66 
COTTON 
of cotton. The prices of wool and silk are prohibi- 
tive. Only cotton can fill the requirements of 
cheapness, and the world is yet only half clothed. 
Says Lieut. Richmond Pearson Hobson: 
"I have had a great many Chinamen who worked 
under my directions, and whose work I inspected 
from day to day, while they were building gun- 
boats, and if they were doing that work for you, I 
would judge the wages of such hard-working men 
to be about forty to fifty cents a day. Now I 
investigated this matter thoroughly, and as far 
as I could get any information, I found the real 
wages of these men to be about five cents a day. 
Their families are large, and, of course, they can't 
afford too much for food, clothing or anything else; 
and what is the result? The average Chinaman 
wears about half a suit of clothes. They are cotton, 
for they don't wear silk over there. It's a mistake 
to say it is silk, for only the Mandarins can wear 
silk. Now there were many of these coolies, 
who would come down from the interior, whom 
I saw working on these gun-boats, and pretty 
soon I would see one come down with a whole suit 
on. That wasn't all. It got a little colder, and I 
found that same coolie before long would come 
down with two suits of clothes on, the second 
pulled over the first. Later, he would come down 
with three, four, five, six and seven, the last suit 
(the sixth or the seventh) made of cotton, so that 
when you saw him coming down the street, he looked 
like a walking cotton bale." 
When China wakes up, therefore, we are likely 
to find an enormously increased demand for our 
cotton crop in this one country. Properly civi- 
lized, China alone, says Lieut. Hobson, with its 
430,000,000 people, would consume the present 
