There is no prospect that other countries will have appreciable quantities of food to spare for China in exchange for her man-factures, so that, in foreign trade, manufactures or raw materials will be exchanged for other manufactures oF raw materials and the en= gineers and artisans in China can only hope to sell their surplus in the long run to the farmer who can only offer his agricultural surplus in exchange. The economies of this process 2 pra tically self-contained country do not woom to have been very thoroughly studied, but are quite worth investigation, especially as they in= dicate an upper limit to wages in terms of food, In so far as the ver enn devise means to pro-amaher number of man-hours (including the labour of producing the raw materials, coal, ete.), the higher the general standard of living may become, but there is a limit which can only be raised very gradually and with diffeulty.
These very importi be done for agriculture in Chit The improvement of irrigation toms both in respect to water supply and drainage, the manufacture of cheap fertilizers, small pumping sets, all offer possibilities, Dut the economic margins are very small, and only large, well-thought out schemes have much prospect of success. The Chinese farmer is very expert on stereotyped lines and no startling changes are at all probable.
The biological side Prevention work in the form of flood control has a great indirect bearing on agriculture, but again the, @onomie factors may not be lightly disregarded. Unless the occasional damage done floods, spread over the whole time, appreciably exceeds the similarly spread cost of preventive works, the latter may not be worth doing. Unless such works are thoroughly maintained and controlled, their benefits may be small.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.