inaugurate a new business and nurse it along to a commercially profitable stage and then turn it over to a business company to carry on. In this manner a Tussah filature was established in 1910. An earthenware and porcelain factory and a firebrick kiln followed. A little later a sorghum alcohol distillery plant, a dyeing and weaving works, a bean-oil mill employing a chemical extraction method, a fatty-acid factory, were built up and turned over to new companies organized for the purpose of continuing the work. After them came also a glass factory and a lignoid factory.

By means of its agricultural-experiment stations the Company is improving the quality of beans and the quantity of output. It is improving the live stock by cross-breeding with imported stock. Its geological bureau was first established at Fushun. It was meant chiefly for the examination of coal resources. It moved to Dairen and enlarged its field of activity to survey the mineral wealth of Manchuria. The discovery of the iron deposit at Anshan is one of its crowning achievements. It has found iron deposits at seven other points, also magnesite in Kaiping and Haichung districts, and fluorspar at various points.

Through the Eastern Asia Economic Bureau which the Company established at Tokyo in 1908 it keeps financial and business Manchuria in touch with international tendencies and conditions in various lines of business. It has already published more than 200 reports. The Company is not satisfied with merely commercial and financial activities. In its research work it invades the realm of scholarship as well. One bureau is making original researches in the history of Manchuria and Chosen under Professor Shiratori of the Imperial University, known as an authority in that particular field. It has issued a number of monographs of considerable value.

CHAPTER VII

AGRICULTURE

CENTURIES ago Manchuria won the title of "the Granary of Asia." What makes Manchuria great are the valleys of the Liao, of the Sungari, the Nonni, the Hurka, and the Yalu. The prime emphasis of the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company, as we have seen, is on the development of Agricultural Manchuria. Industrial Manchuria is as yet a promised land toward which many eyes are turning. Industrial Manchuria is predicated and founded on Agricultural Manchuria.

Nature had done much to make the plains of Manchuria into a great agricultural state. We have seen how the heights of the Great Khingan range screen the vast oval plain of central Manchuria on the west, and on the north and northeast the peaks of the Little Khingan shelter it from the storms that come out of arctic Siberia, and how the Changpai range stands as its eastern wall. We have noted also how these various Manchurian plains lie, their complexions, and the climatic conditions which reign over them. We have also told how and through what combination and compulsion of economic forces they have come under the plough, and by whose hand.

Therefore, in this chapter we shall examine in more detail the various factors which enter into the making of Agricultural Manchuria, and its influences on the life and trade of all its Asian neighbors, especially Japan.

Out of the windows of a Pullman car on the South Manchuria Line, a traveler sees, to the right and to the

left of him, an eternal mosaic of smooth, level, carefully tilled fields racing away to the horizon, broken only here and there by clumps of green trees, a congregation of farmers' huts huddled behind crenelated walls which defend them from bandit raids. One is tempted to think that this Manchuria is quite as well and thoroughly cultivated as Nippon proper, where intensive farming is getting to be something of an agricultural vice. But that is all a Pullman-car-window view of the thing. Once the traveler leaves the order and comforts of the South Manchuria régime and takes to the native carts to roam along the roadless frontiers of Mongolia, his view is apt to get a measure of recasting.

FARM LANDS IN MANCHURIA

Figures on the case have also a sobering effect. The Eastern Three Provinces, as our Chinese friends call this territory which the English-speaking peoples know under the vague name of Manchuria, have the total area of 382,627 square miles according to perhaps the most scientific figures so far presented. That means 244,881,280 acres. Of that total, a trifle over 30,500,000 acres are to-day under cultivation. That is about 121⁄2 per cent. of the total area. The arable area of the country dominated by such imposing mountain ranges as the Changpai and the Khingans is not as big as a stranger might at first suppose. It is no greater than 64,500,000 acres in all. Still that is big enough to equal all the farm lands of Illinois and New York put together and have something like 12,000,000 acres left over. It is not quite three times the arable area of Japan proper, but nearly that. And it is not quite but nearly four times that of Chosen.

The area already under cultivation is most extensive in the southern province of Fengtien, as the Chinese call the