rasp the physical conditions of our
agriculture. And they are always forgetting the warm dankness of our
climate. They forget, too, that implements for hand use are more
efficient than machinery, and, if labour be cheap, more economical.
They forget above all that we are of necessity a small-holdings
country."

Is it such a bad thing to be a small-holdings country? Does the rural
life of countries which are pre-eminently small-holding, like Denmark
and Holland, compare so unfavourably with that of England? I wonder
how much money has been sunk--most of it lost--during the past quarter
of a century in attempts to increase small holdings in England.

"Because we have much remote, wild, uncultivated land," the speaker I
have interrupted continued, "that is not to say that most of it, often
at a high elevation, or sloping, or poor in quality, as well as
remote, can be profitably broken up for paddies. Much of this land can
be and ought to be utilised in one fashion or another, but we have
found some experiments in this direction unprofitable, even when rice
was dear. But it may be said, Why break up this wild land into
paddies? Why not have nice grassy slopes for cattle as in Switzerland?
But our experts have tried in vain to get grass established. The heavy
rains and the heat enable the bamboo grass to overcome the new fodder
grass we have sown. The first year the fodder grass grows nicely, but
the second year the bamboo grass conquers. In Hokkaido and Saghalien
we are conquering bamboo grass with fodder grass. The advice to go in
largely for fruit ignores the fact of our steamy damp climate, which
encourages sappy growth, disease and those insects which are so
numerous in Japan. We cannot do much more than grow for home
consumption."

"The advice to draw the cultivation of our small farms under group
control has not always been profitable when followed by landlords,"
one who had not yet spoken remarked. "They have not always made more
when they farmed themselves than when they let their land. All the
world over, land workers do better for themselves than for others.
Proposals further to capitalise farming which, with a rural exodus
already going on, would have the effect of driving people off the land
who are employed on it healthily and with benefit to the social
organism, do not seem to offer a more satisfactory situation for
Japan. No country has shown itself less afraid of business combination
than Japan, and the