apan nowadays one sees considerable tracts of adjusted
paddy fields. They are a joy to the rural sociologist. In its way
there has been nothing like it agriculturally in our time. For each of
these little farmers valued his odds and ends of paddy above their
agricultural worth. He or his forbears had made them or bought them or
married into them. And he believed that his own paddies were in a
condition of fertility surpassing not a few, and he doubted greatly
whether after adjustment he would find himself in possession of as
valuable land as his own. Sometimes also he believed that his paddies
were especially fortunate geomantically.[70] Yet, convinced by the
arguments for adjustment, the peasant agreed to the proposed
rearrangement, let his old tracts go and accepted in exchange neat
oblongs out of the common stock. Sometimes so great was the change
brought about in a village by adjustment that more than the paddies
were dealt with. Cottages were taken to new sites and the bones in
many little grave plots were removed. In a village in which there had
been an exhumation of the bones of 2,700 persons and a transference of
tombstones, I was told that the assembling together of the remains of
the departed in one place "had had a unifying effect on the
community." In this village within a period of twelve years 96 per
cent. of the paddies had been adjusted.[71]

An advantage of adjustment which has not yet been mentioned is that
adjusted paddies can usually be dried off at harvest and can therefore
be put under a second crop, usually of grain. More than a third of the
paddy-field area of the country can be dried off, and therefore
produces a second crop of barley or wheat. The farmer has two
advantages if, owing to adjustment or natural advantages, he is able
to dry off his land. Of the first or rice crop, if he is a tenant
farmer, he has had to pay his landlord perhaps 60 per cent, in rent,
less straw;[72] but the second crop is his own. The further advantage
is that second-crop land can be cultivated dry shod. One-crop paddy is
under water all the year round, and must be cultivated with wet feet
and legs.

It is because more than half the paddies are always under water that
rice cultivation is so laborious. Think of the Western farm labourer
being asked to plough and the allotment holder to dig almost knee-deep
in mud. Although much paddy is ploughed with the aid of an ox, a cow
or a pony,[73] most rice is the product o