WHAT THE ORIENT CAN TEACH US.

Otago Witness, Issue 3003, 4 October 1911, Page 83

WHAT THE ORIENT CAN TEACH US.

TO CONSERVE OUR PRODUCTIVENESS AND RACIAL STRENGTH. Mr Clarence Poe recently made a long tour through the Far ». to * B JEJ -what the Orient had to teach the Occident. He tells his impressions man interesting article in the World's Work, of * Now that I come to summarise the lessons growing out of my investigations he writes, "I find them embraced in a single word-Conservation-the conservation 1 not only of natural resources but of racial strength and power, of industrial productiveness, of commercial opportunities, and of the finer thfbtfs of the spirit. "The lesson begins with the conservation of natural resources. Hardly anythat I saw on my whole trip burned itself more deeply auto my memory than the heavy penalty that the Celestial Jimpire is now paying for. the neglect of her forests in former years. —Conserve Natural Resources.— "In the country north of Peking I found river valley after ' river vaJkyonoe rich and productive, but now become an abomination of with countless tons of sand and stone brought down from the treeless mounton sides So lone as these slopes were foresta sponge-like character to the soil upon fhZ! and. it gave out the watei, graduallv to the streams below. Now, however the peaks are in most cases only ?£j£ X pikes the laid waste the country round about or else they are mixtures of «ni «d earth rent by gorges through f*"* *™3 torrenterush down i^^ minf-all, submerging.once *™itfidg ß With rock and infertile gully dirt. -Where m thrifty, pigtaUed Chinese peasant once cu!tivlted y 'b?ok m river valleys, he is now able to rescue oSy a fewhalf-heaxted patches by gag the rock in heaps and + saving a few v&X' vening arable remnants from the general soil-wreck. „ >

- —Wasted Oriental Forests.— -Japan, Korea, and India-the whole Orient; in witness to the importance of the iorestry messages which mford Pinchot has been drumming into our more or less unheeding ears for a decade past. When I reached Yokohama I found it impossible to get into the northern part ofthe island of Hondo because of the flood damage to the railroads Ihe lives of several friends of mine had been endangered in the same disaster. ine dams of bamboo-bound rocks that I found men building near Nikko by way of remedy may not amount to much; but there is hope in the general programme for reforesting the desolated areas, which I found the Japanese Department of Agriculture and Commerce actively carrying ° U "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. Take an oldl Japanese sage like Baron Shibusawa, who, like Count Okuma it seems might well have been one of Plutarch's men, and you are not surprised to hear him mention the extravagance of Americans as the thing that impressed him * more than anything else in travelling m our country. 'To spend so much money on making a mere railroad station palatial, as you have done in Washington example, seems to me to be uneconomic, -be declared. s )' . • . . "What most impressed him, be it, remembered, and other Oriental entice with whom I talked,, was the expenditure not fox genuine comforts but for fashion and display—the vagaries, for example, of idle-rich women who will pay any price fox 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 rose in December, but have no eyes for the full-blown glorv of the open-air roses in June. It is such unnatural display that most grates against the 'moral duty of simplicity of life, as the Eastern sages haVe taught it. —lmmorality of Waste. — "The great founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, has expressed in, two memorable sayings the Japanese conception of the essential immorality of waste. When virtual dictator of Japan, Iyeyasu was seen smoothing out an old silk kakama. 'I was doing this,' he said, 'not because of the worth of the garment in itself but because of what i* needed to produce it. It is the result of the toil of some poor woman, and that is why I value it. If w© do not think, while using these things, of the toil and labour required to produce them, then our want of consideration puts us on a level with the beasts.'' Again, when opposing unnecessary purchases of costly royal garments, he declared: 'When I think of the multitudes around me, and the generations to come after me, I feel it my duty to be very sparing, for their sake, of the goods in my possession.' - "No wonder Beam declares of this 'cosmic emotion of humanity' which we Jack that 'we shall certainly be obliged to acquire it .at a later date _ simply to save ourselves from extermdnation.' —Waste of War. — "The importance of saving the wealth of nations from the wastes of war and the wastes of excessive military expenditure is another lesson that one brings home from a study of conditions abroad. " 'The world Is going to be one before you die, sir,' said Pr Timothy Richard, one of the most distinguished Englishmen in China, as we talked together just outside the walls of the Forbidden City. •We are living in the days of anarchy. Unite the 10 leading nations ; let all their .armaments be united into one to

enforce the decrees of the Supreme Court of the World. And since it will then be the refusal of recalcitrant nations to accept arbitration that will make necessary the maintenance of any very large armaments bv these united nations let them ZX*'%£sft by levying ing tariff duties against the countries that would perpetuate present cjnbM "The necessity of p<reßerv" * national wealth from the I regard as one of the n :U Orient lessors that we may get from the Orient.

-Conserve Physical Stamina. "Even more -ampoxtant, whether we cJiS.it from the %*£%£** general welfare or as a matter oi : «■ > oefence,> cal stamina.and ™/arTtmmercial or the wars of the future * &g military it doesn t matter ..* f will goto the peoples stro body and dear of mmd And we may question whether tge g£ wealth Um softness and whale a few Oriena great body <> f u " eil td Sildren are But is there not much more "Jf fig in our case there really demy_at *g» ends of our social system—with the pan Sed rich children who haven t work of the very young is frioinjy A«f^S evil in America as well as m Asia and Sap^ng^,^S^^ Sg? SiS is not yet extiSive enough for the «gffc**| serious: but in both Japan and India l SunTtk Government council thorny alive to the importance. ohiid-hfe, 4 m*m^ s h bo fi S measures for jrotectjon . ifl St Hindoo boys Shriek no giris) that I found at work n a Madras cotton mill, better- legal protection than » - aWed the child workers in some of our Amen °^Mr a pu'tnam Weale abundantly justified the title of his new book, The Conflict of Colour'—the seeming fore-ordma goli of some readjustment o tj-ljjr, tions if present tendencies oontimie when he pointed out that while the white ScS? double in 80 years the yellow or brown double in 60, and the black in 4 °"This last consideration, that of a possible readjustment of racial relations, are the qualities that have given the thus far? And what may we do for the conservation of these qU "FoTone thing, there is the tonic air of democratic ideals in which long generations of white men have lived and developed, as contrasted with the stifling ILlutiW.of the East. £h& it, ajeo.our emphasis upon the. worth of the mdivSual? our inception of the *«•*"» of personality, as compared with the Oriental lack of concern for the individual mTrTsuprerne regard for the Wy and the State: And even more amportant perhaps is the fact that the white man lias had a religion 'that has if somewhat confusedly at times-that 'man SS and master of his fate/ that he is not a plaything of fate, but a responsible sou of God witl enormous possibdities for good or evil, whereas the_ Oriental has been the victim of a benumbing .fatalism that has made him indifferent m industry and achievement, even though it has given him greater recklessness in war. ■ "These things are indeed basic and fundamental, and the question of their conservation, tbe preservation of the ideals of th/* Occident as compared with those oi the Orient, is supremely important not only to us as a nation but to all our human race. But let us come, m conclusion, to some of the less obvious reasons for the greater prosperity and power of the Occidental peoples. "That we have this- greater prosperity of course goes without saying. The chronic poverty and destitution oi the Eastern world is too well known for us to weed to. enlarge upon it. In China a member of the Emperor's Grand Council told me that the average rate of wages throughout the Empire is probably 18 cents a day. In Japan it is probably not more, and in India much less. The best mill workers I saw in Osaka average 22 cents a day; the labourers at work on the new telephone line in Peking get 10 cents; wheelbarrow coolies in Shanghai, 4dol a.month ; linotype operators in Tokio, only 45 cents a day; pressmen, 50 cents; policemen, 40 cents; the iron workers in Hankow average about 10 cents; street car -conductors in iSeoul make 35 cents. The highest Oriental waaes a.re paid under American rule in the Philippines, where trio ordinary labourer gets from 20 cents to 50 cents a day. t - "Moreover, there is a savage struggle for employment even at these low figures ; men work longer hours than in America, and their tasks are often heart-sickening in their heaviness—tasks that an American labourer would regard as inhuman. And the explanation of .all this poverty lies not in an overcrowded population. England, thickly populated es it is now, is more prosperous and pays labour better than it did when it had one-tenth the present number of people ; the same thing is true of Germany ;■ and America pays labour betteir now that we have 90 million people than we did when lie had 30 million.

cent, may may be literate in 1917. In India only 5 per cent, can read and write. In. Japan, for centuries past, the education of the common man has also been neglected, and although Japan W now compelling every child to go into the schools—an enforcement that Will doubtless revolutionise its industrial syetem—ware are concerned only with conditions as they exist at present. And this general study can lead to but one conSusicn," says Mr Poe. "that W»°£ and lack of machinery are responsible tot Asia's poverty; modem took are responsible for America s prosperity."