cracy with a minimum of politics to impede its smooth working. Koreans are being given increased participation in public affairs, but what influence they exert must as yet be largely in the way of advice, for they have no executive or legislative machinery worthy of the name.

The story of Korea to-day is no longer the story of politics and the independence movement. It is the tale of increased productivity and the attempt to make the Budget balance. Of all the measures that are now being taken, that of increasing the production of rice by half must come first. It was the pet scheme of the late Civil Superintendent, who managed to get a bill through the Imperial Diet in Tokyo making available millions of yen for this purpose. "Ten million yen are needed every year,' said the chief of the Japanese Agricultural Bureau at Seoul, 'to make Korean imports and exports balance. The quickest method to do this is to increase the rice crop. With the funds now available, the present crop of fifteen million koku can eventually be raised to twenty-three million koku.

"This will be done in part by the reclamation of waste land in the valleys and on the mountain-sides, in part by increased and better irrigation, in part by improved methods of tillage and fertilizing. Some of the money appropriated will be used as a subsidy, but most of it will be in the form of loans on easy terms to Korean farmers. The landowners in the districts affected will form themselves into an association which will receive a loan for this purpose and which will then do the work itself under the guidance and supervision of civil officials.

'From eighty to eighty-five per cent of the Korean people are farmers. Industry is not even in its infancy as yet. There are a few cotton and spin

ning mills, but virtually no others. They are increasing, especially the cotton mills, but they are of negligible importance in contrast with farming.

'At present Korea imports foodstuff, although increasing quantities of rice are shipped to Japan, which country takes about ninety per cent of all of Korea's exports. Many Koreans are too poor to eat rice. They raise that grain and sell it for export, and then with the money received import millet and other cheaper grains, principally from Manchuria. Many of them live on potatoes as their principal article of diet. We are trying to double the production of millet as well as that of rice.

'As the rice yield increases, it is by no means certain that Korea will have a surplus for export. The standard of living will also rise, perhaps in greater ratio, which may more than consume the additional grain. The plan has been evolved and is being put into practice for the benefit of the Korean people, and not as a means of relieving the very serious food shortage in Japan proper.'

A comprehensive scheme for the unification of Korean railroads and the building of new lines has been worked out, and the Government General is now awaiting the necessary Imperial appropriations to begin construction. What that means is vividly shown by what has happened where good roads or railroads have already made crop transportation easy.

'I have a friend who lives upcountry,' the American Consul-General told me. 'Formerly he was forced to sell his rice on the local market for only ten yen a koku. Improved communication has enabled him to bring his season's crop to Seoul, and now he gets the Seoul price of thirty-five yen a koku!'

Is it to be wondered at that the Korean peasant willingly lays politics

and talk of independence to one side while he strives to bring about conditions where he will receive thirty-five yen instead of ten yen for his koku of rice?

Poverty is driving many Koreans across the Straits into Japan proper, and across the Yalu River into Manchuria and Siberia. In Manchuria they are a sorry lot. They cannot compete with the Chinese and Manchurian peasants and coolies, and they flit from pillar to post. In Japan the problem of Korean immigration is reaching serious proportions. There is no way to keep them out, for they are subjects of the Mikado, and Japan is committed to the policy of equal treatment. Peasants without property are attracted to Japan by the higher wages paid day labor. More and more is Korean labor building Japan's roads and railroads and performing all the unpleasant, heavy manual labor of the Islands. The Japanese cannot compete with the Korean as to wages and living conditions, and in fact is quite content to let the Korean do the dirty work. But Japan itself is overpopulated, and sooner or later the influx of Koreans into Japan proper will breed trouble on a major scale unless it is met and solved.

Japan is in Korea to stay. Only force of arms will ever drive her out. That is a fact that has to be faced and from which all argument or theory must start. Within the past year there was dedicated on one of the hills which enfold Seoul in their embrace the Chosen Dai Jingu, or the Great Shrine of Korea, a branch of the Ise Dai Jingu in Japan. The Ise Dai Jingu is the most sacred spot in all the Empire. The Great Sun Goddess, ancestress of the Emperor and of the Japanese people, is enshrined there, and there is kept the Sacred Mirror which she gave to the first earthly emperor as a symbol of her own soul.

Japan has set her seal, the Great Shrine of Korea, upon the peninsula, but as one strolls about the capital of Seoul it is not the shrine on the mountain-peak that is constantly in sight. Nothing is so striking about this city as the spires and crosses of the churches of Christianity. They seem to be on every hand, and they too symbolize a force that is at work among the Korean people. There are more Koreans who are Christians than there are believers in any other religion. They number a bare four hundred thousand; yet no other religion can muster even as many converts as that. At one time the Christian missionaries were a force in Korean politics. That time has fortunately passed, save in the case of a few missionaries who seem to be still more concerned with the kingdoms of this earth than that of heaven. Christianity, with its driving force, its emphasis on the individual, its active as opposed to a passive attitude toward life, has a function to perform in Korea, and none recognize and welcome this more than the higher officials of the Government General. Even those missionaries who cannot forget politics are treated with a tolerance which they themselves do not display.

Five years ago a visit to Seoul was discouraging. On every hand there was talk of independence, of Japanese tyranny, of rabid discontent. To-day these topics have disappeared from conversation, because they have disappeared from the minds of Koreans, Japanese and foreigners alike, except for a little minority. To-day honest work is the all-absorbing interest. Korea and Japan have both realized that Korea's problem is not political or religious, but that it is fundamentally economic, and they have set themselves to work to solve it along economic lines. After that, 'let the religious workers carry on.'

We do not profess to know whether the delusion is still widespread that the depression of trade and industry in this country is part of a world slump. But at any rate it is a delusion which can hardly survive even a cursory reading of the Memorandum on the subject just issued by the Economic and Financial Section of the League of Nations. For the figures there given bring out the fact that the world, taken as a whole, is enjoying a very considerable measure of prosperity. Since 1913 the world's population has increased by about five per cent. World production of foodstuffs and raw materials was, in 1925, up by from 16 to 18 per cent, and even world trade had kept pace with the rise in population, and risen by five per cent. For manufacturing production there are unfortunately no adequate data available, but such figures as there are indicate a world rise exceeding that of the production of foodstuffs and raw materials.

These figures indicate, indeed, a relative diminution in the quantity of international trade, accounted for by a growth of home, in comparison with foreign, markets. But they certainly do not indicate the existence of a world slump. The world's output per head of population is greater than before the war, and, if it were equally shared among the nations, would everywhere enable a higher standard of life to be sustained. Moreover, in face of the change in the age distribution of world

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), December 4

population, this increased production is being carried on by a labor force which has certainly not increased by five per cent, and most probably not at all. The war has not left the world poorer, if the world is treated as a single unit.

But, of course, though we have largely a 'world market,' the world is not a single unit. And as soon as we turn from considering the figures for the world as a whole to those for its parts, the situation appears in a different light. In North America, for example, population has risen by 19 per cent, production of foodstuffs and materials by 26 per cent, and foreign trade by 37 per cent, while it is estimated that the manufacturing production of the United States has increased by no less than 60 per cent. In Europe, on the other hand, even if Russia is left out, population is up by four per cent and production of foodstuffs and raw materials by from four to five per cent; but foreign trade is down by six per cent. If Soviet Russia is included, trade is down by 11 per cent and population up by only one per cent, the figure for foodstuffs and materials remaining unaffected.

This is a significant contrast which is already well known. But the figures for Asia-excluding Asiatic Russia are equally startling. Asiatic production of foodstuffs and materials is up by about 20 per cent, and Asiatic trade by 36 per cent, whereas the increase in population is only five per cent. In fact, the tables presented in the Memo

randum present throughout a revealing contrast between Europe and the rest of the world. South American trade has fallen a little; but South American production has grown by 35 per cent. Central America and the West Indies actually show an increase of 70 per cent in raw products and nearly 30 per cent in trade. In Africa, where trade has stood still, raw production has advanced by 38 or 39 per cent.

What do these figures indicate? In the first place, no doubt, the relative impoverishment of Europe, the enormous increase in the wealth of America, and the great development of the Eastern countries as producers. This, however, is not the whole story. There is also a definite indication of a fall in relative trade volumes. Less of the world's products are crossing international frontiers, and so entering into the statistics of world commerce. More are being consumed at home - both more foodstuffs and more of the raw materials of industrial production.

This, of course, hits hardest those industrialized countries which are most dependent on their export trade, or on the performance of shipping and financial services in relation to the trade of the world as a whole. In short, it hits hardest Great Britain and Germany, which are the two great countries with the most artificial and vulnerable economic systems. It does not hit America, which is not so greatly dependent on exports, even of foodstuffs. Nor does it hit the Eastern countries, which are busy developing their own productive systems on the model of Europe and the United States.

It is, of course, a moot point how far this tendency to a decline in the relative importance of foreign trade is to be taken as permanent, how far it arises from the natural development of countries outside Europe, and how far it is dependent on an incapacity of

Europe for resuming the services in world trade which she formerly undertook. But, on the whole, the signs are that it is permanent. Whatever the position may have been in the years immediately following the war, Europe's disability to-day certainly is not an inability to produce. It is a failure to put her goods on the market in a form, or at a price, capable of meeting the effective demand. We referred last week to the growth of Japanese and other Eastern competition in the cotton-goods trade, as well as to the expansion of the cotton industry in America. In the metal trades, which accounted for so large a share of British and German exports, the trouble clearly is not a deficiency of productive power, for there is a surplus which is being immobilized by concerted restriction of output. Europe's weakness is partly that her prices are too high, and partly that her productive power is no longer adapted to produce in the right proportion the commodities for which there is a ready market.

This is a serious situation, and one which British and other European statesmen and business men are alike called upon to face. The remedy of low wages is clearly of no use, both because it cannot bring down prices far enough and because it throws good markets after bad and merely reduces itself to a fruitless competition between the European countries which are fellow sufferers from the same evil. The remedy must include a stimulation and not a further destruction of home and European markets. But it must also include a readjustment of industry itself, to suit not the structure of existing manufacturing plants but the requirements of available consumers.

It has been pointed out in more than one quarter lately that a drastic reorientation of British industry is already