Semi=weekly graphic., 1896-12-23
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Praise of the Ono u,s44H .ozsrs a4

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 It is pretty we'll known by this tilna shat the cavalry of ths Japanese aYmv b by far it's weakest division laa et course. is not uncommon. in ta armies of many countries simpi, ar the reason that economists cut of the horses in time Of peace, and trust ta ! Providence and subsidized carters to l make up the deficiency in time of war
 The problem is not quite Che sane fn i, Japan. Comparatively if not abso. lutely, there are no horses in Japan, just as there are no sheep Ia the north one comes across a few hitiur. buckmg 2uadrupeds thaI arc as much like sheep as horses but, taking the country as whole, there is scarcely a decent animal that will take saddle.
 What horses, or rather ponies arc to be found come from China. which pros duce a very good breed Of freight ear- riers thongh they have much to be de. sired in point of speed Horse racing exists in Japan yokohama and Tokio have their eourses-as it exists wher- ever two or three Englishmen are gathered together, bnt it is species of racing quite unlike anything to be found elsewhere.
 The ponies are imported from Hong Kong or shanghai by syndicate. lota are drawn and after a certain interval for training, the races raNe place.
 But to return to the army. One caa conceive u campaign, and especially such one as the Japanese have been doing, being carried on from first to last without cavalry at all, or at any rate, with tho merest skeleton of q mounted force. This of course, IS far es fighting CT scouting goes. Thero re. main the all-important questions of artillery and transport.
 In neither of these departments are horses absolutely necessary, provided you have an adequate supply of human labor, and it is just here that Japan scores
 Very little has been published with regard to the transport aIraBgemeuts of the force that marched so steadily through Corea to the gates of China, but 1t is not difficult to guess what they are. Four years ago there were thirtY-three thousand jiaplekshaw eoolies in TolSio alone. Taking the moderate estimate that there wore just double this number in the whole empire, it is safe to say that there arc quite eighty thousand now, for the kurumaya class Ginrielsshaw) is rapidly increasing cue, owing 10 the simple fact that man who can pntl kuruma is able to earn three times as much as he could at any other manual labor. In fact, the lSurama question is rapidly becoming very vital one in the Japanese industrial problem, but the trade is so overcrowded that the problem will soon solve itself aeeord- ing to the memorable laws of supply and demand. The existence of such elass-and it is quite q recent origin for the kuruma was only invented 9 quarter of . century aeo-wa3 Il eod- send to Japan in her late struggle
 To judge from what one hears pri- vately from Japan, iinrickshaw coolies are now at | premium in the capital, and Osaka and Kioto tell ms the same tale. The lzurumaya have been 'an. nexedn by the imperial government AAAhtA AiA hAA2 odhiA way Aa AllG GtiAiIG fleet of the Nippon Yusen ILarsha 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 d load of two or three hundred pounds? Yet that is feat which Japanese lturumaya think little of. The power of euduranee of these men-one likes to think of them as men and not merely animals-are mar. velous The present writer has been drawn thirty-fve miles in less than seven hours over a 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 a campaign such as Japan embarked upon. How many of them will survive the rigors of t Corean winter-for lsurumaya are not a iong- lived elass--is another matter Siucs Japan is able to plant her flag in PeItin no small measure of the credit of such an achievment is certainly due to the harmless, necessary, jinriczshaw cooly St. Louis Republic.
 How Dead Snakes "eome to Lifo.e