Permanent Agriculture and Democracy' 



AS SUGGESTED BY THE SITUATION IN CHINA 

 By L. H. BAILEY 



Formerly Director and Dean of the New York State College of Agriculture, 

 at Cornell University 



THE phrase "permanent ai>'rieul- 

 ture'' is a real contribution to 

 the discussion of rural affairs 

 in recent time, expressing the idea that 

 we must be able to maintain ourselves 

 on the planet at the same time that the 

 earth retains its producing power for 

 all coming generations. This phrase is 

 important both because it demands the 

 facts and also because it sets ideals for 

 the future. It is the highest expression 

 of being our brother's keeper— the 

 brother who is yet to come. It suggests 

 the most perfect altruism, and the 

 truest socialism. Sometime this will 

 be the greatest concern of government, 

 — in the time when the concern of gov- 

 ernment coincides with the primary 

 concern of mankind. 



It has been said that permanent agri- 

 culture has been developed in the Far 

 East. I have recently returned from 

 the Far East, where, with King's 

 sympathetic book. Farmers of Forty 

 Centuries, in mind, and with opportu- 

 nities to learn something of the rural 

 situation in China in a few parts of the 

 republic, I received certain impressions, 

 and the reflections therefrom are the 

 subjects of this address. 



China is a people still in its agricul- 

 tural phase, and as eighty-five per cent 

 of the population is said to be engaged 

 in farming, the public polity must be 

 largely a reflection of the rural situa- 

 tion. 



At the same time, China is a land in 

 which great numbers of people live con- 

 stantly on the verge between sustenance 

 and want, in which poverty rather than 

 middle-class comfort-earning deter- 



mines much of the life and civilization, 

 in which the scale of living is reduced 

 to the lowest terms for the mass of the 

 people, in parts of which human beings 

 may be worth less economically than 

 beasts of burden, in which government 

 does not reach the social and economic 

 needs of the population, and in which 

 the people on the land are uneducated 

 and the ideals undeveloped. The mere 

 statement of the situation is a chal- 

 lenge of the agricultural status of the 

 country in the twentieth century, when 

 expressed in terms of human beings. 



China is a land of unnumbered peo- 

 ple, of vast resources, of stimulating 

 history, stagnant in the occidental com- 

 mercial sense, still under its own sover- 

 eignty, trying to adapt itself to the 

 current ways of the world, a racial com- 

 ])lex of marvelous vitality and endur- 

 ance — probably the greatest human 

 problem on the planet. Its agricultural 

 or rural status is the fundamental fact 

 in this problem. 



I went to China filled with the ex- 

 pectation of its wonderful centuries. T 

 was to find at last an exhibition of per- 

 manent agriculture. Here is solved the 

 problem, apparently, of maintaining 

 the fertility of the earth. Here also is 

 said to have been solved the problem of 

 the greatest possible yields, of the best 

 disposition of human waste, of the 

 closest utilization of the land, the best 

 conservation, the elimination of the un- 

 necessary accessories of life, and some- 

 thing like final rural individualism. 



It is difficult for an occidental to 

 judge any situation in the Orient. Ho 

 must approach the subject largely 



^ Abstract of paper read November 12, 

 Science at Washington, D. C. 



1917, before the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural 



Coi.yright, 1917, liy L. H. Bailey 



537 



