Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/77

Rh to £40,500,000, or about $200,000,000—$41.66 per capita. The inhabitants of the Anglo-Saxon colonies of the world number but seventeen million. Their net imports of merchandise are $460,000,000. The seven hundred and thirty millions of Hindu and Mongolian populations import $530,000,000. These are the lands of fabled wealth. Antiquity and the middle ages dreamed of riches inexhaustible in connection with their names. To-day still the popular belief is that the wealth of nations is dependent on the conduct of direct trade with the far East. The country can not be rich whose millions find happiness in a sufficient supply of millet or rice, whatever the wealth of a small favored class may be. But these nations were the teachers of the barbarians whose descendants now populate America and Europe. The disciples have improved on the masters. We have improved the tools which they invented and applied new forces of production. We have cheapened the processes of production. We have quintupled, we have decupled time. But whatever our improvements in the tools, they are still our masters in the work. Any one who would endeavor to substitute the product of our mills in cotton, in silk, in wool, in wood, iron, clay, in lacquer, cloisonné, or enamel, for theirs, and not see at a glance the hopelessness, would indeed prove his incapacity for grasping the situation. Our best producers study with profit the work of China and, chiefly, of Japan, and are grateful for the inspiration they derive from it. But they do not attempt to copy. Neither in color effect nor design could they stand the test of comparison. Five thousand years have been recovered from the sepulcher under which they had been sleeping. But the oldest traces unearthed in the valley of the Euphrates still take us back to the farthest East as the originator of what we cover by the term "civilization." The Mongolian shares the lot of all who have benefited the race.

If we can not expect great openings for our mill products in Asia, Africa is a new field for the civilizing efforts of Europe, and will repay cultivating, perhaps. The negro has neither factories nor workshops. There at least is an unlimited field for trade expansion. Germany, the latest comer, with the zeal of all fresh missionaries, is eagerly taking up her colonizing mission. The result is not very encouraging. There is a fine set of buildings with garden spots and harbor improvements in the settlement at Cameroon, and a well-stocked graveyard of what were once good German boys, victims of the deadly climate and of the expansion fever. So far this is the only net showing to the credit side of the ledger. The territory in Africa covers nearly one million square miles. The possession of such an empire is worth a sacrifice, apparently, and Germany is not parsimonious in this direction. The contribution of the German