavy carts and drays; 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 small carts, but this I do not know. The work-beast of the city that interested me most was the elephant, and henceforth the elephants of Rangoon shall have a place alongside the camels of Peking in my memory and affection. Of course, the elephants of Rangoon are not so numerous as are the camels in China's capital, but those that one sees display an intelligence and certain human-like qualities that make them fascinating.

One morning I got up early and went to McGregor & Co.'s lumber yard at Ahloon on the Irrawaddy to see the trained elephants there handle the heavy saw-logs which it is necessary to move from place to place. It was better than a circus.

It is very clear that my lord the Elephant, like most other beings in the Tropics, doesn't entirely approve of work. What he did at Ahloon on the morning of my visit he did with infinite deliberation, and he stopped much to rest between tugs. Also when some enormous log, thirty or forty feet long and two or three feet thick, was given him to pull through the mire, he would roar mightily at each hard place, getting down 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 them with 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 kicking his neck or prodding his ears.

At one time while I watched, a tuskless elephant or mutna got his log stuck in the mud and was tugging and roaring profanely about his trials, when the tusker's mahout bid that royal beast go help his troubled brother. Straightway, therefore, went the tusker, leaving great holes in the mud at each footprint as if a tree had been uprooted there, gave a mighty shove to the recalcitrant log, and there was peace again in the camp.

For stacking lumber the elephant is especially useful. Any ordinary sized log, tree or piece of lumber he will pick up as if it were a piece of stovewood and tote with his snout, and in piling heavy plank he 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, in which case he is quick to make it right. The young lady in our party was also much amused when the mahout called out, "Salaam to memsahib" ("Salute the lady"), and his lordship bowed and made his salutation as gracefully as his enormous head and forelegs would permit.

One of my fellow-passengers, a rubber planter from the Straits Settlements, has worked elephants, has used them on the plantation and as help in building bridges, and has told me some interesting stories concerning 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 went back to the jungle. Evidently, though, his wild brethren didn't like the civilized ways he brought back with him, for when he returned home later two thirds of his tail had been pulled off, and he bore other marks of struggle on his body. The tusker on one occasion ran mad (as they will do now and then) and killed one of his keepers.

I was also interested to hear how a wild elephant is caught. Driven into a stockade, the tamed elephants close in {195} on him, and the mahouts get him well chained before he knows what has happened. For a day or two he remains in enforced bondage, then two or three of the great tamed creatures take him out for a walk or down to the river where he may drink and bathe himself. Moreover, the other mahouts set about taming him--talk to him in the affectionate, soothing, half hypnotizing way which Kipling has made famous in his stories, and stroke his trunk from discreet but gradually lessening distances. In a couple of months "my lord the Elephant" is fully civilized, responds promptly to the suggestions of his mahout, and a little later adopts some useful occupation.

In Siam the elephants are much used in managing the immense rafts of teak trees that are floated down the rivers for export. My friend the rubber planter has also had one or two good travelling elephants on which he used to travel through the jungle from one plantation to the other, a distance of twenty-five miles. On more than one occasion he has run into a herd of wild elephants in making this trip. On good roads, elephants kept only for riding purposes will easily make seven miles an hour, moving with a long, easy stride, which, however, they are likely to lose if set to heavy work.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty about the elephant is the great quantity of food required to keep him going. Eight hundred pounds a day will barely "jestify his stummuck," as Uncle Remus would say, and when he gets hungry "he wants what he wants when he wants it," and trumpets thunderously till he gets it. The skipper on a Singapore-Rangoon steamer told of having had a dozen or more on board a few months ago, and their feed supply becoming exhausted, they waxed mutinous and wrathy, evincing a disposition to tear the whole vessel to pieces, when the ship fortunately came near enough to land to enable the officers to signal for a few tons of feed to be brought aboard 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 from Mandalay, that could eat bananas twice as fast as my Burmese boy-guide and I could peel them, and the boy-guide in question assured me that he will turn white by the time he is two or three years old. Which would be very interesting if true, but I fear it isn't.

I am now hurrying on to India proper and must conclude my impression of Burma with this letter. In Rangoon the lighter-skinned and lighter-hearted Burmese contrast rather notably with the dark and serious Hindus. Many of the Hindus are in Burma only temporarily. One ship that I saw coming into Rangoon from the Coromandel Coast, India, was literally spilling over with 3000 brown Hindu coolies. They will work through the Burman rice harvest--rice is the one great crop of the country--at eight to twelve annas (16 to 24 cents) a day, and after three or four months of this will return home. Because they are so poor at home the steamship charges only ten rupees ($3) for bringing them to Rangoon, but requires fifteen rupees for carrying them back.

Nor should I fail to mention another thing that impressed me very much in Rangoon: the graves of the English officers who were killed in the war with the Burmans many years ago, and are now buried within the walls of the picturesque old Buddhist Temple. True it is that the sun never 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 thousands of them far, far from the land that gave them birth. Nearby the place where those of the Shwe Dagon sleep I stood on the temple walls and looked out on the fading beauty of the tropic sunset, the silvery outline of the Irrawaddy River breaking into the darkening green of the jungle growth. And then came up the cool night breeze of the Torrid Zone--more refreshing and delightful than our Temperate climate ever knows. As gentle and caressing as a mother's lullaby, how {197} it crooned among the foliage of the cocoanut palms, whispered among the papaya leaves, and how joyously the great blades of the bananas welcomed it!

With that fair view before our eyes, with the breezes as if of Araby the Blest making mere existence a joy, we take our leave of Burma.

Rangoon, Bunna.

If it were any other country but India, I might write last of the religion the people profess, but, since it is India, it is the first thing to be considered. Religion is the supreme fact of Indian life-- if we may call religion what has been more properly defined as "a sacred disease."

Certainly nowhere else on earth is there a country where the entire life of the people is so molded by their spiritual beliefs. Two children are born the same day. The one, of high-caste parentage, Brahminism has irrevocably decreed shall be all his life, no matter how stupid or vicious, a privileged and "superior" being, to whom all lower orders must make obeisance. The other, born of a Dom father and mother, Brahminism has decreed shall be all his life, no matter how great his virtue or brilliant his mind, an outcast whose mere touch works 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 any civil government has ever exercised over its subjects.

About theoretical or philosophical Hinduism there is admittedly a certain measure of moral beauty, but to get even this from Hindu literature one must wade through cesspools of filth and obscenity and must shut his eyes to pitiably low ideals of Deity, while in its practical manifestations modern Hinduism is the most sickening combination of superstition, idolatry, and {199} vice that now disgraces the name of religion in any considerable portion of the earth. The idea of the transmigration of souls, "Samsara," the belief that you have had millions of births (as men and animals) and may have millions more (unless you earlier merit the favor of the gods and win release from life), and that what you are in your present life is the result of actions in previous existence, and what you do in this present existence will influence all your future rebirths--this is a doctrine that might be a tremendous moral force if it were linked with such ideals as distinguish the Christian religion. In practical Hinduism, however, the emphasis is not on worthy living, not on exalted moral conduct, as the thing essential to divine favor, but on rites and ceremonies, regard for the priests, rigid observance of caste, sacred bathing, and the offering of proper sacrifices to fickle or bloodthirsty gods and goddesses. In their religion no Isaiah makes terrible and effective protest against the uselessness of form; no Christ teaches that God can be worshipped only in spirit.

Another doctrine, that Self, that a man's own soul is an Emanation of God, a part of the Divine Essence, and the purpose of man's existence to hasten a final absorption into God--this also (although destructive of the idea of individuality, the sacredness of personality, so fundamental in Christian thought) would seem to be a tremendous moral force, but it is vitiated in much the same way as is the idea of Samsara, while it is further weakened by the fact that the Hindu gods themselves are often represented as immoral, bloodthirsty, obscene and criminal.

Enmeshed in vicious traditions and false doctrine, its philosophy and purer teachings known only to a cultured few, the Higher Hinduism "powerless to be born," is only the illusion which it would teach that all else is, while practical Hinduism hangs like a blight over a land whose people are as the sands of the sea for multitude. If all the human race alive to-day were to pass in review before you, every eighth person in the {200} ranks would be a Hindu. And to realize in what manner Hinduism guides its 200,000,000 followers it is only necessary to visit some of their most celebrated temples.

It is an extreme illustration, no doubt, but since it was the first Hindu shrine I visited, we may begin with the Kalighat in Calcutta. This temple is dedicated to Kali, or "Mother Kali," as the English-speaking temple priest who conducted me always said, the bloody goddess of destruction. That terrible society of criminals and assassins, the Thugs (its founder is worshipped as a saint), had Kali as their patron goddess and whetted their knives and planned their murderous crimes before her image: all this in a "temple" of "religion."

The representations of Kali befit her character. Fury is in her countenance and in her three red eyes. Her tongue lolls from her mouth. In one of her four hands is the dripping, bloody head of a slaughtered enemy. Her necklace is of the heads of her slain. Her girdle is the severed hands of the dead men. Tradition says that she constantly drinks blood; and each man who comes to worship her brings a little wet, trembling kid: the warm blood that flows after the priestly ax has done its work is supposed to please the terrible goddess. The morning of my visit there were sacrifices every few minutes, and on the great day of Kali-worship, in October, the place runs ankle-deep in blood.

In the old days--and not so long ago at that--there were human sacrifices at Kalighat, and when I asked the priest concerning them, his significant answer was that the British Government would no longer allow them. He made no claim that Hinduism itself has changed! Their Kaliki Purana says that one human sacrifice delights Kali for a thousand years, and in spite of British alertness a bloody human head bedecked with flowers was found in a Kali temple near Calcutta not many years ago, and at Akrha, also near Calcutta, human sacrifice has been attempted within a decade.

From the Kalighat temple the priest of Mother Kali took me {201} to the edge of the dirty, murky Hoogli (sacred as a part of the Ganges system), where in its consecrated filth scores of miserable pilgrims were washing away their sins or "acquiring merit" with the gods. On the way we passed the image of Juggernaut, the miserable stable-like shelters in which the pilgrims are lodged, and the image of Setola, "the Mother of the Smallpox," as the priest called her, to which smallpox victims come for cure. Back again to the temple, the priest assured me that if I would give the other priests a few annas (an anna is worth 2 cents of our money) they would drive back the shrieking, bloodstained, garlanded crowds of half-naked "worshippers" and give me a view of the Kali idol. The money forthcoming--and the high priest, in expectation of a tip, coming out to lend his assistance--there ensued such a Kilkenny fight between the priests and the dense mob of "worshippers," such knocking, kicking, scrouging, as never any man got for the same amount of money in any prize-fight, until finally I got a swift glimpse of the idol's hideous head.

Then having paid the greedy priest and the high priest (like the daughters of the horseleech they always cry for "more") I went back to my 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 afternoon to another Indian religious service--this time of Christians--and compared it with what I had seen in the morning? Instead of a money-hunting priest sitting beside a butcher's block and exacting a prescribed fee from each pushing, jabbering, suppliant of a bloodthirsty goddess, herself only one of the many jealous gods and goddesses to be favored and propitiated--instead of this there was a converted Indian minister who told his fellows of one God whose characteristic is love, and whose worship is of the spirit. And instead of the piteous bleating of slaughtered beasts there was the fine rhythm of hymns whose English names one could easily {202} recognize from their tunes in spite of the translation of the words into the strange tongue of the Bengali.

At home, I may say just here, I am not accused of being flagrantly and outrageously pious; but no open-minded, observant man, even if he were an infidel, could make a trip through Asia without seeing what a tremendously uplifting influence is the religion to which the majority of Americans adhere as compared with the other faiths, and how tremendously in Christian lands it has bettered and enriched the lives even of those of

who ignore it or deride it. In no spirit of cant and with no desire to preach, I set down these things, simply because they are as obvious as temples or scenery to any Oriental traveller who travels with open eyes 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 than Jerusalem is to Christianity. And Benares is so important that I must give more than a paragraph to my impressions of it.

The view of the river-front from the sacred Ganges I found surprisingly majestic and impressive. The magnificent, many-storied pilgrim-houses, built long ago by wealthy princes anxious to win the favor of the gods, tower like mountains from the river bank. A strange mingling of many styles and epochs of Oriental architecture are they, and yet mainly suggestive of the palaces and temples that lined the ancient Nile. An earthquake, too, has heightened the effect by leaving massive ruins, the broken bases of gigantic columns, that seem to whisper tales even older than any building now standing in Benares. For Benares, although its present structures are modern, was old when the walls of Rome were built; it was historic when David sat on the throne of Israel.

But while one may find elsewhere structures not greatly {203} unlike these beside the Sacred River, nowhere else on earth may one see crowds like these--crowds that overflow the acres and acres of stone steps leading up from the river's edge through the maze of buildings and spill off into the water. There are indeed all sorts and conditions of men and women. Princes come from afar with their gorgeous retinues and stately equipages, and go down into the bathing-places calling on the names of their gods as trustingly as the poor doomed leper who thinks that the waters of Mother Gunga may bring the hoped-for healing of his body. Wealthy, high-caste women whose faces no man ever sees except those that be of their own households-- they too must not miss the blessing for soul and body to be gained in no other way, and so they are brought in curtained, man-borne palki and are taken within boats with closed sides, where they bathe apart from the common herd. Men and women, old and young, high and low (except the outcasts)--all come. There are once-brown Hindus with their skins turned to snowy whiteness by leprosy, men with limbs swollen to four or five times natural size by elephantiasis, palsied men and women broken with age, who hope to win Heaven (or that impersonal absorption into the Divine Essence which is the nearest Hindu 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 poor untutored souls--die in despair, worn out by weakness and disease, ere they reach Benares with its Balm of Gilead which they seek; but many other aged or afflicted ones die happier for the knowledge that they have reached their Holy City, and that their ashes, after the quick work of the morrow's funeral pyre, will be thrown on the waters of the Ganges. "Rama, nama, satya hai" (The name of Rama is true): so I heard the weird chant as four men bore past me the rigid red-clad figure of a corpse for the burning. No coffins are used. The body is wrapped in white if a man's, in red if a woman's, strapped on light bamboo poles, and before {204} breakfast-time the burning wood above and beneath the body has converted into a handful of ashes that which was a breathing human being when the sun set the day before.

Other writers have commented on the few evidences of grief that accompany these Hindu funerals. In Calcutta mourners are sometimes hired--for one anna a Hindu can get a professional mourner to wail heart-breakingly at the funeral of his least-loved mother-in-law--but somehow the relatives of the dead themselves seem to show little evidence of grief. "But where are the bereaved families?" I asked a Hindu priest as we looked at a few groups of men and woman sitting and talking around the fires from whence came the gruesome odor of burning human flesh. "Oh, those are the families you see there," he replied. And sure enough they were--I suppose--although I had thought them only the persons hired to help in the cremation. One ghastly feature of the funerals occurs when the corpse is that of a father. Just before the cremation 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 release his father's spirit!

But, after all, reverting to the question of mourning, why should the Hindu mourn for his dead? Human life, in his theology, is itself a curse, and after infinite rebirths, the soul running its course through the bodies of beasts and men, the ultimate good, the greatest boon to be won from the propitiated gods, is "remerging in the general soul," the Escape from Being, Escape from the Illusions of Sense and Self; not Annihilation itself but the Annihilation of Personality, of that sense of separateness from the Divine which our encasement in human bodies gives us. Where Christianity teaches that you are a son of God and that you will maintain a separate, conscious, responsible identity throughout eternity, Hinduism teaches that your spirit is a part of the Divine and will ultimately be reabsorbed into it. Its doctrine in this respect is much like that of Buddhism. Inevitably neither religion {207} lays that emphasis on personality, the sacredness of the individual life, which is inherent in Christianity and Christian civilization, just as the absence of this principle is characteristic of the social and political institutions of the Orient.

TWO RANGOON TYPES.

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 many temples in which they must worship, many priests whom they must support. There are said to be 2000 temples in Benares and the high priest of one of them--while sparring for a bigger tip for his services--told me that he was at the head of 400 priests supported by his establishment alone (the Golden Temple).

And such temples as they are! I have seen the seamy side of some great cities, but for crass and raw vulgarity and obsceneness there are "temples" in Benares--so-called "temples" that should minister to man's holier nature, with so-called "priests" to act as guides to their foulness--that could give lessons to a third-rate Bowery den. No wonder that the Government of India, when it made a law against indecent pictures and carvings, had to make a special exception for Hindu "religious"(!) pictures. There is a limit, however, even to the endurance of the British Government, and at the Nepalese Temple I was told that the authorities do not allow such structures to be built now. Moreover, it is not only admitted that the temples in many parts of India are the resort of the lowest class of women, "temple girls" dedicated to gods and goddesses, but their presence is openly defended as proper.

Most of the temples in Benares, too, are as far from cleanliness as they are from godliness. The Golden Temple with its sacred cows penned up in dirty stalls, its ragged half-naked worshippers, its holy cesspool known as "The Well of Knowledge," its hideous, leprosy-smitten beggars, its numerous emblems of its lustful god Krishna, and its mercenary priests, {208} is a good illustration. And the famous Monkey Temple (dedicated like the Kalighat to Mother Kali) I found no more attractive. This temple is open to the sky and the most loathsome collection of dirty monkeys that I have ever had the misfortune to see were scrambling all around the place, while the monkey-mad, bloodstained, goat-killing priests, preying on the ignorance of the poor, and itching for a few annas in tips, won a place in my disgust second only to that occupied by their monkey companions. I left and went out to the gate where the snake-charmers were juggling with a dozen hissing cobras. It was pleasanter to look at them.

That night an eminent English artist, temporarily in Benares, discoursed to me at length though vaguely on the beauties of Hindu religious theory, but what I had seen during the day did not help his argument. Emerson's phrase may well be applied to Hinduism, "What you are speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say."

Not that it has anything to do with Hinduism but simply to get a better taste in the mouth at the end, let us turn in conclusion to a happier subject. Some days ago I went to Darjeeling on the boundary of northern India and on the edge of the great Himalaya mountain range. In sight from its streets and from nearby peaks are the highest mountains formed by the Almighty's hand, the sublimest scenery on which the eye of mortal man may ever rest.

Long before daylight one morning I bestrode a sure-footed horse and wound my way, with two friends of a day, as friends on a foreign tour are likely to prove, to the top of Tiger Hill, from which point we looked across the boundaries of Tibet and saw the sun rise upon a view whose majesty defied description. In the distance on our left there glittered in its mantle of everlasting snow, and with its twin attendants, the summit of Mt. Everest, 29,002 feet high, the highest mountain on the surface of the earth. Even grander was the view directly in front of us, for there only one third as far away as Everest, royal {209} Kinchinjunga shouldered out the sky, its colossal, granite masses, snow-covered and wind-swept, towering in dread majesty toward the very zenith. Monarch of a white-clad semicircle of kingly peaks it stood, while the sun, not yet risen to our view, colored the pure-white of its crest with a blush of rose-tint, and in a minute or two had set the whole vast amphitheatre a-glitter with the warm hues of its earliest rays. Across forty-five miles of massive chasms and rugged foothills (these "foothills" themselves perhaps as high as the highest Alps or Rockies) we looked to where, thousands of feet higher yet, there began the eternal snow-line of Kinchinjunga, above which its further bulk of 11,000 additional feet formed a dazzling silhouette against the northern sky. Stand at the foot of Pike's Peak and imagine another Pike's Peak piled on top; stand at the foot of Mount Mitchell and imagine four other Mount Mitchells on top of one another above its highest point--the massive bulk in either case stretching thousands and thousands of feet above the line of everlasting snow. Such is Kinchinjunga.

Spellbound we watched as if forbidden intruders upon a view it was not meet for any but the high gods themselves to see. About it all was a suggestion of illimitableness, of more than earthly majesty, of infinite serenity and measureless calm, which sat upon our spirits with a certain eerie unworldliness.

It only confirmed an almost inevitable conjecture when I learned later that it was in sight of the Himalayas that Gautama Buddha dreamed his dream of the Nirvana and of its brooding and endless peace in which man's fretful spirit--

may find at last the rest that it has sought in vain through all our human realm of Time and Place.

Lucknow, India.

A Mr. Micawber might dilate at length upon how this achievement in verse informs us (1) as to the financial condition of the people, to wit, they are "poor," the average annual income having been estimated at only $10, and the average wages for day labor in the capital city of India only 6 to 20 cents per diem; (2) as to their intellectual condition, "benighted," ninety men in each hundred being unable to read or write any language, while of every thousand Indian women 993 are totally illiterate; (3) as to the social system, each man living and 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 the absence thereof), the children of both sexes being frequently attired after the manner of our revered First Parents before they made the acquaintance of the fig tree, while the adults also dispense generally with trousers, shoes, and stockings, and other impedimenta of our over-developed civilization.

{211}

Great indeed are the uses of poetry. In all my letters from India I shall hardly be able to do more than expand and enlarge upon the great fundamental truths so eloquently set forth in our four-line poetry piece.

If it be sound logic to say that "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them," then the Creator must also have a special fondness for these "poor benighted Hindus," for within an area less than half the size of the United States more than 300,000,000 of them live and move and have their being. That is to say, if the United States were as thickly populated as India, it would contain 600,000,000 people. It is also said that when the far-flung battle-line of Imperial Rome had reached its uttermost expansion that great empire had within its borders only half as many people as there are in India to-day. India and its next-door neighbor, China, contain half the population of the whole earth. In other words, if the Chinese and East Indians were the equals of the other races in military prowess the combined armies of all other nations on the globe, of every nation in Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, the Isles of the Sea, and of the rest of Asia, would be required to defeat them.

Obviously, such a considerable portion of the human family calls for special study. And if we would study them we must not confine ourselves to a tour of a few cities in North India, interesting as these cities are.

The significant man in India (where about eight tenths of the people live on the soil) is not the trader, a city-dweller in these few large centres of population, but the ryot or farmer, in the thousands and thousands of little mud-house villages between the Himalaya slopes and Cape Comorin. The significant economic fact in India is not the millions of dollars once spent on royal palaces but the $7 to $30 spent in building this average peasant's home or hut. The significant social fact is not the income of some ancient Mogul or some modern Rajah {212} estimated in lakhs of rupees, but the five or six cents a day 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 cities I have seen than in the little rural villages whose names may have never found place in an English book. Let us get, if we can, a pen picture of one of these villages in north central India.

As I approached it from a distance it looked like an enormous mass of ant-hills, for the low windowless one-story huts, as has been suggested, are made of yellowish sun-dried clay, and are often roofed with clay also--made flat on top with a little trench or gutter for drainage. Perhaps the majority, however, have thick sloping roofs of straw, the eaves being hardly as high as a man's head. Very thick are the 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 about such 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.

In cold weather, however, the majority of the men are rather fully covered, and in any case they add a turban or cap of some gaudy hue to the uniform just suggested.

As for the dress of the women, a typical woman's outfit will consist of, say, a crimson skirt with a green border, a navy-blue piece of cloth as large as a sheet draped loosely (and quite incompletely) around the head and upper part of the body, and a breast-cloth or possibly a waist of brilliant yellow. This combination of hues, of course, is only a specimen. The actual colors are variable but the brilliancy is invariable.

Furthermore, the celebrated Old Lady of Banbury Cross, who boasted of rings, on her fingers and bells on her toes, would find her glory vanish in a twinkling should she visit India. Not content with these preliminary beginnings of adornment, the barefooted Hindu woman wears--if she can afford it--a band or two of anklets, bracelets halfway from wrist to elbow, armlets beyond the elbow, ear-rings of immense size, a necklace or two, toe-rings and a bejewelled nose-ring as big around as a turnip. Sometimes the jewelry on a woman's feet will rattle as she walks like the trace-chains on a plow-horse on the way to the barn.

This barbaric display of jewelry, it should be said, is not made solely for purposes of show. The truth is that the native has not grown used to the idea of savings banks (although the government is now gradually convincing him that the postal savings institutions are safe), and when he earns a spare rupee he puts it into jewelry to adorn the person of himself or {217} his wife. If all the idle treasures which the poor of India now carry on their legs, arms, ears, and noses were put into productive industry, a good deal might be done to alleviate the misery for which the agitators profess to blame the British Government.

Calcutta, India.

It is somewhat surprising to learn that of the 246,000,000 acres under cultivation to supply 300,000,000 people (the United States last year cultivated 250,000,000 acres to supply 90,000,000) only 28,000,000 acres were cropped more than once during the year. With the warm climate of India it would seem that two or more crops might be easily grown, but the annual dry season makes this less feasible than it would appear to the traveller. Even in January much artificial crop-watering must be done, and no one can travel in India long without growing used to the sight of the irrigation wells. Around them the earth is piled high, and oxen hitched to the well ropes draw up the water in collapsible leather bags or buckets. A general system of elevated 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 the middle of June. "In the latter part of the drought," he said, "the fields assume the appearance of deserts; only the dull green of the tree-leaves varies the vast, monotonous graybrown of the far-stretching plains. The streams are dried up; the cattle hunt the parched fields in vain for a bit of succulence to vary their diet of dry grass. But at last there comes the monsoon and the rains--and then the Resurrection Morning. The dead earth wakens to joyous fruitfulness, and what was but yesterday a desert has become a veritable Garden of Eden."

But, alas! sometimes the rains are delayed--long, tragically long delayed! The time for their annual return has come--has passed, and still the pitiless sun scorches the brown earth as if it would set afire the grass it has already burned to tinder-dryness. The ryot's scanty stock of grain is running low, the daily ration has been reduced until it no longer satisfies the pangs of hunger, and with each new sunrise gaunt Famine stalks nearer to the occupants of the mud-dried hut. The poor peasant lifts vain hands to gods who answer not; unavailingly he sacrifices to Shiva, to Kali, to all the heartless Hindu deities of destruction and to unnamed demons as well. The Ancient Terror of India approaches; from time immemorial the vengeful drought has slain her people in herds, like plague-stricken cattle, not by hundreds and thousands, but by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. In Calcutta I saw several young men whom the mission school rescued from starvation in the last great famine of 1901-02 and heard moving stories of that terrible time. Many readers will recall the aid that America then sent to the suffering, but in spite of the combined efforts of the British Government and philanthropic Christendom, 1,236,855 people lost their lives. To get a better grasp upon the significance of these figures it may be mentioned that if every man, woman, and child in eight American states and territories at that time (Delaware, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada) had been {221} swallowed up in a night, the total loss of life would not have been so great as in this one Indian famine.

Appalling as these facts are, it must nevertheless be remembered that the loss would have been vastly greater but for the excellent system of famine relief which the British Government has now worked out. It has built railways all over India, so that no longer will it be possible for any great area to suffer while another district having abundance is unable to share its bounty because of absence of transportation. In the second place, the government has wisely arranged to give work at low wages to famine sufferers--road building, railroad building, or something of the kind--instead of dispensing a reckless charity which too often pauperizes those it is intended to help. Before the British occupation India was scourged both by famine and by frequent, if not almost constant, wars between neighboring states. The fighting it has stopped entirely, the loss by drought it has greatly reduced; and some authority has stated (I regret that I have not been able to get the exact figures myself) that for a century before the British assumed control, war and famine kept the population practically stationary, while since then the number of inhabitants has practically trebled.

Not unworthy of mention, even in connection with its work in relieving famine sufferers, is the excellent work the British Government is doing in enabling the farmers to free themselves from debt. The visitor to India comes to a keener appreciation of Rudyard Kipling's stories and poems of Indian life because of the accuracy with which they picture conditions; and the second "Maxim of Hafiz" is only one of many that have gained new meaning for me since my coming:

When I first heard of "60 per cent, per annum," and even of 70 per cent, or 80 per cent., as the ordinary rate of interest paid {222} by the Indian ryot to the merchant or money-lender, I could not believe it, but further investigation proved the statement true. In the United Provinces I found that in some cases the ryot has been little better than a serf. The merchant has "furnished him supplies," adding interest at the rate of one anna on each rupee at the end of each month--6-1/4 per cent., not a year but a month, and that compounded every 30 days! In one case that came to my attention, two orphan boys twenty years ago, in arranging the marriage of their sister, borrowed 100 rupees at 50 per cent, interest. For seventeen years thereafter they paid 50 rupees each year as interest, until an American missionary took up the account at 5 per cent, instead of 50, and in two years they had paid it off with only 7 rupees more than they had formerly paid as annual tribute to the money-lender. In many such cases debts have been handed down from generation to generation, for the Hindu code of honor will not permit a son to repudiate the debts of his father; and son, grandson, and great-grandson have, staggered under burdens they were unable to get rid of.

In this situation the cooperative credit societies organized under government supervision have proved a godsend to the people, and thousands of ryots through their aid are now getting free of debt for the first time in their lives, and their families for perhaps the first time in generations. Each member of a cooperative credit society has some interest in it; the government will lend at 4 per cent, an amount not greater than the total amount deposited by all the members; stringent regulations as to loans and their security, deposit of surplus funds, accounting, etc., are in force, and altogether the plan is working remarkably well. The latest report I have shows that in a single twelvemonth the total working capital of these societies increased more than 300 per cent.

The United States seems to be about the only fairly civilized country in 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 the government in regulating land-rents in crowded districts. The courts see to it that no landlord raises rents unfairly. One Brahmin freeholder 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 be quite intelligent as well as prosperous, although he wore nothing save a turban and an abbreviated lower garment not quite stretching from his 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 land at $100 to $300 an acre (and I think these prices general) is indicated by the fact that when I asked, in the next village, the wage per month, I was told, "Four or five rupees ($1.28 to $1.60), the laborer boarding himself."

"And how much is paid per day when a single day's labor is wanted?" I asked.

"Two annas and bread," was the reply. (An anna is 2 cents.)

My informant was the schoolmaster of Khera Kalan village. At his school he told me that the children of farmers were allowed tuition free; the children of the village people pay 1 to 3 annas a month. But so hard is the struggle to get enough coarse grain to keep soul and body together (the peasant can seldom afford to eat rice or wheat) that few farm children are free from work long enough to learn to read and write.

It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan that afternoon. Outside a score of camels were cropping the leaves from the banyan trees (the only regular communication with the outside world is by camel cart) and the men of the village {224} were grinding sugarcane on the edge of the far-reaching fields of green wheat and yellow-blossomed mustard. Not far away was a Hindu temple; not far away, too, the historic Grand Trunk Road which leads through Khyber Pass into the strange land of Afghanistan. It is the road, by the way, over which Alexander the Great marched his victorious legions into India, and over which centuries later Tamerlane came on his terror-spreading invasion. But this has nothing to do with the little half-naked boys and girls we are now concerned with. They had gathered around the Padre to recite the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer in Hindustani. I asked how many had been to school (only one responded), asked something about their games, told them something about America, and then their instructor inquired (interpreting all the time for me, of course):

"And what message would you like for the Sahib to give the boys and girls 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 now giving his life to the Indian people, "for Salaam means. Peace be to you."

So indeed I pass on the message to the fortunate boys and girls of the United States who read this article. "Salaam,"--Peace be to you. Little Ones. You will never even know how favored of Heaven you are in having been born in a land where famine never threatens death to you and your kindred, where the poor have homes that would seem almost palatial to the average Indian child; where educational opportunities are within the reach of all; where the religion of the people is an aid to moral living and high ideals instead of being a hindrance to them; where no caste system decrees that the poorest children shall not rise above the condition of their parents; where a wage-scale higher far than six cents a day enables the poorest to have comforts and cherish ambitions; and where the humblest "boy born in a log cabin" may dream of the Presidency instead {225} of being an outcast whose very touch the upper orders would account more polluting than the touch of a beast.

Ah, the little fate-cursed Indian brats, some of them wearing rings in their noses and not much else, who send the message through me to you--think of them to-night and be glad that to you the lines have fallen in pleasanter places.

Salaam, indeed, O happy little folk of my own homeland across the seas! Peace be to you!

Jeypore, India.

Of Hinduism as a religious or ecclesiastical institution we had something to say in another chapter; of Hinduism as Social Fact bare mention was made. And yet it is in its social aspects, in its enslavement of all the women and the majority of the men who come within its reach, that Hinduism presents its most terrible phases. For Hinduism is Caste and Caste is Hinduism. Upon the innate, Heaven-ordained superiority of the Brahmin and the other twice-born castes, and upon the consequent inferiority of the lower castes, the whole system of Brahminism rests.

Originally there were but four castes: The Brahmin or priest caste who were supposed to have sprung from the head of Brahma or God; the Kshatriya or warrior caste who sprang from his arms, the Vasiya or merchant and farmer class who sprang from his thigh, and the Sudra or servant and handicraftsmen class who came from his feet. The idea of superiority by birth having once been accepted as fundamental, however, these primary castes were themselves divided and subdivided along real or imaginary lines of superiority or inferiority until to-day the official government statistics show 2378 castes in India. You cannot marry into any one of the other 2377 classes of Hindus; you cannot eat with any of them, nor can you touch any of them.

Thus Caste is the Curse of India. It is the very antithesis of democracy--blighting, benumbing, paralyzing to all aspiration and all effort at change or improvement.

{227}

No man may rise to a higher caste than that into which he is born; but he may fall to a lower one.

There is no opportunity for progress; the only way to move is backward. Don't kick against the pricks therefore. You were born a Brahmin with wealth and power because you won the favor of the gods in some previous existence; or you were born a Sudra, predestined to a life of suffering and semi-starvation, because in your previous existence you failed to merit better treatment from the gods. If you are 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 must happen to you throughout your whole existence.

The Brahmin put himself into a position of superiority and then said to all the other classes: Rebel not at the inequalities of life. They are ordained of the gods. The good that the higher castes enjoy is the reward of their having conducted themselves properly in previous existences. Submit yourself to your lot in the hope that with obedience to what the Brahmins tell you, you may possibly likewise win birth into a higher caste next time. But strike a Brahmin even so much as with a blade of grass and your soul shall be reborn into twenty and one lives of impure animals before it assumes human shape again.

Never in human history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "Jo hota so hota,"--"What is happening was to happen"--so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written on my forehead," a man will often say with stoical indifference when some calamity overtakes him, in allusion to the belief that on the sixth night after birth Vidhata writes on every man's forehead the main events of his life-to-be, and no act {228} of his can change them. "I was impelled of the gods to do the deed," a criminal will say in the courts. "And I am impelled of the gods to punish you for it," the judge will sometimes answer. If plague comes, the natives can only be brought by force to observe precautions against it. "If we are to die, we shall die; why offend the gods by attempting interference with their plans?" The fatalism of the East as expressed by Omar Khayyam is the daily creed of India's millions:

It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in the transmigration of the soul has also had a not inconsiderable influence. Though you have fared ill in this life, a million rebirths may be yours ere you finally win absorption into Brahma, and in these million future lives the gods may deal more prodigally with you. Indeed, the things you most desire may be yours in your rebirth. "You are interested in India; therefore you may have your next life as an Indian," 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 previous lives, and, secondly, that there are plenty more rebirths in which any merit you possess may have its just recompense of reward, the caste system has flourished like the Psalmist's green bay tree, though its influence has been more like that of the deadly upas.

If you are a high-caste man you may not only refuse to eat with or touch a low-caste man, your equal perhaps in {229} intelligence and in morals, but in some cases you may even demand that the low-caste man shall not pollute you by coming too near you on the road. On page 540 of the 1901 "Census of India Report" will be found a table showing at what distances the presence of certain inferior classes become contaminating to a Brahmin! Moreover, the low-caste man, offensive to men, is taught that he is equally offensive to the gods. He must not worship in the temples; must not even approach them. Usually it is taken for granted that no Pariah will take such a liberty, but in some places I have seen signs in English posted on the temple gates warning tourists who have low-caste servants that these servants cannot enter the 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 "beneath him." The cook will not sweep; the messenger boy would not pick up a book from the floor. The liveried Brahmin who takes your card at the American Consulate in Calcutta once lost his place rather than pick up a slipper; rather than humiliate himself in such fashion he would walk half a mile to get some other servant for the duty. It is no uncommon thing to find that your servant will carry a package for you, but will hire another servant if a small package of his own is to be moved. "I had a boy for thirteen years, the best boy I ever had, till he died of the plague," a Bombay Englishman said to me, "and he shaved me regularly all the time. But when I gave him a razor with which to shave himself, I found it did no good. He would have 'lost caste' if he had done barber's work for anybody but a European!"

"I have a good sweeper servant," a Calcutta minister told me, "but if I should attempt to promote him beyond his caste and make a house-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 a school 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, and whenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their most valuable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full 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 place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kinsmen have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution that would come from actual contact with the chiprassi." Moreover, there are social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business of his family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged!

Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta {231} tells how one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a dead animal!

My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a well-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 activities of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your house at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar."

In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying things 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 were coming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great majority of cases."

India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has {232} developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and the system now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave (or from the time the conch shell announces the birth of a man-child till the funeral pyre consumes his body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name.

"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, as I have also asked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems to be 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, a Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the Allabahad Exposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presiding officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting in part 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 have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that his sons were "ordained" of Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop a gully with," and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no matter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system is rotting down in other places and some time or other this "ordained" theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited.

The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies of caste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbows under any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars--and they prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart to reach a place which is but a few hours by train. Consequently the priests have had to wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as they had to get around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which has been handled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have seen Brahmins hired to give water to passersby), but the priests decided that the payment of water-rates might be regarded as atonement for the possible defilement, and consequently Hindus now have the advantages of the city water supply.

Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather severely. The Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving the boundaries of India, but the folk have progressed from technical evasion of the law to open violation of its provisions. In Jeypore I saw the half-acre of trunks and chests which the Maharaja of that province used for transporting his goods and chattels when he went to attend the coronation of the King of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the Hindus, claims descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when he 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, a six-months' supply of Ganges water, etc., he might take enough of India with him to make the trip in safety, and he went. Now many are going without any such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the priests usually enables them to resume caste relations upon their return.

Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu merchant of Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi friend of mine on a voyage from Europe, said just before reaching Bombay: "Well, I shall have to pay for all this when I get home, and I shall be lucky if I get off without making a pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of our religion. And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I have broken caste by eating with foreigners." My impression is, however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of foreign travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of the most eminent Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. "Caste has kept me from going abroad until now," he told me, "but I have made up my mind to let it interfere no longer. Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to Europe and possibly to America."

Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As in the olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. In Muttra I found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as sexton of a Christian church whose members are sweepers--outcast folk whom as a Hindu he would have scorned to touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of Christianity frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low caste, even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher regard from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad some years ago the son of a poor sweeper who became a Christian, and was a youth of such fine promise that a way was {235} found for him to attend Oxford University. Returning, he became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission School and won such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he died the whole city--Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike--stopped for 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 a modicum of education. Perhaps it was planned originally as a means of preserving the racial integrity and political superiority of the Aryan invaders, but for unnumbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic engine of oppression and social injustice. At the present time no blood or social difference separates the great majority of castes from the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so high an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in the beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race and blood.

If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished, as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restricting the right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which he is fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants. Booker Washington, born in the South's lowest ranks, becomes a world-figure; had he been born in India's lowest caste, he would have remained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to preserve race integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd.

Bombay, India.

In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Compton remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in their cradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; they are sometimes promised in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they are born.

"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when an American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the negative, "Why not? Couldn't they get anybody to have you?"

"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow," is an Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman is hard 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 women within its reach it enslaves all.

I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of a civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom. In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" who always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dharma Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw from 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 for the 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 been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or--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 a god. "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands," says Manu, "no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven." And a recent Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (the Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to worship the gods."

Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old before they are thirty!

If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate {238} and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her husband's home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.

In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed a crime--though it must always be remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys and girls in the United States.

One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast (if such a strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are. From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers; and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as {239} to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not merely "playing wedding" instead of being principal participants in a serious ceremony!

The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000 rupees, or $1633, was none too high.

Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among the humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also be paid for his indispensable services.

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Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of my girls are engaged to be married," Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the boys are seated."

Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly 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 and insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--his bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the very simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.

And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime," mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a worthier monument.

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There are many places in India to which I should like to give a paragraph. I should like to write much of Delhi and its palaces in which the Great Moguls once lived in a splendor worthy of the monarchs in the Arabian Nights--no wonder the stately Diwan-i-Khas, or Hall of Public Audience, bears the famous inscription in Persian:

In the ruins of seven dead and deserted Delhis round about the present city and the monuments and memorials which commemorate "the old far-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 the English women and children (with the handful of men) who were butchered in cold blood by the treacherous Nana Dhundu Pant; and I was greatly interested in meeting in Muttra one of the few living men, a Christianized Brahmin, who as a small boy witnessed that terrible massacre which for cruelty and heartlessness is almost without a parallel in modern history.

In Agra is the Pearl Mosque, which is itself an architectural triumph splendid enough to make the city famous if the Taj had not already made it so; the Great Temple in Madura is one of the most impressive of the strictly Hindu structures in India; in Madras I found a curious reminder of early missionary activity in the shape of a cathedral which is supposed to shelter the remains of the Apostle Thomas; and the ruins of the once proud and imperial but now utterly deserted cities of Amber and Fatehpuhr-Sikri have a strange and melancholy interest. But all these have been often enough described, and there are things of greater pith and moment in present-day India to which we can better give attention.

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One thing concerning India, which should perhaps have been said in the beginning, but which has not had attention until now, is the fact that it is no more a homogeneous country than Europe is--has perhaps, indeed, a greater variety of languages, peoples, and racial and traditional differences than the European continent. I have already called attention to the fact that there are 2378 castes. There are also 40 distinct nationalities or races and 180 languages. For an utterly alien race to govern peacefully such a heterogeneous conglomeration of peoples, representing all told nearly one fifth of the population of the whole earth, is naturally one of the most difficult administrative feats in history, and Mr. Roosevelt probably did not give the English too high praise when he declared: "In India we encounter the most colossal example history affords of the successful administration by men of European blood of a thickly populated region in another continent. It is the greatest feat of the kind that has been performed since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Indeed, it is a greater feat than was performed under the Roman Empire."

I was interested to find that the American-born residents of India give, if anything, even higher praise to British rule than the British themselves. "I regard the English official in India," one distinguished 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 to trust the justice of the British to that of the Brahmins." In Delhi an American missionary expressed the opinion that the American Government, if in control of India, would not be half so lenient with the breeders of sedition and anarchy as is the British Government.

It should be said, however, that there are now fewer of these malcontents, and these few are less influential than at any time for some years past. In Madras I was very glad to get an interview with Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer, one of the most distinguished of the Hindu leaders.