a tract twenty miles by twenty miles in extent.  But the ‘civilised’ authorities of our own days sold all the timber to a copper company for 8,000 yen.  The company destroyed the fertility of the district not only by cutting down the forest but by poisoning the water with which the farmers irrigated their crops.  A member of Parliament gave himself with such devotion to the cause of the ruined farmers that when he died the ashes of his cremated body were divided and preserved in four shrines erected to his memory.”

It was a sad thing, said Uchimura, that the farmers of Japan, because of the decreased fertility of the land due to the denudation of the hills of trees, and because of their increased expenses, should be laying out “a quarter of their incomes on artificial manures.”  “The enemies which Japan has most to fear to-day,” Uchimura declared, “are impaired fertility and floods.”

It may be well, perhaps, to explain for a few readers how floods do their ill work.  The rain which falls on treeless mountains is not absorbed there.  The water washes down the mountain sides, bringing with it first good soil and then subsoil, stones and rock.  The hills eventually become those peaked deserts the queer look of which must have puzzled many students of Japanese pictures.  The debris washed away is carried into the rivers, along with trees from the lower slopes, and the level of the river beds is raised.  Because there is less space in the river beds for water the rivers overflow their banks, and disastrous floods take place.  The farmers, the local authorities and the State raise embankments higher and higher, but embankment building is costly and cannot go on indefinitely.  The real remedy is to decrease the supply of water by planting forests in the mountains[102].  In many places the rivers are flowing above the level of the surrounding country.  The imagination is caught by the fact that there are four earthquakes a day in Japan[103] and that within a twelvemonth fires destroy 400 acres or so of buildings; but every year, on an average, floods, tidal waves and typhoons together drown more than 600 people and cause a money loss of 25 million yen!  Every year 101/2 million yen are spent by the State and the prefectures on river control alone.

Uchimura put on his famous wideawake and we went out for a walk.  “I should like,” he said, “to press the view that the vaunted expansion of Japan has meant to the farmers an increase of prices and taxes and of armaments out of all proportion to our population[104].”

Uchimura stood stock still in the little wood we had entered.  “There is one thing more,” he added gravely.  “Before you can get deeply into your subject you must touch religion.  There you see the depths of the people.  A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to the deterioration of Buddhism.  You must ask about it.  You will see in the villages much of what your old writers used to call ‘priestcraft.’  You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people.  You will see with your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural district.”