Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/54

24 much as 50,000 dollars, without any written or signed document being made use of at all; and this is typical of commercial intercourse between Europeans and Chinese. The commercial class in China is composed of shrewd hard-headed business men, to whom the accumulation of wealth is as the breath of life, and these men are beginning to realise the magnificent prospects which are held out by the organisation of industry. Who will venture to assign a limit to the influence of a reorganised China, with free play given to the commercial and industrial instinct of the race, upon the position of the trading and manufacturing nations of the world?

The position which China must inevitably acquire some day will not be won with the same startling rapidity with which Japan pressed home her claims to the title of a first-class Power. There are too many factors which will war against the reconstruction of Chinese society and the Chinese State, and which will act as clogs upon the wheels of Chinese progress. Loyalty to and adoration of the Sovereign, which bind the people of Japan into a united