weather and winds in a fever of fervent prayer for good harvests. In this business of gambling with the weather they differ but little from their civilized brothers of American farms. Some so-called authorities on Manchurian agriculture have accused the Manchu farmer of being innocent even of the benefit of the rotation of crops. That is wrong. The Chinese farmer had known the theory of the rotation of crops for centuries, long before they entered the valley of the Liao, and had practiced the method to their profit. The usual rotation in vogue at present in Manchuria is something like the following:

First year, they put the land to millet; second year to wheat; third, to beans; and the fourth, to kaoliang. If not that, then a three-year cycle of kaoliang, beans, millet.

Visitors from Japan are impressed by the mastery and ease with which the Manchurian farmer handles his horses and mules. Indeed, it must be a wonder sight even to Americans to watch the Manchurian farmer negotiate a team composed of a horse, a mule, a donkey, and an ox pulling his heavily laden cart. He is incomparably superior to the Japanese in the handling of domestic animals for farm work and for transportation. That, of course, is a heritage from the pastoral age of his country, a thing entirely unknown to Japan.

At the very first sight, the great plains of Central Manchuria appeal to one as an ideal field for the profitable employment of all sorts of up-to-date agricultural machinery, such as is used in the wheat fields and corn belts of the Middle West of the United States. It unquestionably is. We have given some of the reasons why Manchurian farms have never as yet known the touch of a harvester or a tractor. It is not likely that even the valley of the Sungari will see machine farming for some years to come. Even in this northern section,

individual farmers who have big enough holdings of their own to make machine farming profitable, are fewer than the gold coins in the pockets of the Manchurian tenant farmer. We have seen how small the general run of Manchurian farms are, and the reasons why. If only these small farmers were to come together and combine to invest in a tractor or in threshing machinery, then there might be a different story. But that is just what they can not do. The untold ages of bitter struggle through which they and their forefathers have passed have left them as suspicious as a hunted fox. They are profoundly suspicious of the official class with its superhuman thirst for graft. In the name of all saints why shouldn't they be? They are suspicious of all the rosy songs the money-lenders sing. They don't stop there. They have come to the point where they are deeply suspicious of their own class, of their own neighbors, and of their own blood. To combine for mutual benefit is something that would call for the rebirth of their mental attitude and outlook on life. There is no organization among Manchurian farmers-no organizations for mutual profit and protection. They haven't a farmer bloc. The intensely individualistic turn of their character, which is always driving them to work for themselves exclusively, is the thing which unfits them for co-operation among themselves. If the capacity to co-operate with our fellow beings is the final test by which the degree of our civilization is judged, then Manchurian farmers occupy a very low step of the cultural ladder. This psychological kink in the Manchurian farmers is the chief obstacle barring back the coming of a machine age to Manchurian farms. There are others, too-the lack of protection for property and life, especially in Amur Province, the most tempting place for a trial of large-scale farming, for example. In fact all the things named in the preceding pages as militating against large-scale farm

ing in the southern part of Manchuria apply here with equal force.

FARM LABOR

At the Port of Dairen, the southern terminus of the South Manchuria Railway, and the greatest port on the China coast next to Shanghai, there is staged every year a dramatic scene out of real life such as one can never see anywhere else in the world. Every year, as regular as the seasons, it comes in the icy months of February and March. The sight is well worth a thousand-mile journey to see. For the water front of the great port literally disappears under the black tidal wave of more than 300,000 coolies from Shantung on their way to invade the farm acres of Manchuria. As you look, you wonder how they manage to find the job. They seem to have not the least trouble. They are the "spring-comeautumn-go" army of farm labor, without which agricultural Manchuria could never hope to function.

In South Manchuria the native population furnishes only 70 per cent. of the farm labor needed. The other 30 per cent. comes from Shantung and northern Chihli Province. The farther north one goes, more and more dependent one finds the farms on floating labor. When one reaches Mongolia, he finds that all the work on the farms is practically done by the "spring-come-autumn-go" coolie farm laborer from Shantung.

In Manchuria farm labor is paid in three different ways: by the year, by the month, and by the day. In Southern Manchuria, round about Chinchou, a farm hand gets the equivalent of about sixty to seventy Chinese dollars a year, the employer giving him board and lodging. Around Tashihchiao, the annual pay is forty to fifty Chinese dollars. About Mukden, where the pay is the highest in Manchuria, he gets about $80. These

Chinese dollars, or yuan, suffer from so constant and violent fluctuation in the exchange market that it is wellnigh impossible to give them anything approaching a definite value in American money. The present chaotic condition of Chinese currency in general, and of that of Manchuria in particular, makes the task more puzzling than usual. However, the wage-payments mentioned in this chapter are mostly made in perhaps the most popular silver coin in Manchuria to-day, which the Chinese call Hsiaoyangchien. It was first issued as a subsidiary coin. Its exchange value rises and falls with the rise and fall of silver, as with the rest of the Chinese silver coins. In 1919, when silver was sky-rocketing, one yuan, or dollar, of this so-called small-coin dollar was worth more than $1.10 in American money. It has since fallen to much less than half that amount in the exchange market, as the price of silver has broken sensationally since then. At any rate, it is clear that the Shantung coolies-the best possible labor obtainable for Manchurian farms under the existing circumstances-are not getting a fortune for their work.

The farm hand contracted for two months' work gets monthly pay of from $9 to $10 in Chinchou and its neighborhood. At Tashihchiao he gets five or six yuan, or dollars. At Kungchuling, from eight to nine yuan. The average monthly pay on two-month contracts in Southern Manchuria is about eight Chinese dollars. In this case, the coolie gets his board and lodging free. On three and five-month contracts, the labor is paid monthly, but the amount is not quite as large as on the two-month contract. At Chinchou, the laborer gets from eight to nine Chinese dollars a month. The average in South Manchuria is about six Chinese dollars a month on threemonth basis and five yuan on five-month contract basis. The daily wages of the coolie laborers differ according to the time of the year. In the sowing season of April

and May it stands at thirty Chinese cents at Chinchou, and thirty-five cents at Haicheng. It is as low as twenty cents at Liaoyang, Tashihchiao, and Yingkou. In the months of June and July, weeding and ploughing time, it stands a little higher. At Mukden, Chinchou, Tiehling, forty cents; and at Changchun and Haicheng, forty-five cents. In harvest time, in September and October, it rises still higher. At Kaiyuan and Ssupingkai the coolie gets fifty Chinese cents a day, and forty to forty-five cents at such points as Liaoyang, Mukden, Chinchou, and Changchun. These daily wages do not include food: the coolies themselves pay for their meals. When food and lodging are included the pay falls to about half of the amount mentioned above.

Women farm workers in Manchuria get about half the pay the men get. In Mukden Province, where a man gets $60.20 Chinese a year on the average, the average wage for women workers is $31.25; and about that ratio holds good in monthly and daily pay.

Working hours for farm labor in Manchuria range from 171.5 hours in the month of July when he works the least to 240.8 hours in April. When one speaks of Manchurian farm hands working about six hours a day in October and July and eight hours in the busiest month of April, he is speaking of a month of thirty workingdays. On the basis of twenty-two net working-days in April, the farm laborer in Manchuria works nearly eleven hours a day.

LIFE CONDITION OF THE FARMER

Everything connected with the life of the Manchurian farmer is so severely simple that it borders on the primitive. Among the men and women belonging to what they call the Big Farmer class, there are but few who enjoy the luxuries of life which are enjoyed by the higher mem