and fertile valley of the upper Yang-tze River. Meanwhile,
the English talk of a line from Kowloon, opposite Hongkong,
to Canton, and of connecting their Burma Railroad, which
already runs from Rangoon to Kun-long ferry, with the
Yang-tze valley, so that the enormous trade of southern interior
China may not flow into a French port, as the French so
ardently desire, but into an English city.

It would be impossible to describe adequately the far-
reaching effect upon China and the Chinese of this extension of
modern railways. We have had an illustration of its meaning
in America, where the transcontinental railroads resulted in
the amazing development of our western plains and of the
Pacific Coast. The effect of such a development in China can
hardly be overestimated, for China has more than ten times the
population of the trans-Mississippi region while its territory is
vaster and equally rich in natural resources. As I travelled
through the land, it seemed to me that almost the whole
northern part of the Empire was composed of illimitable fields
of wheat and millet, and that in the south the millions of paddy
plots formed a rice-field of continental proportions. Hidden
away in China's mountains and underlying her boundless
plateaus are immense deposits of coal and iron; while above
any other country on the globe, China has the labour for the
development of agriculture and manufacture. Think of the
influence not only upon the Chinese but the whole world,
when railroads not only carry the corn of Hunan to the famine
sufferers in Shantung, but when they bring the coal, iron and
other products of Chinese soil and industry within reach of
steamship lines running to Europe and America. To make