too deep, and the soil temperature falls and they lose on the crops what they gain by the use of machinery.  Further, it must be remembered that we are not producing our rice for export.  It is a special kind for ourselves, which we like;[291] but foreigners would just as soon have any other sort.  We have no call, therefore, to develop our rice culture in the same degree as our sericulture, which rests mainly on a valuable oversea trade.”

“On this general question of improvement of implements and methods,” said another member of our company, “we must use machinery and combine farming management when industrial progress drives us to it; but why try to do it before we are compelled?  Concerning horses, the difficulty which some farmers have in using them is the difficulty of feeding them economically.  Concerning cereals, our consumption is not less than that of Germany, but Germany imports more than twice the cereals we do, so there would seem to be something to be said for our system.”

[Illustration:  CUTTING GRASS]

“Some revolutionising of Japanese farming is necessary, in combined threshing, for instance,” the expert who had opened our discussion said.  “This combined threshing is now seen in several districts, and combined threshing will be extended.  But there is the objection to the threshing machine that it breaks the straw and thus spoils it for farmers’ secondary industries.  It should not be impossible to invent some way of avoiding this, but the threshing machine is also too heavy for narrow roads between paddies.  It is difficult to deliver the crops to the machine in sufficient bulk.  Necessity may show us ways, but small threshing machines are not so economical.  Of course we must have much more co-operative buying of rural requirements, and certainly there is room in some places for the Western scythe made smaller, but our people, as you have seen, are dexterous with their extremely sharp, short sickle, and fodder is often cut on rather difficult slopes, from which it is not easy to descend loaded, with a scythe.  Some foreigners who speak so positively about machinery for paddies, and for, I suppose, the sloping uplands to which our arable farming is relegated, do not really grasp the physical conditions of our agriculture.  And they are always forgetting the warm dankness of our climate.  They forget, too, that implements for hand use are more efficient than machinery, and, if labour be cheap, more economical.  They forget above all that we are of necessity a small-holdings country.”

Is it such a bad thing to be a small-holdings country?  Does the rural life of countries which are pre-eminently small-holding, like Denmark and Holland, compare so unfavourably with that of England?  I wonder how much money has been sunk—­most of it lost—­during the past quarter of a century in attempts to increase small holdings in England.