ing as follows: (1)
farmers, (2) artisans, (3) merchants. And farming was thus not only
regarded as the most honorable of all occupations, but farmers in the
early ages were privileged to wear swords, the emblem of rank next to
the nobility. Below the farmers ranked the mechanic element, while as
Lafcadio Hearn tells us:

"The commercial class (A kindo), including bankers, merchants,
shopkeepers, and traders of all kinds, was the lowest officially
recognized. The business of money-making was held in contempt by the
superior classes; and all methods of profiting by the purchase and
resale of the produce of labor were regarded as dishonorable. . . .
There is a generally, in militant society, small respect for the
common forms of labor. But in old Japan the occupation of the farmer
and artisan were not despised; trade alone appears to have been
considered degrading, and the distinction may have been partly a
moral one."

I wonder if there is not really a great deal more than we have
realized in what Hearn here suggests as to the soundness and essential
"morality" of the Japanese plan of ranking farming and manufacturing
above trade as occupations? Morally and economically considered, it is
the men who actually produce wealth rather than those men who trade or
barter in the products of other men's labor who deserve most honor.
They serve the world best: The barterers are, in limited numbers,
necessary and useful servants of those who do produce, but the
strength of a state manifestly lies in the classes who are really
creators of values.

Tokyo, Japan.

{17}

III

JAPANESE FARMING AND FARMER FOLK

I went yesterday to the Agricultural College of the Imperial
University of Japan, situated at Komaba, near Tokyo, where I had an
appointment with Director Matsui. My purpose was to get further
information concerning the general condition of Japanese farmers and
Japanese farming, but the biggest fact my researches brought out was
not in regard to rice or barley or potatoes or taro, or any other
field product of the Mikado's empire.

Rather it was a fact with regard to what is in every land the most
important of all crops--the crop of boys and girls. And the big fact I
discovered was simply this:

These brown Mongolian farm children, whose land we opened to
civilization but fifty years ago, and whom we thought of but yesterday
as backward "heathen"--they are getting, as a general proposition,