prominent place we violate our pledges, through apathy, indifference, or any cause whatsoever, we shall find, at the close of the war, that we have been fighting most effectively on the side of Prussianism and autocracy.

The reason constantly given for the failure to increase the output of food is of course that it is impossible to find farm workers. All sorts of makeshift expedients are resorted to, and heralded in the press as indications of the terrible earnestness and intensity of purpose with which we have undertaken the prosecution of the war; whereas, in point of fact, such expedients are simply additional proofs, if any were needed, of the well meaning dilettantism and failure to utilize all available resources which have charterized the action of the United States in every war in which they have taken part. Instead of resorting to such pathetically inadequate makeshifts as the taking of our boys and girls out of school and putting them into the fields, it would be perfectly possible, if the people of this country so willed it, to supply ourselves with as many laborers as were needed; not immature or inexperienced children who should be at their books or their play, but grown men of fine physique, practical farmers, accustomed to grow on a given piece of ground two and three and even four times as much as the American farmer is able to produce.

That this could be done most easily and effectively, our trans-Atlantic Allies have already demonstrated. Nor would there follow any disturbance whatever in the equilibrium of our own somewhat delicately balanced body politic. The northern provinces of China are a reservoir, simply inexhaustible, of farm laborers of the best type, strong, intelligent, sober, law-abiding, and skilled to the last degree in the art of coaxing from the soil the utmost yield possible in the way of food for man and beast, and that, too, without at the same time impoverishing the soil itself. These men are accustomed to farming under all possible aspects, from practically desert conditions, where constant irrigation is essential, to those obtaining in the swampy regions bordering the coast and the great rivers, where drainage and flood control instead of irrigation are the determining factors.

The objection may be urged that the Chinese farmer is not accustomed to the growing of such crops as he would be called upon to raise over here. Nothing could be further from the truth than to assume that the Chinese farmer confines himself to the production of rice. Rice, particularly in the north, is eaten only by an infinitesimal part of the population. The standard cereals with the Chinese, except in the south, have been since prehistoric times wheat, barley, and millet, while within recent times the dietary has been enriched by the addition of maize and sweet and Irish potatoes from the New World. There is not a single one of the more important products of our fields and gardens in the growing of which the northern Chinese farmer is not past master, while the list of valuable food plants which he is in the habit of raising includes very many varieties of which we in this country have not so much as heard.

Another objection which it is conceivable might be raised against the use of Chinese farm labor in this country is that the methods of agriculture as carried on in China are so hopelessly dissimilar to those practiced by our farmers as to render the plan utterly unfeasible from the start. The answer to this is simply, that it is not true; there is no dissimilarity worth mentioning, aside from the greater intensity and intelligence with which the Chinese farmer applies the methods common to both countries. The writer has repeatedly been impressed, in traveling through the country, by the resemblances between the farming processes actually in vogue in northern China and those to be seen in this country, particularly in those regions where the use of farm machinery has not yet attained great proportions. One sees the same ox-drawn carts, the same utensilswooden pitchforks and rakes, clumsy mattocks and spades and hoes, rude scythes and cradles and sickles—which were used universally in the days of our grandfathers, and which

May not the remarkable acceleration in the rate of increase of the population of China which has taken place in the past two centuries in spite of famines, plagues, and massacres on a scale of which the Occidental mind has no conception be ascribed in part, at least, to the addition of these three items to the food supply?

still survive in many localities. The sheaves of wheat and barley are tied in the same way, and the strawstacks about every farmstead look precisely like strawstacks everywhere. At most, the differences in method between Chinese and American agriculture are no greater than those to be witnessed in this country between the broad and level western farms with their large application of machinery, and the small rugged hillside farms of our eastern states, where primitive methods still to a great extent prevail.

Looking at the importation of Chinese labor in this country from still another point of view, the fear might, it is conceivable, be honestly entertained that where it was collected in large numbers the safety and peace of the countryside would be imperilled. Such a notion, to anyone at all acquainted with the ingrained orderliness and respect for law and authority of the Chinese agrarian population, would appear laughable. Unfortunately however the ideas prevalent in this country regarding the Chinese are inspired largely by recollections of the Boxer outburst; by sensational photoplays and melodramas staged in some impossible "Chinatown," with highbinders and opium smokers and slave girls as characters; and by the addresses of a few misguided exponents of the Gospel-exceptions, it is only just to say, to the great majority of their class-who feel it incumbent upon them to display in as lurid a light as possible the evil qualities of "the Chinaman at home" in order to swell the size of contributions to the cause of his conversion.

Bad characters exist in China, naturally, as they do in all countries; but it is the writer's conviction, based upon a somewhat extended experience with both types, that the American "bad man," be he native Anglo-Saxon, or halfbreed Mexican outlaw, or New York gunman, is a very much more evil and treacherous and generally undesirable sort of person than is his Chinese confrère. And in both countries, it must be remembered, these types are the exception. Of the great mass of the population in China, and particularly of the rural population, it would be easy to multiply instances of the good qualities, drawn from the re

THE JOURNAL OF RACE DEVELOPMENT, VOL. 9, NO. 1, 1918

ports of large numbers of properly qualified observers. For considerations of space, however, the writer will content himself with a statement of the conclusions at which he himself has arrived, after a residence of eighteen years in various parts of the Far East, and after travels which have taken him through twelve of the eighteen provinces into which China proper is divided.

Chinese ideals of right and wrong are practically the same as our own, and are probably on the whole somewhat better lived up to. Respect for the marriage tie and for the aged is carried considerably farther in China than is the case in this country. That there are certain practices which, though recognized as vicious, are carried on more or less openly in China is certainly true; whereas with us, though probably more generally prevalent, these practices are resorted to only in secret and furtively, being ignored or hushed up by all respectable people. The virtue of charity has also been cultivated in China to a very great extent, contrary ideas notwithstanding; the existence of beggars in such vast numbers is sufficient proof of that, if other were lacking. Repeatedly the writer has seen humble pedestrians, trudging along, pack on back and stick in hand, stop and drop a few cash into the outstretched bowl of some blind or crippled or leprous unfortunate, and upon inquiry the motive given has been the wish to "acquire merit in the next life." This motive will no doubt appear inadequate to people whose lives are governed by the yearning to "lay up treasure in Heaven;" but that it is efficacious in inducing acts of a charitable nature will have to be admitted.

Again, the writer has been repeatedly impressed by the apparently reckless way in which fruits, cooked foods, and sweetmeats, exposed for sale on stands along the road, were left entirely unwatched. Any fruit vendor in this country who left his applecart unguarded in a busy thoroughfare, whether in town or in country, would be apt, on his return, to find his stock depleted; but such appears not to be the case in China, in spite of the fact that more or less acute hunger is the constant and familiar companion of a great

majority of the poorer classes. That thieves of course exist in China is not to be disputed, although their number is probably nothing like what it would be in this country were a like condition of grinding poverty and insufficiency of the most elemental needs of life to occur. It can not be emphasized too strongly that the Chinese laboring class is as honest and law abiding and reliable as that of any country in the world, and far more so than that of many of the countries which have been permitted to dump upon our shores the dregs of their population without a demur upon the part of our statesmen at Washington or our patriots in the back blocks.

It is a commonplace that where large bodies of laborers of European or African race are gathered together in this country, as for instance in mining or railway construction camps, drunkenness, prostitution, and disorder occur, sometimes reaching proportions which render them a serious menace to the more permanent and orderly portion of the community. Such a state of affairs would be unthinkable in a camp of Chinese laborers in this country. They are not drunkards, prostitution would be out of the question for more reasons than one, and among them it is not customary to prosecute their personal vendettas with the aid of stiletto or razor or revolver; their quarrels, in fact, rarely get beyond the point of vigorous personal abuse, particularly since the abolition of the queue has deprived would-be combatants of a convenient point d'appui.

As regards the question of repatriation, that should present no difficulties whatever. The laborers, if organized under some plan similar to that already put into practice with such good results by our Allies, would be under what would amount to military control from the moment of their enlistment until they were discharged again in their native land. That any considerable number of them, or any of them at all for that matter, without European style clothing, without funds, without a knowledge of the language or of the country, should be able to escape from surveillance, conceal themselves until the hue and cry died down, and, finally, establish themselves over here in economic compe