all these resources available to the rest of the world, and in turn
to introduce among the 426,000,000 of the Chinese the products
and inventions of Europe and America, is to bring about
an economic transformation of stupendous proportions.

Imagine, too, what changes are involved in the substitution
of the locomotive for the coolie as a motive power, the
freight car for the wheelbarrow in the shipment of produce,
and the passenger coach for the cart and the mule-litter in the
transportation of people. Railways will inevitably inaugurate
in China a new era, and when a new era is inaugurated for
one-third of the human race the other two-thirds are certain to
be affected in many ways.

That the transformation is attended by outbreaks of violence
is natural enough. Even such a people as the English and the
Scotch were at first inimical to railroads, and it is notorious
that the great Stephenson had to meet not only ridicule but
strenuous opposition. Everybody knows, too, that in the
United States stage companies and stage drivers did all they
could to prevent the building of railroads, and that learned
gentlemen made eloquent speeches which proved to the entire
satisfaction of their authors that railways would disarrange all
the conditions of society and business and bring untold evils
in their train. If the alert and progressive Anglo-Saxon took
this initial position, is it surprising that it should be taken with
far greater intensity by Orientals who for uncounted centuries
have plodded along in perfect contentment, and who now find
that the whole order of living to which they and their fathers
have become adapted is being shaken to its foundation by the