Part 6 (1/2)
The truth is that the j.a.panese, from camp-followers to commander-in-chief, were prepared for war and the Russians were not.
From the day that Russia, aided by France and Germany, forced j.a.pan to cede back to China some of the fruits of her victory over the Chinese, from that hour j.a.pan nursed and fed fat her rankling grudge and bided her time as deliberately as a tiger waiting to spring. While I was in j.a.pan an Englishman told me that immediately after Russia forced j.a.pan {72} to give up her spoils of victory he was amazed to see the tremendous interest in the military drills in all the j.a.panese schools. When he asked what it meant, there was one frank answer: ”We are getting ready to lick Russia.”
It should also be observed that when the war came on the j.a.panese were not only in a state of preparedness so far as battles.h.i.+ps and army drill and munitions of war were concerned, but they were also prepared in the vital matter of proper medical attendance.
”When your American soldiers went with Shafter into Cuba the army was utterly without proper medical corps and equipment, and the death-rate was disgracefully high. But the first j.a.panese who fell in crossing the Yalu were taken at once to the best of j.a.panese surgeons and cared for in the most approved of modern military hospitals.” So said a frank Scotchman to me yesterday, and in the light of the official statistics I could say nothing in palliation of the unpleasant allusion to America. When the war with Russia ended, Baron Takaki, Surgeon-General of the j.a.panese Army, boasted that whereas in the Spanish-America War ”fourteen men died from preventable diseases to one man killed on the field of battle,” the j.a.panese had lost only one man from disease to every four from bullets. Now the j.a.panese, as usual, had not worked out any of the principles of medical science, sanitation, and hygiene which enabled them to make this remarkable record, but they showed their characteristic facility in taking the white man's inventions and getting as much or more--more in this case--out of them than the white man himself.
The j.a.panese record, showing in such amazing fas.h.i.+on what a wisely directed health organization may accomplish, is worth remembering not only in connection with plans for military efficiency, but also in connection with plans for general public health activities at home.
Every State should spend five times as much for this public health work as at present.
In 1910 the forgetful Manchurian earth bears but few traces {73} of the fierce contest that only five or six years ago scarred its bosom, and the serried shocks of newly harvested corn, _kaoliang_ (sorghum) and millet--in some infrequent instances fertilized by the dead men's bones--are seen on fields where contending armies struggled. Let it be so for a little while; let the Manchurian peasant sow and garner in peace while he may; for still the war cloud hangs heavy above China's Three Eastern Provinces, and in the next struggle the peasant's blood may redden his own fields. For that the fighting has not ended is to me perfectly clear. By reason of the j.a.panese railroad monopoly through the very heart of Southern Manchuria, and her leased territory on the coast, j.a.pan has obtained power bordering on control, and everything goes to show that she has fully made up her mind to complete and retain that control.
Moreover, when one has seen the great Manchurian empire, it is easy to understand how it has now roused the covetousness of j.a.pan just as the temptation a few years ago proved too strong for Russia. Immense farming areas are only thinly settled; some of the richest of the world's mineral resources have only been touched.
A day or two ago I went out to see Mr. Edward C. Parker, in charge of the agricultural experiment farm here (he is a Minnesota man, I believe), and found him enthusiastic over his corn crop just harvested. ”I have been so surprised by the growth of corn this year,”
he declared, ”that I could hardly believe my own eyes. I have never seen finer seed ears anywhere.” Among American states, only Iowa, he declares, is probably more fertile than Manchuria; with stock-raising to prevent land-deterioration, all the vast southern section could beat Illinois growing crops, and the same thing could be said of the northern country but for its colder climate. About Harbin, where the South Manchuria Railway joins the Trans-Siberian Line, one may see cuts thirty feet deep and the soil rich to the bottom. Most of Manchuria is level--strikingly like our Western Corn Belt and Wheat Belt--and the {74} soil is of wind-drift origin ”like a great snow-blanket,” very easily tilled. The plowing is done with a steel-tipped wooden beam such as I have already written of seeing in Korea, and only the favoring physical texture of the soil explains the fat harvests of food, feed, and fuel achieved under such methods.
It has been a positive joy to me in traveling through the country here in late October to see the great shocks of kaoliang, millet and corn (even with labor at 20 cents a day out here, the people don't pull fodder!), quaint-looking farmhouses almost surrounded by well-stuffed barns, and corn cribs packed until the overflowing yellow ears spill out the ampler cracks. The kaoliang is a sort of sorghum, the grain being used for food, while the stalks, which contain but little sugar, are used for fuel. Consequently the barnyards packed to the limit and running over with
”The garnered largess of the fruitful year”
not only mean feed for all the variegated animals that are used in Manchurian agriculture, but fuel for the long Manchurian winters as well. I even find the peasants digging up the roots and stubble to be dried and burned in the houses.
One sees but a small proportion of good horses here, and practically no four-wheeled farm wagons. Unlike j.a.pan, however, Manchuria does have its farm vehicles: great heavy two-wheeled carts drawn by from two to eight horses, donkeys, and a.s.ses. Sometimes there is a big horse or two, then one or two donkeys half the size of the horses, and a couple of little a.s.ses or burros half the size of the donkeys--and maybe a bull thrown in for good measure. It looks as if the Whole Blamed Family of work-stock had been hitched to pull the cart. The Whole Blamed Family is often needed, too, for the roads in China are ample proof that we needn't expect ours in America or anywhere else to get any better by letting them alone three thousand years. The Chinese have tried it, and it doesn't work. The October roads are so bad in many places that if {75} the carts had four wheels instead of two not even the combined aggregation in the team could pull them out of the mud. A little later, however, the roads freeze over solidly and stay so for five or six months--and then the Manchurian farmers go on long, slow pilgrimages carrying their products to the larger markets--sometimes two or three hundred miles from home.
The pride and glory of Manchuria, the talk of its citizens, the foundation of its prosperity, the backbone of its commerce, the symbol of its wealth, is the bean--the common soja, or soy bean as we know it. What corn is to our Corn Belt and what cotton is to our Southern States, that the bean is to Manchuria: supreme among products. There is no cla.s.s of people not affected by the prosperity or the adversity of his Majesty the Bean. Bankers, merchants, farmers, even the ladies one meets in the drawing-rooms in the foreign concessions, not only ”know beans,” but can talk beans too. If the present rate of progress is maintained, it will not be long until no one will enumerate the world's great crops--wheat, corn, oats, rice, rye, barley, cotton, etc.--without including beans. The first beans were s.h.i.+pped to Europe only about four years ago, and the London _Times_ correspondent estimates that next year Europe will take $35,000,000 worth. In a very great measure the beans have the same properties as cottonseed, an oil being extracted that is used for much the same purposes as cottonseed oil, while the residue called ”bean cake” is about the equivalent of cottonseed meal. It is somewhat superior, Mr. Parker says, to cottonseed meal or linseed meal as a stock feed, but is now chiefly used for fertilizing purposes. My first acquaintance with the bean cake was in j.a.pan, where I found it enriching the earth for vegetable-growing, j.a.pan importing an average of half a million tons a year to put under its crops. Manchuria also uses not a little for the same purpose. The more intelligent Manchurian farmers, however, are learning that it is a waste to rot one of the best cattle feeds in the {76} world and get its fertilizing value only--just as our American farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producer without first getting its other value as a meat-producer.
I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me to believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongolia alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly a great gra.s.s plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr.
Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges and brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake, millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness.
This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.
The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high as the little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is the general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through the experiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of level cultivation. He also wishes to introduce better plows. ”The truth is,”
he says, ”that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like, wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make enough to subsist on.”
In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and in Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the climate here is obviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that the j.a.panese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea.
This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete {77} without some mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields-- thick-dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved and twisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. They contain not vegetables, however, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is a Chinaman's grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea, but the mounds are quite low there--all that I saw, at least, except the Queen's Tomb at Seoul. Here in Manchuria they are about three or four feet high in most cases, and sometimes six. One of the famous sights of Mukden is the Peilang, or Northern Tomb, where old Taitsun, the first great Manchu Emperor of China, lies buried, and the grave proper (reached after a long approach of temple buildings, magnificent gates, images, and monuments) is a huge earth mound, probably an acre in extent. The base is thrown up twenty-five or thirty feet high and surrounded by a rock wall, while the cone-shaped summit runs up about twenty feet higher. The Chinese have a deep-rooted superst.i.tion as to the existence of a sort of devil or ”fung-shui” in the ground, and to disturb this fung-shui may prove the direful spring of more ”woes unnumbered” than the Iliad records. Such a fung-shui is supposed to exist under the surface of the earth about the Mukden royal tombs, and, accordingly, the railroad between Mukden and Peking had to run twenty-five miles out of its proper course in order not to disturb it.
Mukden, Manchuria.
{78}
IX
WHERE j.a.pAN IS ABSORBING AN EMPIRE