66 COTTON 



of cotton. The prices of wool and silk are prohibi- 

 tive. Only cotton can fill the requirements of 

 cheapness, and the world is yet only half clothed. 

 Says Lieut. Richmond Pearson Hobson: 



"I have had a great many Chinamen who worked 

 under my directions, and whose work I inspected 

 from day to day, while they were building gun- 

 boats, and if they were doing that work for you, I 

 would judge the wages of such hard-working men 

 to be about forty to fifty cents a day. Now I 

 investigated this matter thoroughly, and as far 

 as I could get any information, I found the real 

 wages of these men to be about five cents a day. 

 Their families are large, and, of course, they can't 

 afford too much for food, clothing or anything else ; 

 and what is the result? The average Chinaman 

 wears about half a suit of clothes. They are cotton, 

 for they don't wear silk over there. It's a mistake 

 to say it is silk, for only the Mandarins can wear 

 silk. Now there were many of these coolies, 

 who would come down from the interior, whom 

 I saw working on these gun-boats, and pretty 

 soon I would see one come down with a whole suit 

 on. That wasn't all. It got a little colder, and I 

 found that same coolie before long would come 

 down with two suits of clothes on, the second 

 pulled over the first. Later, he would come down 

 with three, four, five, six and seven, the last suit 

 (the sixth or the seventh) made of cotton, so that 

 when you saw him coming down the street, he looked 

 like a walking cotton bale." 



When China wakes up, therefore, we are likely 

 to find an enormously increased demand for our 

 cotton crop in this one country. Properly civi- 

 lized, China alone, says Lieut. Hobson, with its 

 430,000,000 people, would consume the present 



