Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

New Forces in Old China by Arthur Judson Brown
page 135 of 484 (27%)
While the farmers of the Mississippi Valley find living much
more expensive than it was two generations ago, they also find
that they get more for their wheat and that they eat better food
and wear better clothes and build better houses than their
grandfathers. The era of railroads ended the days of cheap
living, but it ended as well days when the farmer had to confine
himself to a diet of corn-bread and salt pork, when his
home was destitute of comforts and his children had little
schooling and no books. So the American working man of today
has to pay more for the necessaries of life than the working
man of Europe, but he is nevertheless the best paid, the
best fed, the best clothed and the best housed working man in
the world, a far better and more intelligent citizen because of
these very conditions.

The same changes will doubtless take place in Asia. That
great continent is capable of producing enormous quantities of
food, minerals and both raw and manufactured articles which
the rest of the world will sooner or later want. Already this
foreign demand is bringing comparative wealth to the rug
dealers of Syria, the silk embroiderers of China and the cloisonne'
and porcelain makers of Japan. But only an infinitesimal
part of the total population has thus far profited largely by
this wider market. Where one man amasses wealth in this
way, 100,000 men find that aggressive foreign traders exploit
their wares by flooding the shops with tempting articles which
they can ill-afford to buy. The difficulty is rapidly becoming
acute. My inquiries in Japan led me to the conclusion that
while the cost of the staple articles of living has increased
nearly 100 per cent. in the last twenty years, the financial ability
DigitalOcean Referral Badge