just twice as much schooling as is furnished pupils in many of our
American rural districts: their parents are providing, in their zeal
for their children's welfare, just twice as good educational
facilities as we are giving many of our white farm boys and
girls--boys and girls who have in their veins the blood of a race
which has carried the flag of human progress for a thousand years, and
whom we are expecting to continue leaders in civilization and
enlightenment.

In other words, so Doctor Matsui told me (and I went to-day to the
Japanese National Department of Education to verify the fact), the
Japanese farm boys and girls are getting ten months' schooling a year,
while the farm boy or girl {18} in my own state is getting only five
or six months--and when I was in a country school fifteen years ago,
not nearly so much as that! Do you wonder that I avoided telling the
Japanese educational officer just how our provision for farm boys and
girls compared with Japan's? Also that I neglected to tell him how we
compare in the matter of utilizing school advantages, when he showed
me that of all the children between six and fourteen in all the empire
of Japan the school attendance is 98 per cent.--98 out of every 100
children of "school age" attending school, and in several provinces 99
out of every 100! Thirty-five years ago the average school attendance
in Japan was only 28, and in 1893 only 59, but by the time of the war
with Russia it had passed 90, and since then has been climbing
straight and steadily toward the amazing maximum itself, the official
figures showing a gain of 1 per cent, a year--94 per cent., then 95,
then 96, then 97, and now 98, and the leaders are now ambitious for 99
or 100, as they told me to-day.

When this officer of an "inferior race" showed me, furthermore, that
Japan is so intent upon educating every boy and girl in her borders
that she compels attendance on the public schools for eight years, I
didn't tell him that in civilized America, in the great enlightened
nation so long held up to him as a model, demagogues and others in
many states on one pretext or another have defeated every effort for
effective compulsory education laws, so that if a boy's parents are
indifferent to his future, the state does not compel them to give him
a fighting chance in life--for the state's own sake and for the boy's.

{19}

[Illustration: JAPANESE FARMING SCENES.]
The upper picture shows a rice fiel