Part 22 (1/2)
There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would never do to write about India without saying something about lions, tigers, and snakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come to this topic.
I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those in cages--though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men and women before they caught him, and whose t.i.tanic fury as he lunged against his cage-bars, gnas.h.i.+ng at the men before him, I shall never forget. A jackal howled at my room-door in Jeypore one night; between Jeypore and Bombay monkeys {259} were as thick as rabbits were in the old county where I was reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented me from getting interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; en route to Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods near where he had evidently been caught; and near Khera Kalan I saw wild deer leaping with their matchless grace across the level plains.
”In my district,” one missionary told me, ”five or six people a month are killed by tigers and panthers and even more by snakes. One panther carried off a man from my kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in the jungle. It is customary when a body is found in this condition for hunters to gather around it and await the return of the tiger or panther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other way so sure for getting a man-eater.”
As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night with a friend in Madura I was shown a place near the house where a deadly cobra had been seen (his bite kills in twenty minutes), while upon retiring I was given the comforting a.s.surance that it was not safe to put my foot on the floor at night without having a light in the room!
As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed to a gra.s.sy mound near the roadside and said.
”See that grave over there? There's rather an interesting story connected with it which I'll tell you. One day about four years ago three snake-charmers came to my house, and as I had an American friend and his son with me, I decided for the boy's sake to have them try their art. Only two of the men had flutes, but one went into my garden and one took up his post on another side of the house, and began to play. It wasn't long before one called out, 'Cobra!' and sure enough there was the snake, which he captured; but on coming back he declared that he had been bitten. In fact, he showed a bruise, but I knew that snake-charmers counterfeit these bites, so I would not believe him.
Then the other charmer also cried {260} 'Cobra!' and captured another snake. They showed me the fangs of each serpent, and I gave them four annas. 1 also offered them four annas more if they would kill the serpents; but of course they would not. 'Man kill cobra, cobra kill man,' is one of their sayings. And so they left, but the man who captured the first snake hadn't gone twenty steps before he fell in convulsions and died. He had really been bitten, and that is his grave which you see there.”
Madura, India.
{261}
XXVI
WHAT THE ORIENT MAY TEACH US
But, after all, what may the Orient teach us? The inquiry is a pertinent one. Perhaps it is all the more pertinent because, while acknowledging that the old East may learn much from the young West, we are ordinarily little inclined to look to the Orient for instruction for ourselves. In fact, we are not inclined to look anywhere.
That the germ and promise of all the new j.a.pan was in the oath taken by the young Mikado in 1868, ”to seek out knowledge in all the world,”
we are ready to admit, and we are also ready to admit the truth of what Dr. Timothy Richard said to me in Peking last November. ”This revolutionary progress in China has come about,” he remarked, ”because for twenty years China has been measuring herself with other countries. It is a comparative view of the world that is remaking the empire.”
In our own case unfortunately, certain natural conditions as well, perhaps, as the excessive ”Ego in our Cosmos,” conspire to keep us from this corrective ”comparative view of the world.” We are not hemmed about by rival world-powers, whose activities we are compelled to study, as is the case with almost every European nation. Barring the Philippines (and their uncertain value) we have no far-flung battle line to lure our vision beyond borders. And thus far our growing home markets have been so remunerative that not even commerce has induced as to look outward, with the incidental results of {262} bringing us to realize our defects and remedy 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 Pa.s.s 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 Egyptian ruin, was at once a melancholy monument to the gladness and fertility of a vanished era, and an argument for forest-conservation that should carry conviction to all who see it.
The next day as I rode amid the strange traffic of Nankou Pa.s.s I found this argument translated into even more directly human terms. For of the scores of awkward-moving camels and quaint-looking Mongolian horses and donkeys that I saw homeward-bound after their southward trip, a great number were carrying little bags of coal--dearly bought fuel to be sparingly used through the long winter's cold in quant.i.ties just large enough to cook the meagre meals, or in extreme weather to keep the poor peasants from actually freezing. Only in the rarest cases are the Chinese able to use fuel for warming themselves; they can afford only enough for cooking purposes.
Yet in sight of the peasant's home, perhaps--in any case, not far away--are mountain peaks too steep for cultivation, but which with wise care of the tree-growth would have provided fuel for thousands and tens of thousands, and at a fraction of the price at which wood or coal must now be bought.
j.a.pan, Korea, and India--the whole Orient in fact--bear witness to the importance of the forestry messages which Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt have been drumming into our more or less uncaring ears for a decade past. When I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into the northern part of the island of Hondo because of the {264} flood damage to the railroads, and the lives of several friends of mine had been endangered in the same disaster. The dams of bamboo-bound rocks that I found men building near Nikko and Miyanos.h.i.+ta by way of remedy may not amount to much; but there is much hope in the general programme for reforesting the desolated areas, which I found the j.a.panese Department of Agriculture and Commerce actively prosecuting.
Here is a good lesson for America. In Korea, however, the j.a.panese lumbermen, even in very recent years, have given little thought to the morrow and with such results as might be expected. The day I reached Seoul, one of its older citizens, standing on the banks of the Han just outside the ancient walls, remarked, ”When I was young this was called the Bottomless River, because of its great depth. Now, as you can see, it is all changed. The bed is shallow, in some places nearly filled up, and it has been but a few weeks since great damage was done by overflows 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 j.a.pan we find a glorification of the j.a.panese character that is unquestionably overdone on the whole, but in his contrast between the wasteful display of fas.h.i.+on's fevered followers in America and the ideals of simple living that distinguished old j.a.pan, there is a rebuke for us whose justice we cannot gainsay. Take an old j.a.panese sage like Baron s.h.i.+busawa, who, like Count Ok.u.ma, 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 Was.h.i.+ngton, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 j.a.panese 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.