Seventy or eighty per cent. of the population of China are engaged in agriculture.  Rice and tea are the chief products of the south, while wheat and other kinds of grain form the staple crops in the north.[34] The rainfall is very great in the south, but in the north it is only just sufficient to prevent the land from being a desert.  When I arrived in China, in the autumn of 1920, a large area in the north, owing to drought, was afflicted with a terrible famine, nearly as bad, probably, as the famine in Russia in 1921.  As the Bolsheviks were not concerned, foreigners had no hesitation in trying to bring relief.  As for the Chinese, they regarded it passively as a stroke of fate, and even those who died of it shared this view.

Most of the land is in the hands of peasant proprietors, who divide their holdings among their sons, so that each man’s share becomes barely sufficient to support himself and his family.  Consequently, when the rainfall is less than usual, immense numbers perish of starvation.  It would of course be possible, for a time, to prevent famines by more scientific methods of agriculture, and to prevent droughts and floods by afforestation.  More railways and better roads would give a vastly improved market, and might greatly enrich the peasants for a generation.  But in the long run, if the birth-rate is as great as is usually supposed, no permanent cure for their poverty is possible while their families continue to be so large.  In China, Malthus’s theory of population, according to many writers, finds full scope.[35] If so, the good done by any improvement of methods will lead to the survival of more children, involving a greater subdivision of the land, and in the end, a return to the same degree of poverty.  Only education and a higher standard of life can remove the fundamental cause of these evils.  And popular education, on a large scale, is of course impossible until there is a better Government and an adequate revenue.  Apart even from these difficulties, there does not exist, as yet, a sufficient supply of competent Chinese teachers for a system of universal elementary education.

Apart from war, the impact of European civilization upon the traditional life of China takes two forms, one commercial, the other intellectual.  Both depend upon the prestige of armaments; the Chinese would never have opened either their ports to our trade or their minds to our ideas if we had not defeated them in war.  But the military beginning of our intercourse with the Middle Kingdom has now receded into the background; one is not conscious, in any class, of a strong hostility to foreigners as such.  It would not be difficult to make out a case for the view that intercourse with the white races is proving a misfortune to China, but apparently this view is not taken by anyone in China except where unreasoning conservative prejudice outweighs all other considerations.  The Chinese have a very strong instinct for trade, and a considerable intellectual curiosity, to both of which we appeal.  Only a bare minimum of common decency is required to secure their friendship, whether privately or politically.  And I think their thought is as capable of enriching our culture as their commerce of enriching our pockets.