flows right here in Seoul."

Yet another kind of conservation to which our people in Occidental
lands need to give more earnest heed is the conservation of the
individual wealth of the people. The wastefulness of the average
American is apparent enough from a comparison of conditions here with
conditions in Europe--when I came back from my first European trip I
remarked that "Europe would live on what America wastes"--but a
comparison of conditions in America with those in the Orient is even
more to our discredit. In Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan we find a
glorification of the Japanese character that is unquestionably
overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful
display of fashion's fevered followers in America and the ideals of
simple living that distinguished old Japan, there is a rebuke for us
whose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old Japanese sage like Baron
Shibusawa, who, like Count Okuma, it seems might well have been one of
Plutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the
extravagance of America as the thing that impressed him more {265}
than anything else in traveling in our country. "To spend so much
money in making a mere railroad station palatial as you have done in
Washington, for example, seems to me uneconomic," he declared.

What most impressed him and other Oriental critics with whom I talked,
be it remembered, was the wastefulness of expenditures not for genuine
comforts but for fashion and display--the vagaries of idle rich women
who pay high prices for half-green strawberries in January but are
hunting some other exotic diet when the berries get deliciously ripe
in May, and who rave over an American Beauty in December but have no
eyes for the full-blown glory of the open-air roses in June. It is
such unnatural display that most grates against the "moral duty of
simplicity of life," as Eastern sages have taught it.

"When I was in the Imperial University here in Tokyo," a Japanese
newspaper man said to me, "my father gave me six yen a month, $3
American money. I paid for room, light, and food $1.20 a month; for
tuition, 50 cents; for paper, books, etc., 30 cents; and this left me
$1 for pocket money expenditures, including the occasional treat of
eating potatoes with sugar!" In such Spartan simplicity the victors of
Mukden, Liao-yang and Port Arthur were bred.

The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, whose tomb at
Nikko situated at the end of a