But the rural problem was not only a problem of better crops and of greater production.  Man did not live by food alone.  Tolstoy wrote a book called What Men Live By, and there was nothing in it about food.  Men lived not by the number of bales of rice they raised, but by the development of their minds and hearts.  It might be asked if it was not the business of rural experts to teach agriculture.  But a poet of my country had said that it took a soul to move a pig into a cleaner sty.  It was necessary for a man who was to teach agriculture well to know something higher than agriculture.  The teacher must be more advanced than his pupils.  There must be a source from which the energy of the rural teacher must be again and again renewed.  There must be a well from which he must be continually refreshed and stimulated.  Some called that well by the name of religion, unity with God.  Some called it faith in mankind, faith in the destiny of the world, that faith in man which is faith in God.  But it must be a real belief, not a half-hearted, shivering faith.

Agriculture was not only the oldest and the most serviceable calling, it was the foundation of everything.  But the fact must not be lost sight of that agriculture, important and vital though it was, was only a means to an end.  The object in view was to have in the rural districts better men, women and children.  The highest aim of rural progress was to develop the minds and hearts of the rural population, and in all discussion of the rural problems it was necessary not to lose in technology a clear view of the final object.

But when account is taken of all the drab materialism in the rural districts there remains a leaven of unworldliness.  It takes various forms.  Here is the story of a landlord at whose beautiful house I stayed.  “When a tenant brings his rent rice to this landlord’s storehouse,” a fellow-guest told me, “it is never examined.  The door of the storehouse is left unpadlocked, and the rent rice is brought by the tenant when he is minded to do so.  No one takes note of his coming.  If he meets his landlord on the road he may say, ’I brought you the rent,’ and the landlord says, ‘It is very kind of you.’  It is an old custom not to supervise the tenants’ bringing of the rent.

“Nowadays, however, some tenants are sly.  They say, ’Our landlord never looks into our payments.  Therefore we can bring him inferior rice or less than the quantity.’  The landlord loses somewhat by this, but it is not in accordance with the honour of his family to change the method of collecting his rent.  He is now chairman of the village co-operative society as well as of the young men’s society, and he aims to improve his village fundamentally.”

I also heard this narrative.  The tenants in a certain place wished to cultivate rice land rather than to farm dry land.  But when silkworm cultivation became prosperous they began to prefer dry land again in order that they might extend the area of mulberries.  Therefore the landlords raised the rents of the dry farms.  But there was one landlord who said, “If this dry farm land had been improved by me I should be justified in raising the rent.  But I did not improve it.  Therefore it would be base to take advantage of economic conditions to raise the rent.”