THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE
certain, indeed, that she will by-and-by have to look abroad for supplies of the necessaries of life. Rice is the staple diet of her people, and she seems to have almost reached the potential maximum of her rice-growing area; for in spite of her genial climate and seemingly fertile soil, the extent of her arable land is disproportionately small. She has only eleven and one-half millions of acres under crops, and there is no prospect of any large extension, or of the yield's being improved by new agricultural processes.
The Japanese farmer understands his work thoroughly. By skilful use of fertilisers he has been able to raise good crops of rice on the same land during fifteen or twenty centuries. On the other hand, not only is the population increasing at the rate of half a million annually, but in proportion to the growth of general prosperity and the distribution of wealth, the lower classes of the people, who used formerly to be content with barley and millet, now regard rice as an essential article of food. It cannot be long, therefore, before large supplies of this cereal will have to be drawn from abroad. The same is true of timber, which has already become inconveniently scarce. Further, Japan cannot even grow her own cotton, and nature has not fitted her pastures for sheep, so that much of the material for her people's clothing has to be imported. Her future lies undoubtedly in industrial enterprise. She has an abundance of
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