Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan — John Shaqi
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and JapanKing, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Science
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Agriculture -- China; Agriculture -- Japan; Agriculture -- Korea
It could not be other than a matter of the highest industrial,
educational and social importance to all nations if there might be
brought to them a full and accurate account of all those conditions
which have made it possible for such dense populations to be
maintained so largely upon the products of Chinese, Korean and
Japanese soils. Many of the steps, phases and practices through
which this evolution has passed are irrevocably buried in the past
but such remarkable maintenance efficiency attained centuries ago
and projected into the present with little apparent decadence merits
the most profound study and the time is fully ripe when it should be
made. Living as we are in the morning of a century of transition
from isolated to cosmopolitan national life when profound
readjustments, industrial, educational and social, must result, such
an investigation cannot be made too soon. It is high time for each
nation to study the others and by mutual agreement and co-operative
effort, the results of such studies should become available to all
concerned, made so in the spirit that each should become coordinate
and mutually helpful component factors in the world's progress.
One very appropriate and immensely helpful means for attacking this
problem, and which should prove mutually helpful to citizen and
state, would be for the higher educational institutions of all
nations, instead of exchanging courtesies through their baseball
teams, to send select bodies of their best students under competent
leadership and by international agreement, both east and west,
organizing therefrom investigating bodies each containing components
of the eastern and western civilization and whose purpose it should
be to study specifically set problems. Such a movement well
conceived and directed, manned by the most capable young men, should
create an international acquaintance and spread broadcast a body of
important knowledge which would develop as the young men mature and
contribute immensely toward world peace and world progress. If some
broad plan of international effort such as is here suggested were
organized the expense of maintenance might well be met by diverting
so much as is needful from the large sums set aside for the
expansion of navies for such steps as these, taken in the interests
of world uplift and world peace, could not fail to be more
efficacious and less expensive than increase in fighting equipment.
It would cultivate the spirit of pulling together and of a square
deal rather than one of holding aloof and of striving to gain
unneighborly advantage.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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