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,* more than one-half of
which is uncultivable mountain land.

*[Footnote: 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.]

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.

We are to consider some of the practices of a virile race of some
five hundred millions of people who have an unimpaired inheritance
moving with the momentum acquired through four thousand years; a
people morally and intellectually strong, mechanically capable, who
are awakening to a utilization of all the possibilities which
science and invention during recent years have brought to western
nations; and a people who have long dearly loved peace but who can
and will fight in self defense if compelled to do so.