volume has explored. Because they fall short of what was planned, and
in happier conditions might have been accomplished, a word or two may
be pardoned on the beginnings of the book--one of the many literary
victims of the War.

The first book I ever bought was about the Far East. The first leading
article of my journalistic apprenticeship in London was about Korea.
When I left daily journalism, at the time of the siege of the Peking
Legations, the first thing I published was a book pleading for a
better understanding of the Chinese.

After that, as a cottager in Essex, I wrote--above a _nom de guerre_
which is better known than I am--a dozen volumes on rural subjects.
During a visit to the late David Lubin in Rome I noticed in the big
library of his International Institute of Agriculture that there was
no took in English dealing with the agriculture of Japan.[1] Just
before the War the thoughts of forward-looking students of our home
affairs ran strongly on the relation of intelligently managed small
holdings to skilled capitalist farming.[2] During the early "business
as usual" period of the War, when no tasks had been found for men over
military age--Mr. Wells's protest will be remembered--it occurred to
me that it might be serviceable if I could have ready, for the period
of rural reconstruction and readjustment of our international ideas
when the War was over, two books of a new sort. One should be a
stimulating volume on Japan, based on a study, more sociological than
technically agricultural, of its remarkable small-farming system and
rural life, and the other a complementary American volume based on a
study of the enterprising large farming of the Middle West. I proposed
to write the second book in co-operation with a veteran rural reformer
who had often invited me to visit him in Iowa, the father of the