60 W. G. Langzvorthy Taylor 



been opened. Emigration to the Canadian Northwest has discov- 

 ered regions to be attractive and fertile that were formerly deemed 

 uninhabitable. But the principal territories that are to be added 

 to the materialistic conjuncture of a new epoch are Africa, Siberia, 

 and China. The Boer war clearly means the opening up of Africa 

 to the world market. Whatever may be the reciprocal rights and 

 wrongs of Briton and Boer, the utilities of man demand that South 

 Africa be added to the world environment. The expeditions to 

 Cuba and to Pekin may be "predatory forays," reminding us of the 

 age of fist-law, but it is the destiny of the tropics and of the 

 Orient to enter the world market pari passu with the development 

 of railway and navigation. Wars like the Chino-Japanese are 

 but incidents in the economic development. The economic and 

 political relations of men must work within and throughout the 

 wider environment. 



The quasi-materialistic conjuncture displays notable changes : 

 electrical inventions had something to do with the crisis of 1893. 

 Electricity has been a most prominent feature and disturbing 

 element of the subsequent period. The world of industry was 

 by that crisis partially and only partially adjusted to it. It has 

 been an especially prominent factor in. the depression of 1901-02 

 in Germany ; so that we have in electricity a case of slow devel- 

 opment, but with continual surprises which makes it practically 

 impossible for industry to know the limitations placed by the new 

 invention upon new activity. 



In steam-transportation, the new developments of the ninth 

 decade were revolutionary, but those of the tenth were equally 

 so. Greater power and capacity of old kinds of machines depend 

 upon new inventions, especially those of new materials ; but peo- 

 ple only notice a change of kind and are surprised at great results 

 where the change is apparently only one of degree. Twenty-five- 

 thousand-ton ships and fifty-ton pressed steel freight cars tell 

 the story of a new state of affairs that require larger plans and 

 a more complex organization. Moreover, a new era of railway 

 building is setting in ; the Trans-Siberian railway allows of com- 

 munication along its entire line, and the Cairo-Cape railway is 

 under construction. The Panama Canal will soon asfain be 



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