een 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 London _Times_ correspondent
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 a