Semi=weekly graphic., 1896-12-16
PACK HORSES OF aAPAn.
AA Praise of the Cooy--Thsir Powers al


 Endurance.
 It is pretty we'll known by this tims that the cavalry of the Japaness army is by far its weakest division. This pf eonrse, is not gneommon, in tue ardiies of many countries, simply for the reason that economists cut off the horses ia tias2 Of peace, and trust to Providence and subsidized carters to make up the deffieIancy in time of war
 The problem is not quite the same in Japan. Comparatively, if not abso. lutely, there are no horses in Japan, just as there arc no sheep. In the north oas comes across few biting. bucking quadrupeds that arc us much 1 like sheep as horses; but, taking the country as a whole, there is scarcely decent animal that will talxe saddle.
 What horses, or rather ponies, are to be found come from China, which pro- duce very good breed of freight car- riers though they hnve much to he de- sired in point of speed. Horse racing exists in Japan Yokohama and Tokio have their courses---as it exists wher. ever two or three Englishmen are gathered together, but it is a species of racing quite unlike anything to be l found elsewhere.
 The ponies are imported from Hong Kong or Shanghai by syndicate lots are drawn and after a certain interval for training, the races take place But to return to the army Che can conceive a campaign, and especially such q one as the Japanese have been doing, being carried on from first to last without cavalry at all, or at any rate, with the merest skeleton of mounted force. This. of course, aa far ss fighting or scouting goes. There rss main the all-important questions o1 artillery and transport.
 In neither of these departments are horses absolutely necessary, provided you have an adequate supply of human labor, and 1t is just here that Japan seores.
 Very little has been published with regard to the transport arrangements of the force that marched so steadily through Corea to the gates of China, gut 1t is not difficult to guess what they are. Four years ago there were thirty three thousand jinrtckshaw coolies in Tolsio alone. Taking tho moderate estimate that there were just double this number in the whole empire, it is safe to say that there arc quite eighty thousand now, for the lurumaya class Ginrickshaw) is rapidly increasing oue, owing to the simple fact that man who can pull kuruma is able to earn three times as much as he could at any other manual labor In fact, the luruma question Is rapidly becoming a very vital one in the Japanese industrial problem, but the trade is so overcrowded that the problem will soon solve itself accord ing to the memorable laws of supply and demand. The existence of such elass-and it is quite recent origin for the lSuruma was only invented quarter of a century ago-was god- send to Japan in her late struggle.
 To judge from what one hears pri. vately from Japan, jinrickshaw cooiies are now at n premium in the capital, and Osaka and Kioto tell me the sams tale The lfurumaya have been .'an- nexed" by the imperial government much in the same way as the entire fleet of the Nippon Yusen Karsha has been acquired for transport purposes by sea. Having no horses, or at any rate, insufficient horses, the empire has fallen back upon the abundant supply of human horses which has grown up of recent years. And for all purposes except as cavalry mounts-theY are certainly superior to the four-footed variety. Where would you find horses to do thirty or forty miles day, and day after day, with load of two or three hundred pounds2 Yet that is & feat which Japanese kurumaya think little of. The power of endurance of these men-one likes to think of them as men aud not merely animals-are mar velous The present writer has been drawn thirty-fve miles in less than seven hours over bad road and remem- bers the holiday spent in which couple of Osakei coolies contracted to draw forty pounds of baggage thirty miles q day for an indefinite period. Such men, healthy, hardy, in perfect training. able to do their work upon little food, and that of the simplest, must be in- valuable in campaign such as Japan embarked upon. How many of them will survive the rigors of Corean winter-for kurumaya are not loag- lived class-is another matter. Since Japan is able to plant her flag in Pekin, DO small measure of the credit of such an achievment is certainly due to the harmless, necessary, jinrickshaw cooly. St. Louis Republic.