lage or to any farm. Every one who
has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that
make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory,
and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of
cryptomerias--gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the
cedars of Lebanon--that line the road leading to the great Shogun
Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.

Lastly, these people are fired by the thought that a better day is
coming. Their children are going to school, as the {28} older folk
could not, and as a Japanese editor said to me this week:

"Every boy in the empire believes he may some day become Premier!"

What is the lesson of it all? Is it not just this: That we in America
should feel highly favored in that we have such magnificent resources,
and yet as sharply rebuked in that we are doing so little with them.

And most of all, is there not need for us to emulate the broad
patriotism and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice in which the Land
of the Rising Sun, in spite of dire poverty, is providing ten-months
schools for every boy and girl in all its borders? And, indeed, how
otherwise can we make sure, before it is too late, that our American
farm boys and girls will not be outdistanced in twentieth-century
achievement by the children of a people our fathers regarded only as
hopeless "heathen?"

Tokyo, Japan.

{29}

IV

"WELFARE WORK" IN JAPANESE FACTORIES

The obvious truth is that the agricultural population of Japan is too
congested. It is a physical impossibility for a people to live in
genuine comfort on such small pocket-handkerchief pieces of land, even
though their standards do not call for shoes or tables, beds or
chairs, Western houses or Western clothing. The almost exclusive use
of hand labor, too, is uneconomic, seen from a large standpoint, and
it would seem that in future farmers must combine, as they are already
beginning to do, in order to purchase horses and horse-power tools to
be used in common by a number of farmers. In the Tokyo Seed, Plant &
Implement Company store the other day I saw a number of widely
advertised American tools, and the manager told me the demand for them
is increasing.

Thus with a smaller number of men required to produce the nation's
food, a larger number may engage in manufacturing, and gradually the
same principle of division of labor which has brought Western people
to high standards of living, comfort, and earning powe