THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1911. CHINA'S MILLIONS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10457, 23 October 1911, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1911. CHINA'S MILLIONS.

The keenness of the struggle for existence in many districts in China is a prime factor in producing the political discontent that is finding expression at the present time in revolution. Professor E. A. Ross tells the readers of the Century Magazine that in two-thirds of China the veller can fiijd no vacant ground on which l he can "pitch a tent. There is no roadside, no common land, no plantation or orchard. The whole, face of the country is cultivated and like a Dutch garden, the roads being merely narrow tracks through the crops, while dividing fences, which would cause a waste of room, are practically unknown. Only agricultural methods of an extraordinarily painstaking character have saved the soil from exhaustion. No natural resource is too trifling to be turned to acount by China's teeming millions. The sea is raked and strained for edible plunder. Seaweed and kelp find a place, in the larder..- Enormous quantities of little shellfish, each one no bigger than a threepenny piece, are opened and made to yield a food that finds its way, far inland. The fungus that springs up in the grass after a rain is eaten, and potato vines are fried for the poor man's table. "The roadside ditches are baled out for the sake of fishes no longer than one's finger," says Professor Ross. "Great panniers of strawberries, half of them .still green, are collected in the mountain ravines and offered in the markets. No weed or stalk escapes the bamboo rake, of the autumnal fuel-gath-erer. Tlie grass tufts on the rough slopes are dug up by the roots. The sickle reaps the grain close to the ground, if or straw and chaff are needed to burn under the rice-kettle. The leaves of the trees are a crop to be

carefully gathered. One never sees a rotting stump or a mossy log." Tho silkworms are- eaten after the cocoon has been unwound from them. Domestic animals of all kind© become butchers' meat in their old age, and in Canton dressed rats and cats are exposed for sale. Professor Ross noticed that his boatmen cleaned and ate the heads, feet, and entrails of the fowls used by the cook. Pressure of population, in fact, has brought about a condition of grinding poverty scarcely to be understood" in more favoured countries.