ny destroyed the
fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by
poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops. A
member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of
the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body
were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory."

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because
of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the
hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be
laying out "a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures." "The
enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day," Uchimura declared, "are
impaired fertility and floods."

It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do
their ill work. The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not
absorbed there. The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing
with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock. The hills
eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must
have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures. The debris washed
away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower
slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised. Because there is
less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their
banks, and disastrous floods take place. The farmers, the local
authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but
embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely. The real
remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the
mountains[102]. In many places the rivers are flowing above the level
of the surrounding country. The imagination is caught by the fact that
there are four earthquakes a day in Japan[103] and that within a
twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every
year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown
more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen! Every
year 101/2 million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on
river control alone.

Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk. "I
should like," he said, "to press the view that the vaunted expansion
of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and
of armaments out of all proportion to our population[104]."

Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered. "There
is one thing