world owes as much to industry as to agriculture,
and I am not in the least afraid of machinery and capital; but
production is not our final aim. Production is to serve us; we are not
to serve production. If people can live in self-respect on the land
they are better off in many ways than if they are engaged in industry
in some of its modern developments."

"The world is also better off," my interpreter in his notes records me
as saying when I was pressed to state my opinion. "The day will come
when the uselessness and waste of a certain proportion of industry and
commerce will be realised, when the saving power of an export and
import trade in unnecessary things will be questioned and when the
cultivator of the ground will be restored to the place in social
precedence he held in Old Japan. With him will rank the other real
producers in art, literature and science, industry and commerce. The
industrialisation of the West and its capitalistic system have not
been so perfectly successful in their social results for it to be
certain that Japan should be hurried more quickly in the industrial
and capitalistic direction than she is travelling already.[292] If she
takes time over her development, the final results may be better for
her and for the world. I have not noticed that Japanese rural people
who have departed from a simple way of life through the acquirement of
many farms or the receipt of factory dividends have become worthier.
On the question of the alleged over-population of rural Japan, one
Japanese investigator has suggested to me that as many as 20 per
cent. could be advantageously spared from agricultural labour. But he
was not himself an agriculturist or an ex-agriculturist. He was not
even a rural resident. Further, he conceived his 20 per cent. as
entering rural rather than urban industry.

"A great deal of afforestation and better use of a large proportion of
forest land, much more co-operation for borrowing and buying, improved
implements where improved implements can be profitably used, animal
and mechanical power where they can be employed to advantage, paddy
adjustment to the limit of the practical, more intelligent manuring, a
wider use of better seeds,[293] the bringing in of new land which is
capable of yielding a profit when an adequate expenditure is made upon
it, a mental and physical education which is ever improving--all
these, joined to better ways of life generally, are obvious avenues of
im