HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 107 



chance, merchants, engineers, soldiers will be able to subsist as in 

 the past. Will they exercise some of the influence hitherto refused 

 to the foreign element? I think so, thanks to the economic revolu- 

 tion worked by railways, which cannot fail to be followed by a social 

 revolution. However democratic the system of Chinese adminis- 

 tration may be, an administration all the degrees of which are 

 accessible to the most deserving or the most intriguing, the Chinese 

 dignitaries are nevertheless a backward caste which prevent all 

 progress. But if this state of things has lasted in China during cen- 

 turies, if the narrow and abusive interpretation of the precepts of 

 Confucius has postponed the introduction of reforms, it is only be- 

 cause the means of intercommunication were too slow and too rare 

 between the various parts of this immense Empire. That great events 

 could take place in certain regions without other provinces having 

 the least knowledge of them; that the very existence of the Empire 

 could have been threatened as it was in 1858 and 1860, without the 

 bulk of the nation having the least inkling of the danger, will sur- 

 prise only those who are ignorant of China. Things will be changed 

 when a net of rapid highroads shall cross the eighteen provinces, and 

 bring them into direct relation with the countries where the outer 

 barbarians have settled. The management of affairs will fall into 

 the hands of those who, more clear-sighted than their elders, shall 

 have foreseen the new state of things; the Star of Confucius will 

 vanish in the steam of the locomotive, and fade in the light of the 

 electric spark. 



Whether China will remain a territorial unit, which I do not believe, 

 the economic interests of the north and the south, of the east and 

 of the west being too divergent ; whether she will keep her autonomy, 

 or be dismembered, or held in bondage by foreign chiefs the prolific 

 Chinese race will ever remain one of the most important factors in 

 the great struggle for life of races and nations, a struggle for which 

 she is assuredly better prepared than many of those who consider 

 her an easy prey, which they may possibly devour, but certainly will 

 not digest. 



It is not without some intent that till now I have hardly spdken of 

 the United States, whose guest I am to-day; last but not least. 



The initiative of the trade of the United States with the Far East 

 is not due, as one might be tempted to believe, to the merchants of 

 the western coast, but to the enterprising and spirited merchants 

 of New England, Boston, New York, Baltimore, whose wooden 

 ships doubled Cape Horn to go to Canton. Eight years after the 

 Declaration of Independence, on Sunday, February 22, 1784, for 

 the first time an American ship, The Empress of China, set sail at 

 New York for China; since then an unbroken line of vessels flying 



