Page:The empire and the century.djvu/132

 to invest several millions in the purchase of industrial machinery. This, if we can rid ourselves of Western habits of thought, will appear a proceeding as natural and efficient as the investment of money in ironclads after the Chinese War. The ships were most needed then; the machines are most needed now. Let us be certain that they will be placed in competent hands and well utilized.

The case of Formosa is an interesting object-lesson. That island has been admirably developed. Japan levies no import duties against foreign trade. But she does levy taxes upon exports to foreign countries, and, as a result, Formosan exports flow through the free channel to Japan. Imports flow back by the same route; and the result of the awakening of Formosa—a very proper result in an island which is part of the Japanese Empire—is that foreign trade is stationary or dwindling, while Japanese commerce grows with the most striking rapidity, and is now more valuable than the exchanges of Formosa with all other countries together.

The strengthening of the industrial efficiency of our allies rather than of the consuming power of China is what it would be wisest to prepare for in the near future. Japanese competition will trench deeper into the present margin of trade, and the opportunities are hardly likely to widen faster than Japanese ability to take increasing advantage of them. China herself, anciently partial to walls, may not prove averse from McKinleyism, and in the long run she must become the most self-sufficing of nations. Less than half a century has witnessed the vast change from the agricultural America of Cobden's time to the industrial United States of to-day. It is not impossible that as great an economic revolution may be effected in the new Far East within as short a period. British industry may profit for a time by supplying the apparatus of later competition. But Japan, we repeat, after her war of existence, stands where Germany did after 1870. The one Power must make her commercial career as the other has made it. It is most reasonable