fe. Evidently the sea very largely affords industry and
sustenance to the people, for there is no botlom or prairie land, as
we call the level or slightly rolling fields in America. There was not
a spot from first to last visible in Japan, as seen from the water,
or in an excursion on the land, where there is room to turn around a
horse and plow. The ground is necessarily turned up with spades and
mellowed with hoes and cakes, all, of course, by human hands. This is
easy compared with the labor in constructing terraces. The mountains
have been conquered to a considerable extent in this way, and it is
sensational to see how thousands of steep places have been cut and
walled into gigantic stairways, covering slopes that could hardly
answer for goat pasture, until the shelves with soil placed on them
for cultivation have been wrought, and the terraces are like wonderful
ladders bearing against the skies. So rugged is the ground, however,
that many mountains are unconquerable, and there are few traces
of the terraces, though here and there, viewed from a distance,
the evidences that land is cultivated as stairways leaning against
otherwise inaccessible declivities. I have never seen elsewhere
anything that spoke so unequivocably of the endless toil of men,
women and children to find footings upon which to sow the grain
and fruit that sustain life. It is not to be questioned that the
report, one-twelfth, only of the surface of Japan is under tillage,
is accurate. The country is more mountainous than the Alleghenies,
and some of it barren as the wildest of the Rockies on the borders of
the bad lands, and it is volcanic, remarkably so, even more subject
to earthquakes than the Philippines. The whole of Japan occupies
about as much space as the two Dakotas or the Philippines, and the
population is forty-two millions. With work as careful and extensive
as that of the agricultural mountaineers of Japan, the Dakotas would
support one hundred million persons. But they would have to present the
washing away of the soil and the waste through improvident ignorance
or careless profligacy of any fertilizer, or of any trickle of water
needed for irrigation. One of the features of the terraces is that
the rains are saved by the walls that sustain the soil, and the
gutters that guide the water conserve it, because paved with pebbles
and carried down by easy stages, irrigating one shelf after another
of rice or vegetables, whatever is grown,