the square mile, or 240 people, 24 donkeys and 24 pigs to one of our
forty-acre farms which our farmers regard too small for a single
family. The average of seven Chinese holdings which we visited and
where we obtained similar data indicates a maintenance capacity for
those lands of 1,783 people, 212 cattle or donkeys and 399
swine,--1,995 consumers and 399 rough food transformers per square
mile of farm land. These statements for China represent strictly
rural populations. The rural population of the United States in 1900
was placed at the rate of 61 per square mile of improved farm land
and there were 30 horses and mules. In Japan the rural population
had a density in 1907 of 1,922 per square mile, and of horses and
cattle together 125.

The population of the large island of Chungming in the mouth of the
Yangtse river, having an area of 270 square miles, possessed,
according to the official census of 1902, a density of 3,700 per
square mile and yet there was but one large city on the island,
hence the population is largely rural.

It could not be other than a matter of the highest industrial,
educational and social importance to all nations if there might be
brought to them a full and accurate account of all those conditions
which have made it possible for such dense populations to be
maintained so largely upon the products of Chinese, Korean and
Japanese soils. Many of the steps, phases and practices through
which this evolution has passed are irrevocably buried in the past
but such remarkable maintenance efficiency attained centuries ago
and projected into the present with little apparent decadence merits
the most profound study and the time is fully ripe when it should be
made. Living as we are in the morning of a century of transition