such sphere than shall be levied on similar merchandise belonging to its own nationals transported over equal distances." In the second note, dated July 3, 1900, however, Mr. Hay enlarged the scope of the first note and came out squarely for the maintenance of the territorial integrity of China. The principles enunciated both in the first note and in the second are just and incontrovertible, but the American public must not permit itself to be flattered into believing that these notes of Secretary Hay's really accomplished the purpose for which they were written. To one European power-Russia—at least, the American notes were not worth the paper on which they were written. Upon receipt of Secretary Hay's first note Russia not only expressed herself in favor of reserving for herself the right to levy customs duties on foreign imports in. her sphere, but demurred upon the American proposal with regard to harbor duties and railway charges. With characteristic audacity she hoisted, on August 4, 1900, the Russian flag over the Chinese customhouse in New-Chwang. She poured her troops into Manchuria, and was preparing her way for the immediate absorption of a territory of 363,700 square miles. Russia, in short, completely ignored Mr. Hay's open-door note. Alarmed by this critical situation, Japan, in the early spring of 1901, approached Germany, England, and the United States with a view to securing their coöperation in checkmating the Russian absorption of Manchuria, but none would render any assistance to Japan. Even the United States, the very sponsor of the "open-door" policy, declined to help her. It is the old story: to the living in their need we measure out neglect, reserving our praises for the dead, who are beyond our charity. So Japan earned after the Manchurian war more aspersions than praises mainly because she did not perish a martyr in the herculean struggle with Russia. Yet the world must admit that had it not been for Japan's determination to fight Russia single-handed, the muchheralded open-door proclamation would have become a "scrap of paper." Had this come to pass, other European powers would immediately have followed Russia's suit, and sliced for themselves large sections of China. In challenging Russia in 1904, Japan, therefore, fought not only for her own existence, but for the integrity of China and for the open-door doctrine of America. It must, however, be frankly admitted, what the Japanese are reluctant to admit, that the prowess of Japanese arms failed to attain the end for which it was employed against Russia. Blinded by the successive victories they had scored on land and sea, the Japanese entertained an exaggerated idea of their military successes and believed that they had effectively shielded the open door. This was a great delusion. When the smoke cleared away from the fields of battle, they found Russia just as strongly intrenched in Manchuria as before the war. Although in Korea they succeeded in destroying Russian domination, in Manchuria they were too weak to cope with the Northern colossus. It had been their avowed purpose to drive Russia from Manchuria, and thus realize the open door in China; but before they had reached anywhere near the goal their resources were exhausted, with no nation pledged to the open door coming to their rescue. In diplomatic language Japan succeeded in maintaining against Russian intrusion the open door and the integrity of China; in reality her efforts were a failure. After the signing of the peace treaty of Portsmouth no one realized this more keenly than Japanese statesmen. They saw Russia not only occupying by far the largest portion of Manchuria, but scheming to include Mongolia in her sphere of influence. Far from abandoning her empire scheme in the far East, Russia only diverted her activities into Mongolia, through which she hoped to reach and dominate Peking. After the sacrifice of a hundred thousand lives and $100,000,000 in the titanic struggle that had just ended, Japan's position with regard to Russia appeared as precarious as ever. Especially 1 The spheres of influence in China were the militarists, who had faced the brunt of the Russian onslaught in Manchuria, fearful of the Muscovite revenge, which they thought not only possible, but probable. What could Japan do but accept the inevitable, and strengthen her foothold in Manchuria to prepare herself against Russia's fresh aggression? Today not only has Russia strengthened her position in Manchuria, but she has become the virtual mistress of Mongolia, measuring a million square miles. Her activities in the khanates began immediately after the war with Japan, and in the Chinese Revolution of 1911 she saw a golden opportunity to push her interests in that country. The result was the Russo-Mongolian treaty of October 3, 1912, establishing a Russian suzerainty over Mongolia. England, ever on the alert to counteract the Russian advance, at once took action in Tibet. Beginning with Colonel Younghusband's spectacular expedition to Lhasa in 1905, she was busy fostering her influence in Tibet, and by 1912 there were stationed in that country at least five thousand British troops. In the same year she entered into a secret agreement with Russia, the two countries dividing Mongolia and Tibet as their respective spheres of influence. In February, 1913, England persuaded the Dalai Lama to borrow ten million dollars from her and to purchase from her manufacturers all the arms and ammunition Tibet might need. The Lama also agreed to confer upon British capitalists the exclusive right to exploit the mining and other natural resources in Tibet. In the meantime China, rent by revolution, was powerless to safeguard her interests in her outlying territories. She made only a feint of protest, which was, of course, completely ignored. Here it must be emphasized once more that neither England nor Russia had any conceivable pretext for utilizing China's internal trouble and establishing a suzerainty over Tibet or Mongolia. Their only reason was their greed. And yet the press of America and Europe was virtu series of small mill-dams filled or filling with mud. These little mill-dams, with their rapidly moving water, are very poor mud-catchers indeed in comparison with the fine, large, still-water reservoirs of the flood commissioners. In a few decades a fine reservoir system built by the French in Algeria has become worthless because the reservoirs became level plains of washed-in earth. The same thing has already happened in some of our Southern States, and it will happen on any stream along which farmers expose considerable areas of bare, sloping fields to that great dirt-carrier, the American thunder-storm. Unfortunately for soil conservation and river control by reservoirs, we have in America two factors strange to Europe, whence most of our reservoir philosophy comes. One is the bare, tilled field required for our monopoly crops of corn, cotton, and tobacco, and the other is the torrential downpour of the thunder TREE TREE and indirectly through the expiration of the better-watered plants. This is not a dream, nor can it be dismissed as a pretty theory. I have found it working in three places as widely separated as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and northern Africa. At Susa, in northeastern Tunis, where the uncertain rainfall averages only fifteen inches a year, and where the sirocco blows out of the Sahara, the Arab has had abundant opportunity these last thousand years to observe closely the value of an inch or two of rain. He knows that one or two good rains at a critical time make all the difference between olives and no olives, barley and no barley. If water is so valu How hillsides should be treated. The diagonal lines represent furrows, the water-pockets being built at their intersections shower, which removes from these bare fields astounding amounts of soil. In the United States we cannot put our hills to the plow and then with levees and storage reservoirs cure the flood problem by dealing with the streams as streams. Fortunately, relief is to be had from an agricultural invention which is beneficial alike to the farmer, to the farm, and to the great river. The rain can be kept where it falls in little "water-pockets," or field reservoirs. They can be made twenty or one hundred to the acre, according to the needs of agriculture, and the water made to do us its greatest possible service at the same time that it is made harmless. Before it ever gets to a stream it will have done three things: watered the plants that are near, entered the subsoil to increase the supply of wells and springs, and enriched the moisture supply of the air by direct evaporation, able, why let it run away? There is not answer but "Don't," and he does not. There are plots of ground near Susa from which it is probably true that there has been no surface run-off for several centuries. Such is the belief of agricultural scientists who have given the matter This economical end some investigation. is attained by the very simple device of piling up a ridge of earth a foot high around a plat of nearly level ground. Often the plat is about the size of a tennis-court, with an olive-tree or two standing in the middle. As no water can flow over the little embankment, it must lie within the inclosure until it soaks into the hardbaked desert earth, and the olive-tree gets a chance at every drop of it. This is a great contrast to the swift run-off and surprising flood that often accompany the dashing rainfall of the desert's edge, when it falls on soil as dry as dust, but as hard The tree is on a little ridge; each of the men is standing in a shallow water-pot passages in books that this practice will be found in many foreign countries. After all, it is only a kind of irrigation. Fortunately, the American people have evidence at home-good evidence, and well tried. Thirty years ago a physician, Dr. J. H. Mayer of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, turned his attention to farming, and planted an orchard on a gullied hillside. In the fight with these gullies he built barriers across them. At times water stood behind these barriers, and the physician-farmer observed that the near-by trees grew better than their neighbors. The reason was simple. The doctor took the hint, and made more of these waterpockets in the gullies. The trees continued to wave green leaves and long shoots in appreciation, and finally the doctor adopted the policy of putting his men at digging "water-pots," as he calls them, all over his hillsides. He uses it as a kind of knitting job for his labor force whenever there is nothing else to do. The further he goes, the more enthusiastic he becomes. In the dry year of 1914 a survey of the orchard convinced Dr. Mayer that if he had had the proper number of water-pots on all of it, there would have been a thousand bushels more of fruit on his peach- and apple-trees. The soil is a micaceous clay, and "many of the water-pots retain water a week or ten days after a rain. Most of the waterpots are on a rather steep hillside, and we think we can easily notice the effects of the retained water-supply upon trees thirty, sixty, and even a hundred feet or more below the pots. We have failed to note any injury to any trees, although the pots in some cases happen to be within a few feet of the trees and are as much as two and a half feet deep." In Minnesota, more than a thousand miles from Dr. Mayer, and entirely unknown to him, another man, Colonel Freeman Thorp, a portrait-painter with an interest in the earth, has adopted similar methods of water conservation, and attained similar results-a great increase in productivity of the soil by so shaping the earth that water must stay upon it and soak into it rather than run away to waste, to flood, and to destroy. This water-pocket system is fine for pasture, fine for trees, but open to question as a feasible device for the grain crops on some soils and under some conditions. Its excellence and adaptation to trees, however, make a strong argument for the development of a tree-crop agriculture, by A hillside orchard. The man is standing in one water-pot and another is visible to the right which we may utilize this new power. We do not have to depend solely upon grains. It is merely the accident of an early start that we improved the wild. grains rather than the wild trees. Colonel Thorp finds by experiment that acorns. fed to swine are eighty per cent. as valuable as corn. The swine knew this before Noah led them into the ark. It is only man that is slow. Colonel Thorp's experiments convince him further that he can grow a hundred bushels of acorns to the acre on Minnesota sandy soil that will not naturally make twenty bushels of corn per acre. One of his experiments with oaks is most suggestive. He took two acorns from the same black oak-tree (Quercus velutina) and planted them fifty feet apart on a hillside. One took its natural course, and the other had a waterpocket to hold for it all the rain that fell on a few square rods. In seventeen years the natural one was six inches in diameter, the other twelve. This means virtually four times as great in cross section or wood content per foot of trunk, and a total wood content about six times that of the smaller and shorter tree. The natural tree produced acorns in fourteen years. The water-conservation tree produced at seven years one half bushel of acorns; at ten years, one bushel; at seventeen years, |
