The moths reserved from the first brood, after becoming fertile, are tied by means of threads to the oak bushes where they deposit the eggs which produce the second crop of tussur silk. To maintain an abundance of succulent leaves within reach the oaks are periodically cut back.
Thus these plain people, patient, frugal, unshrinking from toil, the basic units of three of the oldest nations, go to the uncultivated hill lands and from the wild oak and the millions of insects which they help to feed upon it, not only create a valuable export trade but procure material for clothing, fuel, fertilizer and food, for the large chrysalides, cooked in the reeling of the silk, may be eaten at once or are seasoned with sauce to be used later. Besides this, the last unreelable portion of each cocoon is laid aside to be manufactured into silk wadding and into soft mattresses for caskets upon which the wealthy lay their dead.
XIV
THE TEA INDUSTRY
The cultivation of tea in China and Japan is another of the great industries of these nations, taking rank with that of sericulture, if not above it, in the important part it plays in the welfare of the people. There is little reason to doubt that the industry has its foundation in the need of something to render boiled water palatable for drinking purposes. The drinking of boiled water has been universally adopted in these countries as an individually available, thoroughly efficient and safe guard against that class of deadly disease germs which it has been almost impossible to exclude from the drinking water of any densely peopled country.
So far as may be judged from the success of the most thorough sanitary measures thus far instituted, and taking into consideration the inherent difficulties which must increase enormously with increasing populations, it appears inevitable that modern methods must ultimately fail in sanitary efficiency and that absolute safety must be secured in some manner having the equivalent effect of boiling water, long ago adopted by the Mongolian races, and which destroys active disease germs at the latest moment before using. And it must not be overlooked that the boiling of drinking water in China and Japan has been demanded quite as much because of congested rural populations as to guard against such dangers in large cities, while as yet our sanitary engineers have dealt only with the urban phases of this most vital problem and chiefly, too, thus far, only where it has been possible to procure the water supply in comparatively unpopulated hill lands. But such opportunities cannot remain available indefinitely, any more than they did in China and Japan, and already typhoid epidemics break out in our large cities and citizens are advised to boil their drinking water.
If tea drinking in the family is to remain general in most portions of the world, and especially if it shall increase in proportion to population, there is great industrial and commercial promise for China, Korea and Japan in their tea industry if they will develop tea culture still further over the extensive and still unused flanks of the hill lands; improve their cultural methods; their manufacture; and develop their export trade. They have the best of climatic and soil conditions and people sufficiently capable of enormously expanding the industry. Both improvement and expansion of methods along all essential lines, are needed, enabling them to put upon the market pure teas of thoroughly uniform grades of guaranteed quality, and with these the maintenance of an international code of rigid ethics which shall secure to all concerned a square deal and a fair division of the profits.
The production of rice, silk and tea are three industries which these nations are preeminently circumstanced and qualified to economically develop and maintain. Other nations may better specialize along other lines which fitness determines, and the time is coming when maximum production at minimum cost as the result of clean robust living that in every way is worth while, will determine lines of social progress and of international relations. With the vital awakening to the possibility of and necessity for world peace, it must be recognized that this can be nothing less than universal, industrial, commercial, intellectual and religious, in addition to making impossible forever the bloody carnage that has ravaged the world through all the centuries.
With the extension of rapid transportation and more rapid communication throughout the world, we are fast entering the state of social development which will treat the whole world as a mutually helpful, harmonious industrial unit. It must be recognized that in certain regions, because of peculiar fitness of soil, climate and people, needful products can be produced there better and enough more cheaply than elsewhere to pay the cost of transportation. If China, Korea and Japan, with parts of India, can and will produce the best and cheapest silks, teas or rice, it must be for the greatest good to seek a mutually helpful exchange, and the erection of impassable tariff barriers is a declaration of war and cannot make for world peace and world progress.
The date of the introduction of tea culture into China appears unknown. It was before the beginning of the Christian era and tradition would place it more than 2700 years earlier. The Japanese definitely date its introduction into their islands as in the year 805 A. D., and state its coming to them from China. However and whenever tea growing originated in these countries, it long ago attained and now maintains large proportions. In 1907 Japan had 124,482 acres of land occupied by tea gardens and tea plantations. These produced 60,877,975 pounds of cured tea, giving a mean yield of 489 pounds per acre. Of the more than sixty million pounds of tea produced annually on nearly two hundred square miles in Japan, less than twenty-two million pounds are consumed at home, the balance being exported at a cash value, in 1907, of $6,309,122, or a mean of sixteen cents per pound.