204 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



FRANCE AS AN OBJECT LESSON. 



MOST Americans do not take kindly to citations of 

 the exploits of the people of other countries, and 

 are prone to believe that each and every mem- 

 ber of this great Yankee nation is the superior of the 

 unfortunate inhabitants of any other part of the world. 

 Viewed from a purely patriotic standpoint, perhaps, 

 this provincial estimate is pardonable, if not wholly 

 just; but looked at from an economic point of view, 

 it cannot command serious consideration. The fact 

 is, we have much to learn from the people of other 

 lands. Even the Chinese agriculturists can tell us how 

 to preserve the fertility of the soil through thousands 

 of years of constant production of good crops. Egyp- 

 tians are still growing annual crops upon soil which 

 was old in cultivation when'the Pyramids were begun. 

 England produces double the amount of wheat per 

 acre that she did three hundred years ago, and the 

 enormous productions of France have been for five 

 centuries the marvel of agriculture. 

 France is smaller than Texas by 

 the area of Oregon, and yet she 

 produces nearly three-fourths as 

 much wheat as the United States, 

 twice as many prunes, fifty times 

 as many olives, and twenty-five 

 times as much wine. On her little 

 area of 204,000 square miles, she 

 feeds a population of forty millions 

 and contributes largely to the sup- 

 port of other peoples in all parts 

 of the world. The secret of it all 

 is the small, well-tilled farm, sup- 

 plemented by industry and frugal- 

 ity. French farmers do not burn 

 their manure heaps or their straw, 

 as is still done in some parts of 

 the United States. The poultry 

 raisers of France received more 

 for their crop last year than Amer- 

 ican farmers received for their 

 entire wheat crop, if we may de- 

 pend upon statistics published in 

 England, placing the poultry and 

 eggs produced in France in 1893 

 at $225,000,000. Very little land 

 is allowed to remain unproductive 

 in France. An ancient law, requir- 

 ing holdings to be divided among 

 the heirs of the owner, has resulted in doing there 

 what Mr. Henry George and his school of economists 

 expect to eventually accomplish in the United States 

 by the single tax that is, the subdivision of the land 

 into small holdings, and virtually removing it from 

 the field of speculation. Small farms, well tilled and 

 properly fertilized, have made the French people as 

 a mass exceedingly prosperous and financially inde- 

 pendent. Nothing but the accumulated savings of 

 the French farmers enabled the country to pay the 

 enormous amount of blood money exacted by Ger- 

 many at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. The 

 French peasantry, having unquestioning faith in " le 

 Grand ffomme," Lesseps, and fired by a sublime 

 enthusiasm for the glory of France, poured forth 

 the hundreds of millions which that great engineer 

 squandered so recklessly on the Panama isthmus. 

 But we have the territory and every other needed 

 facility to rebuild a greater France as well as a 

 Greater Britain in the arid regions of the United 



States. Water, small holdings, industry, economy 

 and education only are needed to build up in time 

 among the mountains and upon the so-called deserts 

 of the sunset slope an empire greater in extent and 

 higher in its civilization than even France can boast. 



WILLIAM REECE, 



Superintendent City Schools 



Falls City, Nebraska. 



CHINESE IRRIGATORS IN THE EAST. 



Over on Long Island, says the New York World, 

 at a place called Steinway, you can find John China- 

 man on his native heath. 



Here you may see him in queer clothes and queer 

 houses, raising qiueer products, and with a queer- 

 looking pagoda-like summerhouse near by, to lend a 

 real celestial air to his surroundings. It seems like 

 a bit of China dropped into rural New York. 



If you would learn how to husband the natural re- 

 sources of the soil, go witness a Chinese farmer at 

 work. He can give points to the most thrifty squat- 

 ter that ever worked a Harlem field. Several for- 

 tunes have been made at Steinway, and their owners 

 are now enjoying them in China. 



John generally selects a tree near 

 running water under which to build 

 his house, and while the house is 

 pretty sure to be dirty, the fields 

 are the pink of neatness in all that 

 pertains to good farming. 



In the field he wears his native 

 hat, uses primitive tools and gener- 

 ally does everything upside down. 

 He never puts his phosphates in 

 the ground; he just sprinkles them 

 along the top of the hill. It is 

 queer stuff, too, which looks like 

 soot.- He plants his vegetables 

 upon a hill, with deep gullies on 

 either side. He builds trellises 

 and trains his vines upon them, 

 and then when the fruit is ripe 

 crawls underneath on his back and 

 snips it off with a pair of shears. 



But such fruit! No Jersey or 

 Delaware horticulurist grows more 

 toothsome products. His squashes, 

 cucumbers, tomatoes and pump- 

 kins have a reputation. 



The rural Chinaman is a thorough 

 believer in irrigation. The whole 

 sub-soil of his farm is a net-work 

 of water pipes. Every plot of ground has a water- 

 barrel placed on one side and a pipe and faucet 

 leading thereto. To show how queerly he works 

 after leading the water all under his fields to his 

 water barrel, he laboriously lifts it out by the bucket- 

 ful and throws it over the growing plants. 



From daylight until dark he is at it, stopping only 

 to eat, and after dark he still goes on, carrying his 

 pailfuls of water over the fields. It would be per- 

 fectly useless for an agent to try to sell him such a 

 labor-saving device as a garden-hose. He could not 

 understand such a modern invention. 



But after all he fills his niche. It is a profitable 

 niche, of course, but he would not fill it if it wasn't. 

 He is an autocrat in Chinatown and an example to 

 the American market gardener. He disturbs no one 

 and wants no one to disturb him. He toils and 

 slaves, only in hope of the happiness and content- 

 ment and ease he will find when he returns to his 

 native land. 



