them, our strong points
and emphasize them.

For these reasons, I made my trip through the Orient with an increased
desire to bring home the lessons its long experience should teach us.
And now that I come to summarize these lessons I find a single note
running through all--from beginning to end. And this keynote may be
given in a single word. Conservation: the conservation not only of our
natural resources, but of racial strength and power, of industrial
productiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of finer things of
the spirit.

Taking up first the matter of natural resources, I may mention that
hardly anything that I saw on my entire trip burned itself more deeply
into my memory than the heavy penalty that the Celestial Empire is now
paying for the neglect of her forests in former years.

In the country north of Peking I found river valley after river valley
once rich and productive but now become an abomination of
desolation--covered with countless tons of sand and stone brought down
from the treeless mountainsides. So long as these slopes were
forest-clad, the decaying leaves and humus gave a sponge-like
character to the soil upon them, and it gave out the water gradually
to the streams below. Now, however, the peaks are in most cases only
enormous rock-piles, the erosion having laid waste the country
roundabout; or else they are mixtures of rock and earth rent by gorges
through which furious torrents rush down immediately after each
rainfall, submerging once fruitful plains with rock and infertile
gully-dirt. Where the thrifty, pig-tailed Chinese peasant once
cultivated broad and level fields in such river valleys, he is now
able to rescue only a few half-hearted patches by piling the rock in
heaps and saving a few intervening arable remnants from the general
soil-wreck.

Especially memorable was the ruin--if one may call it such--of a once
deep river, its bed now almost filled with {263} sand and rock, that I
crossed on my little Chinese donkey not far from the Nankou Pass and
the Great Wall. Even the splendid arches of a bridge, built to span
its ancient flood, were almost submerged in sand. Instead of the
constant stream of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in
each rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit behind,
and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a desert. So it
was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone bridge, almost
sand-covered like an Egypt