Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/72

40 put the case into the phraseology of the economists, with the outstanding features of Chinese demand and supply, and he will be enabled to form some idea of the probable and possible demand of the Chinese for commodities which they cannot themselves supply, and of the extent of their purchasing capacity.

Nowadays, too, he will come into contact with a new belief,—new, that is to say, as far as China is concerned,—the belief of a people in a national destiny. In the treaty ports much may be heard of a new China, but much that is met with in the treaty ports is mere froth and bubble; and to be real, the spirit of regeneration must be found moving among the people, in the villages and in the country towns hidden away from the eye of Europe in the dim recesses of the inland provinces, severed from the outer world by hundreds and even thousands of miles of medieval communications—unimaginable cart roads and tortuous coolie tracks. If new forces are found stirring the quiet and stagnation which for centuries have brooded over these back-waters of the great onward-flowing current of the world's