Its clinic for outside patients was handling an average of more than 800 people every day at the time of my visit there in 1923. Regular courses of instruction in nursing and pharmacy are given in all the S. M. R. hospitals. And the Company does not stop there. It employs regular practising physicians at various outlying points to guard the communities against the invasion of contagious diseases and to educate the people in hygienic matters at all times. These hospitals and the medical employees of the Company attend to vaccination every year also and without charge. The whole Railway Zone is divided into a number of hygienic districts, placed under experts of the Sanitary Office of the S. M. R. The S. M. R. inspectors examine the drinking-water supply of the zone every month, as well as the meats entering it. They inspect all the wells in the Zone twice every year. All the schools under the S. M. R. administration have visiting dentists, oculists, and nose, throat, and ear specialists constantly watching over the health of the school children. The medical-inspection system of the Company is at work, and in the most rigid manner, at all the workshops of the railway, and in the mines and factories. Every year the Company, jointly with the Kwantung Government, spends a small fortune in fighting Manchurian flies. This is no small job in the land where bathing is a rare luxury and extravagance. SUPPLYING GAS AND ELECTRICITY Not the least of the Empire-Builder's burdens is the lighting of the homes, shops, factories, of the cities it calls into existence. Also furnishing the power to turn the wheels of industries in them. The electric light and power plants of the S. M. R. are in Dairen, Mukden, Changchun, Antung, Fushun. The Company also runs the electric railways in Dairen and Fushun. The total output of electric energy by all the plants reaches 20,000,ooo kilowatts a year. The Company has in Dairen a large gas plant which produces 215,000,000 cubic feet a year, and a smaller one at Anshan which serves the Company's iron and steel works there. In my rounds of all these various power plants I saw that practically all the generators and other major machinery were covered with the crests of two of the great American manufacturers of electrical machinery. And where they did not appear the trade-mark of the Shibaura plant-which is a Japanese incarnation of one of the American concerns-was sure to be present. IRON AND STEEL WORKS Nature has been unkind to Nippon. So surprisingly so that any children of the Land of the Gods (even though they are by nature almost unreasonably patriotic) will come right out and tell you so. This is especially true of the gift of raw materials-primary and essential ones like iron and oil. Therefore whenever and wherever the Japanese come upon a promise of iron ore their imagination paints it with rose. This precisely has been the case with the Anshan Iron Mine. In 1921 Viscount Inoue, the acting superintendent-general of the Anshan Iron and Steel Works as well as of the Fushun Colliery, made a special trip to the United States. His idea was to go to the fountain of most up-to-date knowledge in iron ore and the production of steel. Here was another tribute for America-quite as emphatic, in its way, as the one which Baron Goto and his advisers tendered to America in equipping the South Manchuria railway system with American locomotives, cars, and rails. At the invitation of Viscount Inoue, a group of American scientists and practical engineers, headed by Pro fessor Appleby of the University of Minnesota, went over to Anshan and made a thorough investigation into the nature of the ore and its possibilities. The working program of the Anshan mine and the iron and steel works there is based on the recommendations of the American experts. Practically all the machinery and equipment of the mine was imported from the United States. Blast furnace No. 1 with the daily capacity of 350 tons, a charging elevator, four hot stoves, two blowing engines, four boilers, two generators of 3,000 kilowatts each, and other adjuncts had been completed in 1918, and the furnace was fired in April, 1919. Blast furnace No. 2 was completed in 1920, with its charging elevator, electric tramway, water-circulating system, ore depot. Also two batteries of coke ovens, of forty ovens each, and a coal-washing system were working early in 1920, and in the following year two batteries were added. The annual output of iron is expected to reach 1,000,000 tons a year. The S. M. R. has poured more than 35,000,000 yen since 1919 into these iron and steel works. It has been losing money at the rate of two- to threemillion yen a year since the price of iron fell from 440 yen a ton in war time to 50 yen a ton, which is about the present price. All that, however, does not dampen the ardor of the S. M. R. people in the least. The recent report is that they have at last solved the problem of working the low-grade iron ore there at a profit. HOTELS Another business in which the Company is losing money year in and year out, and which it has not the remotest idea of discontinuing, is its hotel business. It has built and is now maintaining a string of modern occidental-style hotels at Dairen, Port Arthur, Mukden, Changchun, and at a summer resort near Dairen which |