steam Communication 5 



steam communication ; now at last, after over twenty years, 

 wrangling with Chinese officialdom, this is about to be estab- 

 lished. The difficulty lay with the provincial authorities, 

 whose interests were menaced by the change ; but a vigorous, 

 minister had only to press the matter home sufficiently upon 

 the Central Government at Pekin, for them to give way, 

 and in their turn '^\&zA force majeure to the provincials, who 

 then, as in so many other previous instances, promptly, 

 though sulkily acquiesced. The mandarins pleaded for 

 delay, on the ground of the junkmen who would be thrown 

 out of work; but this argument, though good in itself, is 

 dispelled by the experience of other ports opened to steam, 

 where the trade on the subsidiary channels of communication 

 has been so stimulated that more natives are employed in 

 the carrying trade than ever before. Another argument 

 gravely adduced in an official despatch to Sir John Walsham 

 was, that the monkeys in the Gorges would throw down 

 rocks on the passing steamers, and that then the poor Chinese 

 Government would be held responsible ! 



But in bringing about a radical change like that of steam 

 communication, and at the same time to promote the 

 prosperity of all classes, including those whose vested in- 

 terests are threatened, what is wanted is permission to the 

 people to avail themselves freely of their almost untouched 

 mineral wealth. It is the studious discouragement of mining 

 enterprise on the part of the authorities that forms the second 

 of the three obstacles to increased trade, which I have just 

 enumerated. It is nothing less than a scandal, that at 

 Ichang, 1000 miles inland, steamers should be driven to 

 burn imported Japanese coal, when Ichang, as Richthofen 

 points out, is situated on the borders of one of the richest 

 coal-fields in the world. The vast carboniferous deposits 

 that underlie the Red Basin of Szechuan, and the out- 



