an and English country life, it is no
wonder that thousands of farmers are leaving their two and three acre
plots, too small to produce a decent living for a family, to try their
fortunes in the factories and the towns. Specifically, it may be
mentioned that the boys from the farms who go into the army for the
compulsory two years' service are reported as seldom returning to the
country.

True, the government is trying to help matters to some extent (though
this is indeed but little) by lending money to banks at low rates of
interest with the understanding that the farmers may then borrow from
these banks at rates but little higher; and there are also in most
communities, I learn, "cooperative credit societies" (corresponding
somewhat to the mutual building and loan societies in American towns),
by means of which the farmers escape the clutches of the Shylock
money-lenders who have heretofore charged as high as 20 to 30 per
cent. for advances. The Japanese farmers invest their surplus funds in
these "cooperative credit societies," just as they would in savings
banks, except that in their case their savings are used solely for
helping their immediate neighbors and neighborhoods. A judicious
committee passes upon each small loan, and while the interest rates
might seem high to us, we have to remember that money everywhere here
commands higher interest than in America.

{26}

I am the more interested in these "cooperative credit societies,"
because they seem to me to embrace features which our American farmers
would do well to adopt.

It is said that the farmers live on better food than they had twenty
years ago, but I should think that there has been little improvement
in the little thatch-roofed houses in which they live. These houses
are grouped into small villages, as are the farm houses in Europe, the
farmer going out from the settlement to his fields each working day,
much after the fashion of the workers on the largest American
plantations. Buildings corresponding to our American two-story houses
are almost never seen in towns here and absolutely never in farming
sections, the farm home, like the town home, usually consisting of a
story and a half, with sliding walls of paper-covered sash between the
rooms, a sort of box for the fire on which the meals are cooked, and
no chimney--little better, though much cleaner, than the negro cabins
in the South. In winter the people nearly freeze, or would but for the
fac