210 



HANDY-BOOK OF HUSBANDRY. 



NIGHT-SOIL. 



The empire of Japan, with an area about equal to that of some 

 of our smaller States, has a population, probably, equal to that of 

 the whole United States. For thousands of years, its small hand- 

 tilled fields, without the importation of a grain of food from any 

 foreign source, have supported its teeming millions in comfort and 

 plenty. Shut off, until within a few years, from commercial 

 intercourse with the nations of the West, this remarkable people 

 have, like the Chinese, maintained themselves in sober and indus- 

 trious prosperity, while they have achieved a civilization, difterent 

 from ours, it is true, and to be measured by a different standard 

 but which has, far more successfully than that of America or of 

 Europe, compassed the comfortable subsistence of all classes of a 



dense population. • u .« 



The secret of their ability to accomplish what the agriculture 

 of our more favored race has failed to secure, is to be found in the 

 fact that the rule of their life and of their industry has always been 

 to allow no element of the fertility f their soil to go to waste. Pro- 

 hibited by their religion from eating flesh, milk, butter, or cheese, 

 and with farms so small as to forbid the use of draught animals 

 almost their only source of manure is found in the vegetable food 

 and the fish which they themselves consume. 



Human excrement, which we name only in an undertone, and 

 which, when we consider it at all, we generally hurry into the 

 nearest stream of water, is to them the foundation-stone of subsist- 

 ence It is their chief prop in all of their cultivation. Their 

 methods of collecting, preserving, and applying it are any thing but 

 delicate, but they are safe and sure, and without them, or their 

 equivalent, Japan would long ago have gone the way of ancient 



^Disregarding the lessons of the past, (and of the present, as 

 shown in the East,) the British Empire is now preserving itself 

 from annihilation only by the commerce which brings bread and 

 manure from all parts of the world to supply the enormous waste 

 that swallows up nearly every atom of the food of its population. 



