INTRODUCTION.
A word of introduction is needed to place the reader at
the best view point from which to consider what is said in
the following pages regarding the agricultural practices
and customs of China, Korea and Japan. It should be
borne in mind that the great factors which today
characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural and other
industrial operations of western nations were physical
impossibilities to them one hundred years ago, and until then
had been so to all people.
It should be observed, too, that the United States as yet is a nation of but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and child, while the people whose practices are to be considered are toiling in fields tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than two acres per capita,[1] more than one-half of which is uncultivable mountain land.
Again, the great movement of cargoes of feeding stuffs and mineral fertilizers to western Europe and to the eastern United States began less than a century ago and has never been possible as a means of maintaining soil fertility in China, Korea or Japan, nor can it be continued indefinitely in either Europe or America. These importations are for the time making tolerable the waste of plant food materials through our modern systems of sewage disposal and other faulty practices; but the Mongolian races have held all such wastes, both urban and rural, and many others which we ignore, sacred to agriculture, applying them to their fields.
- ↑ This figure was wrongly stated in the first edition, as one acre, owing to a mistake in confusing the area of cultivated land with total area.
