Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/396

390 with whom they pleased. This was soon extended to subjects of the United States and France, and since then the rights of foreigners in China have steadily increased. There are now over thirty 'treaty ports' the gateways of Western trade and influence.

American commerce with China began in 1784, the first ship leaving New York on Washington's birthday of that year, and taking fifteen months for the round trip. Our trade with China has been successful from the start, and is greater in importance and value than that of any other nation except Great Britain. With all the rapid developments of modern commerce and the pressure which every commercial nation is exerting in that quarter, our sales to China have quadrupled in the last decade. This rapid growth, together with other recent events in the far east, has warranted the U. S. Department of Commerce and Labor in publishing a quarto volume of some hundred and twenty pages on 'Commercial China in 1904.' Some of the introductory sentences of this monograph are significant in the present connection:

With an area of 4.000,000 square miles and a population of 400,000.000 people, its written history, covering thousands of years, shows that its doors have been firmly closed against foreign trade until within the memory of the present generation, while during the short time in which foreigners have been admitted to its commerce no period has been so marked with important commercial developments as that of the past three years. With hundreds of miles of railway now in operation and thousands of miles projected; with telegraphs connecting its capital with every province and even its far away dependencies and also with the outside world; with steam navigation and foreign vessels penetrating to the very head of its many navigable waterways; with new treaty ports opening upon the coast and far inland, and with foreigners permitted to travel for business or pleasure to the remotest corners of the Empire and carry with them their merchandise and the machinery with which it is manufactured, the changes in conditions are such as to attract unusual attention.

The expansion of the great powers of the world has culminated in the armed strife on China's northern border which is holding the attention of the civilized world. The issue in the east may be briefly stated, but it concerns hundreds of millions of the human race. 'Shall Japan, Siam, Korea and China be free to work out their own national destinies?' Japan and Siam have already made great strides, but while they may seem to be beyond outside domination, their fate is still involved in no small measure with that of China. The issue in the orient is sharply drawn: 'independent national development for China, and continued progress of the other two free Asiatic states; or the subjection of China, and the endangering of all free nationality in Asia.'

The loss of free nationality in Asia would probably be a calamity to mankind. However justly the occidental may pride himself on his mastery of the art of living, however truly he may rejoice in his achievement throughout the whole reach of life, a sane modesty, taught him by his own science, should keep him from regarding western peoples as the