24 THE 1RR1 C A Tl ON AGL. 



piece of very brittle metal for the hammer. In every trade, therefore, 

 involving the manufacture of goods, such as the sewing machine, the 

 bicycle, fine machinery, the making of pure chemicals, the making of 

 novel and varied designs in textures, the Orient can never compete 

 successfully with the Occident. 



The Orient can compete where merely brute labor unaccompanied 

 by intelligence is required. In the production of raw sugar, in 

 the mining of coal, the growing of rice, millet and cotton, in the 

 raising of silk-worms, the production of tea, they have always had, 

 have to day and will have for an indefinite period an advantage over 

 us, if it be an advantage. 



"We may stop this advantage by a tariff, but it is not a protective, 

 tariff in the true sense of the word, any more than would be a tariff 

 upon pine-apples, mangoes, bananas and other fruits which will not 

 grow in our land. The reason why our commerce in the east has not 

 kept pace with our trade and commerce with all other fields is due 

 chiefly to our thoughtlessness. A New York exporter, a Philadelphia 

 manufacturers, a Chicago merchant sends his price current and his 

 illustrated catalogue to a house in Canada, South America and West 

 Indies or Europe. There they are understood. The words and the 

 drawings give fair concrete ideas of the wares and goods, and trade 

 is started. The business man sends the same publication to the east 

 where such things have never been used, where in most towns outside 

 of the treaty ports there are no postofflces, no reading rooms, no 

 chambers of commerce or mercantile exchanges. There our drawings 

 appear just as ridiculous to natives as theirs do to us, and our price- 

 list, by its very candor, is regarded by them as a fraud and a swindle 

 upon its face. What is needed is to send our first-class men to that 

 part of the world. We should also establish in the east industrial ex- 

 hibitions of moderate dimensions and should establish a trade litera- 

 ture in both English and the language of the land where the publica- 

 tions are to circulate. In this way a commerce with the Orient could 

 be built up which would bring wealth, in hundreds of millions per 

 annum, to the United States." 



I do not knov; of a romance of late years that has been so gener- 

 ally taken up by the press as a truth, credited by the people as a fact, 

 and looked upon by a business men as a reality, as the canard pub- 

 lished a few months ago by the San Francisco Report called "the in- 

 vasion of the United States by the manufacturers and producers of 

 China and Japan." Even with improved methods of utiliz 

 ing the same, and all the genius that their power of 

 comprehension can command, it will be many, many years before the 

 Orientals reach a point when they will become inventors or even pro- 

 ficient imitators. Before 9ur industries will be effected to any appre- 



