Flash-lights from the Seven Seas

by William L. Stidger

That was glibly said, but the fact which the statement leaves out of reckoning is that Shantung is the very heart and soul of China instead of being the appendix.

The average American has so often thought of China just as China; a great, big, indefinite, far-off nation of four hundred million people, always stated in round numbers, that Shantung doesn't mean much to us. Yes, but it means much to China.

It means about the same as if some nation should come along and take New England from us; New England, the seat of all our most sacred history, the beginning of our national life, the oldest of our traditions, the burial-place of our early founders, the seat of our religious genesis. I don't believe that many folks in New England would desire to be called an appendix of the United States.

So one of the things that I was determined to do when I went to China was to go from one end of Shantung to the other, talking with coolies, officials, old men and young men, students, and those who can neither read nor write; missionaries and soldiers; natives and foreigners; to see just what importance Shantung is to China as a whole.

The first thing I discovered was that it has about forty million people living within the limits of the peninsula, close to half the population of the United States. Does that sound as if it might be China's appendix? You wouldn't think so if you saw the cities, roads and fields of this great stretch of land literally swarming with human beings, and every last one of them, as busy as ants.

I rode one whole day across the peninsula. I happened to be traveling with a man from Kansas. He was a man interested in farming and wheat-growing. For hundreds of miles we had been passing through land that was absolutely level and every inch of it cultivated. I had been saying to myself over and over again, "Why, it's exactly like our Middle West Country."

Then much to my astonishment this Kansas man turned to me, and said, "Did it ever occur to you that these fields of Shantung look just like Kansas?"

"Yes, it has just occurred to me this minute," I responded.

Then the wife of the Kansas man said, "I have been shutting my eyes and trying to imagine that I was in Kansas, it's so much like home."

"And say, man, but a tractor on those fields would work wonders," added a portion of William Allen White's reading constituency.