“I began to ask many distinguished persons to help me.  They influenced the farmers.  The sight of a good man is enough.  Speech is unnecessary.  The villagers were not educated enough to understand moralisings or thinking, but the kind face of a good man has efficacy.  There was a man in the village who was demoralised, and when I told of him to a distinguished man who lives near our village he sympathised very much.  That distinguished man is eighty-four years old, but he accompanied that demoralised man for three days, giving no instruction but simply living the same life, and the demoralised man was an entirely changed man and ever thankful.

“I am a sinful man.  Sometimes it happens that after I have been working for the public benefit I am glad that I am offered thanks.  I know it is not a good thing when people express gratitude to me, for I ought not to accept it.  When I know I am doing a good thing and expecting thanks, I am not doing a good thing.  My thanks must not come from men but from Buddha.  I am trying to cast out my sinful feelings.  It must not be supposed that I am leading these people.  You skilful farmers kindly come to my village if you pass.  You need not give any speech.  Your good faces will do.”

But the two speeches I have reported are hardly a fair sample of the discourses which were delivered.  The addresses of the earnest Tokyo officials and the Governor were directed towards urging on the farmers increased production and increased labour, and the duty was pressed upon them, as I understood, in the name of the highest patriotism and of devotion to their ancestors.  This talk was excellent in its way, but when I got up I hazarded a few words on different lines.  If I venture to summarise my somewhat elementary address it is because it furnishes a key to some of the enquiries I was to make during my journeys.  I was told the next day that the local daily had declared that my “tongue was tipped with fire,” which was a compliment to my kind and clever interpreter, who, when he let himself go, seemed to be able to make two or three sentences out of every one of mine: 

I said that my Japanese friends kept asking me my impressions, and one thing I had to say to them was that I had got an impression in many quarters of spiritual dryness.  I dared to think that some responsibility for a materialistic outlook must be shared by the admirable officials and experts who moved about among the farmers.  They were always talking about crop yields and the amount of money made, and they unconsciously pressed home the idea that rural progress was a material thing.