{53}
THE GREAT BUDDHA (DIABUTSU) AT KAMAKURA.
This gigantic figure of Buddha (a man's head would barely reach the statue's feet) singularly expresses the spirit of serene contemplation for which the Buddhist religion stands; is indeed, hauntingly suggestive of that dreamy Nirvana which it teaches is the goal of existence. There is perhaps no finer piece of statuary in the East than this.
{54}
THE DEGENERATE KOREANS AT REST AND AT WORK.
The favorite occupation is smoking, but in the lower picture three men together are managing to operate one spade. One man rams it into the ground, and the other two (by means of ropes attached) jerk out the shovelful of earth!
{52 continued}
The wife of the missionary I visited in Osaka told me one or two amusing incidents--amusing in one aspect and pathetic in another--that are of interest in this connection. A Japanese member of her church declared: "No, no, Mrs. {55} Hail, you can't ever make me believe that my wife is as good as I am!" On another occasion she was teaching a Sunday-school class concerning the woman of Samaria, and asked: "Why did Jesus ask the woman to call her husband?" And the Japanese answer was: "Because he was going to talk on intellectual things and she needed some man to help her understand!"
Dr. Sidney Gulick, with whom I had tea in Kyoto, tells of tying his wife's shoes on the street, on one occasion, only to find the Japanese amazed that a man should so humble himself. His wife's taking his arm in walking was also regarded as the height of impropriety!
No religion of the Far East has ever recognized the dignity of woman, probably because no religion has ever recognized the worth of the individual. Just as I have said, that in the old days, and almost as largely to-day, in the relations of the home, it was the family that counted and not the individual, so in his relations to the larger world beyond the individual formerly counted for nothing when weighed against the wishes of the superior classes. In the earliest days, when the lord died, a number of his subjects were buried with him to wait upon his spirit in the Beyond. Later, with the same object in view, wives and servants committed suicide on the death of the master. Even now it is regarded as honorable for a girl to sell herself into shame to save the family from want.
The same antipodal difference between East and West--here "the family is the social unit" and with us the individual himself--explains the system of adoption: a younger son not being essential to the maintenance of the family cult may be adopted into another family, while the eldest son may not. On the same principle the father rules, not because of what he represents as an Individual, but because he represents the Family. Whenever he chooses, he abdicates, and must then join his other children in obeying the eldest son.
In the relations of citizenship the same disregard of {56} individual rights was the ancient rule, not merely in the fact that for centuries the smallest details of everyday life were regulated by law, but more seriously in that the Samurai, or privileged class, might "cut down in cold blood a beggar, a merchant, or a farmer on the slightest provocation, or simply for the purpose of testing his sword," while in case of the ruin of their cause it was the honorable and natural thing for soldiers to commit "hari-kiri"--that is to say, commit suicide by disemboweling themselves. A Japanese writer recently declared that "the value of the individual life is an illustration of the Christian spirit" that is profoundly influencing Japan, and he mentioned as an example that formerly suicide, in such circumstances as I have mentioned, "was regarded as an honorable act; now it is regarded as a sin."
Without professing the religion of fatalism which so influences the peoples of the Nearer East, the Japanese soldiers behave like fatalists because the fundamental basis of the social order for centuries has been the necessity of the Individual to sacrifice pleasure, comfort, or life itself when required either by the Family or by the Social Order. And this partially explains why it is said in sober earnest that the highest ambition of most Japanese schoolboys to-day is to die for their Emperor.
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:
"Oh, East is East, and West is West,and never the twain shall meet."
But while the yellow man had thus moved steadily eastward, the 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.
{60}
VIIKOREA: "THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM"
I have become a contemporary of David and the patriarchs of Israel. In the civilization into which I have come science and invention are in swaddling clothes, the Pyramids are yet young, the great nations of Western Europe still in the womb of Time.
This at least is how I have felt now that, having left Japan, I am travelling through Korea, "the Land of the Morning Calm"--or "Chosen," as the Japanese will call it hereafter--whose authentic recorded history runs back into the twelfth century before the Christian era, and whose general features must have changed but little in all this time. A typical Korean view of the present year might well be photographed to illustrate a Sunday-school lesson from the Old Testament.
The men in the fields I have seen plow with bullocks harnessed in the primitive fashion of the earliest civilization. Their plow stocks are of wood rough-hewn from their native forest trees, the plowman here never standing between the "plow-handles," as we say, because there is only one handle and that little better than a stick of firewood. With sickles equally primitive I have seen men cutting the ripe rice in the fields; with flails, beating out their grain. Their houses, hardly high enough to stand up in, are little more than four square rock walls with roofs of straw, over which pumpkin vines clamber or on which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun. Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or what was once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea.
There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp out under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem to burn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awaken in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few short months ago.
As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangely robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of massive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.
In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but little higher than one's head, and I shall never forget what a towering skyscraper effect is produced by a photographer's little two-story studio building on the main street of the city. Practically every other building is but little higher and not greatly larger as a rule, than the pens in which our American farmers fatten hogs in the fall. Most American merchants would expect to make more in a day than the average white-robed, easy-going Seoul merchant has in stock, but he smokes his long-stemmed pipe in peaceful contemplation of the world and doesn't worry. There are no sidewalks in Seoul, of course, although it has been for five centuries (until now) the capital of a kingdom, and a quarter of a million people call the city their home; no carriages or buggies, no sewerage, and but few horses. There are miserable little overloaded ponies that the average farmer would feel that he could pitch single-handed into his barn-loft, but the burden-carriers are mostly bulls that are really magnificent in appearance, both oxen and ponies carrying loads on their backs that an American would expect to crush them.
The customs are odd indeed. Men wear enormous straw hats as a badge of mourning, but the usual style of head-dress is to shave the extreme summit of the head, while the rest of the hair grows long and is braided up in a sort of topknot with a little bird-cage hat above it. This hat is then tied under the chin as an American woman would tie hers.
Girls are but little seen on the streets, custom requiring them to stay indoors before marriage, and the married women, when on the street are likely to wear a sort of green wrap thrown over their heads and shoulders that leaves only their eyes and contiguous facial territory exposed. The tourist is at first {63} inclined to think that there are many young girls on the streets, but this is because the boys dress as we have grown used to seeing girls dress in America. Take the young boy who waits on my table: fair of feature in his neat white dress, and with a long glossy hair-plait hanging down his back, you would think him some fair Korean maiden. When he gets married a little later, probably at seventeen or eighteen, he will shave his head (not necessarily as a sign of mourning!) and wear his hair thereafter in the manner described in the preceding paragraph. An English missionary-doctor's pretty daughter here yesterday (and how pretty an English or American girl does look in this far land!) told me that a Korean girl of twenty or twenty-one is regarded as a rather desperate old maid, and the go-betweens, who arrange the marriages here as they do in Japan, are likely to charge a rather steep sum for getting a husband for one so far advanced in spinsterhood! The chances are that the groom doesn't see his bride until the ceremony, and she doesn't even see him then, for according to the curious custom here the bride's eyes are sealed up until late afternoon of her wedding day. More than this, custom requires that the bride must keep absolutely unbroken silence all the day long, and for a varying length of time thereafter. Mrs. Bishop in her book on Korea asserts that "it may be a week or several months before the husband knows the sound of his wife's voice,"--and the nature of the dear creatures in America will of course insure the ready acceptance of her statement!
The go-betweens are often not very scrupulous, and for good fees sometimes manage to palm off damsels of unsatisfactory features on unsuspecting swains, or match undesirable young fellows with girls vastly superior to them. A rather amusing instance was reported to me by the young lady from whom I have just quoted. One of the officials or noblemen in Seoul had a daughter whom the go-between was preparing to marry off into a family of rank in another city. A few days before the wedding-day-set-to-be, some one came to {64} the father of the bride and said: "Did you know that your prospective son-in-law has a hare-lip?" Now a hare-lip in Korea is not merely such an undesirable addition to one's countenance as to make a Mrs. Wiggs happy because of being without it, but under the old dispensation no one with a harelip, or other like facial blemish, could be presented at court and thereby introduced into the Four Hundred of this capital city. Therefore the father waxed thoughtful from his topknot to the end of his long-stem pipe. "I tell you what I'll do," he finally said to his wife. "We'll go ahead with the ceremony, but instead of my daughter I'll substitute my orphan niece." And he did, and the young fellow didn't know any better for a week. Fortunately, however, my story doesn't end here. I am extremely glad to add the usual "lived-happily-ever-after" peroration, for that was really what happened in this case. The father of my young lady informant, who is a doctor, sewed up the young fellow's lip, he was presented at court, and the real daughter who so narrowly escaped marrying may be an old maid, for all I know.
In such a high, dry climate as this one would expect to find little tuberculosis, but I am told that there is really a great deal of it, due to the carelessness of the families where there are victims, and to the generally unsanitary conditions. A daughter of one of the Southern missionaries here, having contracted the malady, has just gone to Arizona in search of cure. Everywhere on the streets I encounter faces marked by smallpox, and formerly to have had the disease was the rule rather than the exception. In fact, instead of alluding to a man's inexperience by saying "He hasn't cut his eye teeth," as we do, a Korean would say: "He hasn't had smallpox." Since vaccination became the rule, however, there are very few cases.
Infant mortality here, as in America, is one of the greatest factors in the high death-rate, but conditions are improving. {65} And so long as authorities declare that in America half the infant death-rate is due to ignorance or neglect, we haven't much right to point a scornful finger at Korea, anyhow.
I have already alluded to the fact that the old monarchial government of Korea ended its inglorious career but a few short months ago. While the records of the nation run back more than three thousand years--probably to a period when Job was so superbly reproaching his comforters in the Land of Uz--the late dynasty runs back only 500 years. We Americans, I may say in passing, are accustomed to think of men of five hundred years ago, or even of John Smith and Pocahontas, as very ancient, but a pedigree of only five hundred years wouldn't entitle a family to enter good society over here. But though only five hundred years in power, this recent dynasty succeeded in doing about as much devilment and as little good as many dynasties much older in years. One of the missionaries explained to me yesterday that it was only when the King got very mad that he would order heads cut off without reason--but then the Koreans are very lazy and his inactivity at other periods may have been due to sloth.
The truth is, that most of these Oriental monarchies have been corrupt beyond the belief of the average American. When I was a boy I used to hear the old men in country churches thank God for the blessings of orderly government and for the privilege of worshipping as they chose, "with no one to molest us or make us afraid." As a rule, we take such things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia and into countries where the people have been cursed by corrupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths:--when he, in short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges somewhat more highly.
{66}
The old Korean dynasty was not only corrupt, but unspeakably stupid. Like the people, the King relied on sorcerers or fortune-tellers to find a lucky day or a lucky time of the moon to do whatever he wished, and in case of sickness consulted the mutang, or conjurer, instead of a doctor. Thus when the prince had smallpox some years ago, the mutang declared that the Smallpox Spirit or devil (who must always be referred to with great respect as "His Excellency") would not leave unless allowed to ride horseback clear to the Korean boundary, three hundred miles away; and a gayly caparisoned horse was accordingly led the entire distance for His Excellency, the Smallpox Spirit, to ride away on!
The government was also unfeignedly corrupt. Offices were given, just as lives were taken merely at the whim of the Throne. Taxes were farmed out, the grafting collectors taking from the people probably five or six times as much as finally reached the public treasury. More than this, the nobility robbed the people at will, and there was no authority from whom they could get redress. Woe unto the man who became energetic and industrious under the old dispensation! First, the tax-gatherers would relieve him of the bulk of his swollen fortune, and what was left the noble or "Yang-ban," as a noble was called, would take the trouble to borrow but never take the trouble to repay. For the Yang-ban was a "gentleman," he was. It was beneath his dignity to work--even to guide the reins of the horse he rode--but it was not beneath his dignity to sponge on his friends (I think the verb "to sponge" is too expressive to remain slang) or to borrow without repaying. Moreover, in case of extremity, it is said that Mother Yang-ban and Sister Ann might take in washing, as is recorded in the classic lays of our own land, but Father never defiled himself by doing anything so dishonorable as an honest day's work.
But alas and alack! for the degeneracy of our times. The Yang-bans in Korea have been deprived of their ancient {67} privileges, and I fear that even their fellows in America are by no means treated with the ancient deference and respect due to persons of such exalted merit and blue-blood.
What with the arbitrary and oppressive system of tax-robbery and the extortions of the Yang-bans it is not surprising that the Koreans here became disinclined to labor, while those who went to Manchuria, where there has been "proper security for the gains of industry" are said to be quite a different folk--energetic because there has been encouragement to be energetic. The old Korean system of taxation being arbitrary, the only way to escape a raid by the tax-gatherer was to appear not to have anything worth raiding, and with the coinage confined usually to the copper "cash" (each "cash" worth a small fraction of a cent), it was difficult for a man to have much money without everybody knowing it. If a man had much he needed a warehouse to store it in. Mrs. Bishop in her book, already referred to, speaks of a time when it took 3200 "cash" to equal a dollar in our money, making each coin worth 1-32 of a cent, and it took six men or one pony to carry $50 worth of coin! Another instance is mentioned in the Japanese official Year Book on Korea. The Japanese army bought $5000 worth of timber in the interior, where the people were not used to any other currency, with the result that "the army had to charter a small steamer and fill her completely with this copper cash to finance the transaction!" I bought a few long, necklace-like strings of this old Korean money at ten cents a string, and even then probably paid too much.
When I bought my ticket for Korea it was nominally an independent monarchy under a Japanese "protectorate," but the day before I sailed from San Francisco, Japanese aggression took another step and the country was formally annexed as a part of the Japanese Empire. There is little doubt, I suppose, that the Japanese will give the Koreans better government than the old monarchy gave them, but one {68} cannot excuse all the methods by which Japan fastened her rule on the island. Yesterday morning I went out to the Old North Palace, a deserted and melancholy memorial of vanished power, stood on the throne where Korean kings once held audience, and saw the royal dwelling in which the Japanese and their aids killed the Queen in 1895, and also saw the place where they burned her body. The Japanese minister at that time was recalled and placed on trial for the offence, and, though he escaped conviction, the evidence of his guilt was undoubted. It has been estimated that in about eighteen months in 1907-'08, "12,916 Koreans, called 'insurgents' by the Japanese and patriots by their fellow countrymen, were killed by the Mikado's soldiers and gendarmes, only 160 of whom lost their lives." This looks more like butchery than war. Moreover, the Japanese themselves have to admit that there were inexcusable delays in paying for land seized from Koreans, and in view of all the circumstances it is questionable whether the Korean hatred or dislike of Japan will become very much less cordial than it is to-day.
Perhaps in no country in the world has missionary work been more successful than in Korea (there are probably 125,000 Protestants now, while there were only 777 thirteen years ago), and I have been interested to learn that there is absolutely no truth in the Japanese newspaper reports that immense numbers of native Christians are leaving the church since annexation. On the contrary, reports from all over the country are good, and Seoul itself is just now in the midst of a most thoroughgoing and successful Christian revival, with 1800 conversions reported during the first ten days. At a Methodist mission school I visited this morning I found that a hundred of the native pupils had been canvassing the town a part of three successive afternoons with the result that they had brought in the names of 697 Koreans expressing a desire to become Christians.
Here in Korea there is no waste of energy or money through {69} denominational divisions. Each denomination has its own sphere of activity, preventing duplication of effort, and my general observation has convinced me that the criticisms of foreign mission work sometimes heard in America are based on a radical misconception of conditions. Even the non-Christians, in the great majority of cases, speak in high praise of the splendid work of the missionaries. A typical expression is that found in the latest issue of the ShanghaiNational Review, now before me, which may be expected to speak impartially. Referring to an address by Doctor Morrison, the Peking correspondent of the LondonTimes, it says:
"Doctor Morrison eulogized the work of the missionaries and we cannot conceive that anybody who really knows of their work at first hand, not as it is to be found in extreme cases, but as ordinarily carried on, should do otherwise than eulogize it."
Seoul, Korea.
{70}
VIIIMANCHURIA--FAIR AND FERTILE
"Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night"--I remember yet how one of the dispatches began which brought so vividly to my mind the meaning of the great death-grapple here between the Japanese and Russian hosts in 1905.
[Footnote: "Uneasily sleeps Mukden to-night. In the main street lamps burn dimly. Along dark roads in heavy dust are marching columns. The cool night is full of the low rustle of movement. Near the station, in over-filled hospitals, are heard low groans. The wounded arrive in a never-ceasing stream of carts, and another stream of ambulances moves northward, for the place must be cleared for to-day's victims. The eternal pines whisper above the Tombs of Chinese Emperors. In the fields watch fires are burning stores and evacuated villages----" And the correspondent goes on to tell of the wearied forces gathering for further fighting with the coming of dawn--men footsore and weak for want of food and water and rest. For forty-eight hours the Japanese had not eaten.]
The story in a nutshell is this:
"After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
"After the capitulation of Port Arthur, Oyama pressed toward Mukden, where Kuropatkin had established his headquarters, and there from February 24 to March 12 occurred probably the most desperate battle in modern history, if not in all history. About eight hundred thousand men were engaged. Again Oyama won, and Kuropatkin retreated in fairly good order about a hundred miles north of Mukden."
So runs the historian's brief record of the titanic struggle 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 LondonTimescorrespondent 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.