Province of Mukden. That is natural: Mukden is the most thickly populated of the Eastern Three Provinces. The earlier estimates used to put Kirin next to Mukden. Later ones makes the provinces of Kirin and Amur about even in point of the cultivated acreage, as follows:

An Illinois farmer may visualize this by simply deducting something like 2,000,000 acres from the total farm acreage of his own State. The Manchurian acreage, utterly innocent of the plough now but which can be tickled into smiling seas of wheat, beans, and kaoliang with more or less labor, amounts to about the same as the combined farm acreage of Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Michigan: in other words, 34,000,000

acres.

Those 30,500,000 acres are a mere string of figures. They happen to be as dramatic and eloquent as the lines of Shakespeare never were. Two things back of this string of figures make it so. One is man's fight for food, which is as old as the disappearance of the Garden of Eden, and the other is the soil-character of Manchuria.

The Tungus, the original tribal owners of Manchuria, were good fighters, hunters, drifters. They were bad farmers. They liked star-lit sky for their roof and a lot of room with no fences of wood or stone or man-made laws. They preferred to fight for their empty stomachs with bows and arrows, fish-lines, and spears, but rarely with a hoe or a plough. But to the southwest dwelt a race with stomachs more empty and with an entirely different method of fighting for them-the Chinese. As

early as the closing days of the Fifteenth Century, in the days of the Ming Dynasty, Chinese farmer colonists began to gather in the fruitful basin of the Liao River. In 1644, Shunchih ascended the Dragon Throne at Peking and established the Manchu Dynasty of Taching over the children of Han. Then the proud Chinese became a subject race. Their Manchu masters did not wish their home Province of Mukden and its sacred precincts defiled by Chinese farmers. That was the historic origin of the exclusion of Chinese immigration from the Liao basin more than 230 years before the days of Kearney and his sand-lotters. The course of Chinese farmers toward food-producing land is almost as direct and sure as that of the flood seeking lower levels. And in the young days of the Eighteenth Century, the exclusion law of the Manchus had begun to lose its severity. Up the Liao valley the Chinese immigrants made their silent way. Their love of the soil and the work and their art of tilling were about the only weapons they carried with them, but they were quite enough. Before them the Manchu Bannermen had not much more chance than Arab cavalry before the machine-gun corps of today. Soon there were Chinese all over the plains of the southern Manchuria of which the City of Mukden was the center.

CHINESE FARMER COLONISTS

Other Chinese colonists also made their way up along other great streams of Manchuria like the Yalu. They also established themselves in the Liaotung Peninsula which is to-day under lease to the Japanese. That was the beginning. For more than two hundred years they have been pushing their way along the Sungari, the Nonni, the Hurka, and the Amur rivers, spreading themselves out over the rich valleys.

The farming population of the Eastern Three Provinces exhibits this historic movement. It is divided as

These figures are from the most recent statistics available, of the year 1917. In the four years preceding 1917, the number of farmer families in Mukden Province increased by more than 56,000 and in the Amur Province by 48,500, but in Kirin Province, there was a slight decrease. In 1921, the Chamber of Commerce of the City of Dairen estimated the number of farmers in Manchuria at 19,461,100. The agricultural growth of Manchuria in recent years has been rapid. This is especially true with the section of North Manchuria opened up by the Russian railway there. In discussing the increase of cultivated acreage in the twenty-eight Districts of Amur Province and twenty Districts in the Kirin Province which are more or less served by the Chinese Eastern Railway's transportation facilities, a Russian investigator declares that there were 12,236,000 acres of cultivated farms in that section in 1913. In 1921 the acreage of actually cultivated land there rose to 16,960,000. That is, there was an increase of 4,724,000 acres of cultivated land in less than ten years. By the year 1922 the cultivated land. had reached the total of 17,647,000 acres. These are astounding figures really. At the same time it should be remembered that a horde of Chinese farmers was drawn into that section of the country by the war demands of Europe for foodstuffs, sending a shower of gold along the Chinese Eastern line. To-day, there are about

910,000 farms in that section of Manchuria of an average size of about 18 acres. The acreage of this territory included in the above forty-eight Districts amounts to a goodly section of the two provinces of Amur and Kirin. Yet, as these forty-eight Districts extend over about 125,070,000 acres, the cultivated acres do not loom so large: they are not more than 14 per cent. of the total area. And when one takes into account the entire area of North Manchuria, the cultivated area sinks into a mere 7 per cent. of the whole.

Moreover, when one stops and thinks of what a tremendous rôle soya beans played in the international market all through the war time, the above-quoted figures are still less astounding than they at first appeared. There is another thing also which might go far to show the correctness of the above-quoted Russian figures. The so-called Chinese official figures, and some of the other kinds also, have about them more imagination than actual scientific data. The very table from which the number of farming families of the three provinces mentioned above was taken omits no less than four Districts in the Amur Province, for reasons best known to the author of the official report. They were left frankly blank. Taken all in all, it may not be far from the mark to put the total number of farmer families now tilling the soil of Manchuria close to 3,000,000.

CHARACTER OF FARMERS

There are many things that are striking about these farming families of Manchuria. Perhaps the most important of them all is the proportion of land-owners among these farmers. In Mukden Province, 686,281 out of the total of 1,686,646, are land-owning farmer families. Only 501,731 out of the total are tenantfarmer families. Of the land-owning farmers 498,634

are also tenant farmers at the same time. In Kirin Province the proportion is much more pronounced. There 251,676 families own the land they till: that is nearly 50 per cent. of the total farming families of the province. Only 165,079 of the total are tenant farmers pure and simple. The rest combine both rôles. In Amur Province the proportion is still more emphatic. Out of the total of 324,155, fully 180,680 are land-owners, and only 82,098 are tenant-farmer families.

The fact that nearly 90 per cent. of all the Manchurian farmers are settled in the two provinces of Mukden and Kirin can result in only one thing: that South Manchuria, which vaguely covers all of Mukden and a large portion of Kirin Province, is far from being the wilderness so many good American readers picture in their imagination. There, more than 54 per cent. of the arable area is already under the plough. In other words, it is somewhat better cultivated than the United States taken as a whole; for only 52.6 per cent. of the arable land of the United States is under cultivation to-day. In the Mukden District 95.9 per cent. of the arable land is already under cultivation. In the Liaoyang District the percentage is not much lower: it is 95.6 per cent. Around Hsinmintun it is even higher: 96.6 per cent. Near Antung it is 83.3, and in the Yingkou District a little better: 89.5. Even in the Changling District, where the percentage of cultivation is the lowest, it stands at 21.7 per cent. And here in South Manchuria the cultivated land area is increasing at the rate of 1.1 per cent. a year.

In North Manchuria, which covers all of Amur Province, the percentage of cultivated area is much lower. It averages about 25% per cent. Therefore when one speaks of the vast possibilities of agricultural Manchuria he has in mind this tremendous virgin area in the valleys