web of life.''



IX

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN ASIA[24]

THE result of the operation of this commercial force is
an economic revolution of vast proportions. When
ever I went in Asia, I found wider interest in this subject
than in the aggressions of European nations. The reason
is obvious. The common people in Asia care little for politics,
but the price of food and raiment touches every man, woman
and child at a sensitive point. Almost everywhere, the old
days of cheap living are passing away. Steamers, railways,
telegraphs, newspapers, labour-saving machinery, and the introduction
of western ideas are slowly but surely revolutionizing
the Orient. Shantung wheat, which formerly had no market
beyond a radius of a few dozen miles from the wheat-field, can
now be shipped by railroad and steamship to any part of the
world, and every Chinese buyer has to pay more for it in consequence.
In like manner new facilities for export have doubled,
trebled and, in some places, quadrupled the price of rice in
China, Siam and Japan. The Consul-General of the United
States at Shanghai reports that the prices of seventeen staple
articles of export have increased sixteen per cent. in twenty
years while in Japan the increase in the same articles for the
same period was thirty-one per cent.[25]