of the mountains.  The reason he gave was that “there are many recreations in the plains whereas in the mountains there is only one.”  In most of the mountain villages he knew three-quarters of the young men had relations with women, mostly with the girls of the village or the adjoining village.  He would not make the same charge against more than ten per cent. of the young men of the plains, and “it is after all with teahouse girls.”  He thought that there were “too many temples and too many sects, so the priests are starved.”

An itinerant agricultural instructor in sericulture who joined in our conversation was not much concerned by the plight of the priests.  “The causes of goodness in our people,” he said, “are family tradition and home training.  Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the whole.  We are now putting most stress on economic development.  How to maintain their families is the question that troubles people most.  With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach morality.  We can always find high ideals and good leaders when economic conditions improve.  The development of morality is our final aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school.  The child learns that if it does bad things it will be laughed at and despised by the neighbours and scolded by its parents.  We are busy with the betterment of economic conditions and questions about morality and religion puzzle us.”

When I reached Matsumoto I met a rural dignitary who deplored the increasing tendency of city men to invest in rural property.  “Sometimes when a peasant sells his land he sets up as a money-lender.”  I was told that nearly every village had a sericultural co-operative association, which bought manures, mulberry trees and silk-worm eggs, dried cocoons and hatched eggs for its members and spent money on the destruction of rats.  Of recent years the county agricultural association had given 5 yen per tan to farmers who planted improved sorts of mulberry.  About half the farmers in the county had manure houses.  Some 800 farmers in the county kept a labourer.

I went to see a guncho and read on his wall:  “Do not get angry.  Work!  Do not be in a hurry, yet do not be lazy.”  “These being my faults,” he explained, “I specially wrote them out.”  There was also on his wall a kakemono reading:  “At twenty I found that even a plain householder may influence the future of his province; at thirty that he may influence the future of his nation; at forty that he may influence the future of the whole world.”  Below this stirring sentiment was a portrait of the writer, a samurai scholar, from a photograph taken with a camera which he had made himself.  He lived in the last period of the Shogunate and studied Dutch books.  He was killed by an assassin at the instance, it was believed, of the Shogun.