4'4 



The National Geographic Magazine 



From " Kingdom of Siam." Copyright, 1904, G. P. Putnam's Sous 



The Awakening of the East. 



but one-eighth of the world's commerce ? 

 The people of the Orient are, as a rule, 

 industrious, painstaking, and now dis- 

 posed to commercial intercourse with 

 the Occident, but without facilities for 

 transporting their products from the 

 interior to the seaboard, where they may 

 sell or exchange them for products of 

 the other parts of the world, they are 

 powerless to develop a great commerce. 



THE RECENT DEVELOPMENT OF INDIA 

 AND JAPAN COMPARED TO 

 THAT OF CHINA 



It is apparent, from this comparison 

 of the railways and telegraphs of the 

 Orient with those of the Occident, that 

 the small per capita of commerce in the 

 Orient is due, in part at least, to the 

 lack of facilities for transportation and 

 communication on land ; and there is 

 a means by which this theory can be 



A School for Girls, Bangkok 



tested. There are, in the Orient, two 

 countries which have been sufficiently 

 supplied with railways in recent years 

 to enable us to determine, with some 

 degree of accuracy, their effect upon 

 Oriental commerce. While their rail- 

 way mileage is yet small in comparison 

 with that of the great commercial coun- 

 tries of the Occident, it is sufficient to 

 justify a momentary study as to the 

 growth of commerce which has followed 

 that development. These two Oriental 

 countries in which railroads have de- 

 veloped, or at least began to develop, 

 are India and Japan. India has about 

 28,000 miles of railway and Japan 

 about 4,500 miles. True, these coun- 

 tries in each case have but about one 

 mile of railway for each 10,000 inhab- 

 itants, while in the United States we 

 have one mile for each 400 inhabitants, 

 yet the contrast in the commerce of 



