same law which is at work in Japan, displacing rice as a food-product, will come into force in China, and when it does we shall sell no more flour or wheat in Liverpool. The tables will be turned upon our fellow farmers of the Trans-Rocky-Mountain States, and we shall have the advantage of a practically home market, and the price will not be made in Liverpool.

Mr. Hill stated to the Senate Committee that in 1898 his company carried ten thousand tons of manufactured cotton in their Puget Sound boats to Asia from North and South Carolina, and about thirty-five million pounds of raw cotton from Texas. I infer that Mr. Hill got this traffic away from the Southern Pacific Company because there was no transportation to be had from San Francisco. Japan, until in recent years, has been using shortstaple Egyptian cotton, but the Japanese have found that our longer staple makes a better yarn and mixes well with the other, and now the vessels leaving Puget Sound ports including the new line established by Japan, always leave freight on the docks which they have not space to carry. And I am told the same congestion exists at San Francisco. Mr. Hill spoke of an offer of twenty thousand tons of cotton from Texas to his road last October, which was refused because there were no vessels at Puget Sound to carry it across the Pacific Ocean. It is to be hoped that the Southern Pacific brought it to San Francisco. There are sufficient shipping facilities, I believe, for the Atlantic trade, but on the Pacific it is greatly retarded by lack of vessels.

As matters now stand, however, the foreign trade of this country would almost cease in the event of war between Great Britain and any one or more of the leading maritime powers, for our traffic would have to be carried on under the flag of a nation at war, which could not be done. The loss to our country in such an event while we were building ships to carry our traffic would be more than reasonable subsidies paid for twenty years. We are now paying to foreign bottoms for our transportation service over two hundred million dollars per annum. The money we received for exports in 1897 of wheat, wheat flour, corn, and fresh and canned beef amounted to less than we paid out to

foreign bottoms for doing our carrying business that year.

With the expansion of trade in the Orient will come a larger demand for articles now being exported from this country, such as flour, corn, iron and steel, and metals of all kinds and their manufactures, lumber, manufactures of cotton and wool, kerosene oil, sugar, wines and brandy, and numerous other articles.

There is no reason apparent to my mind why there should not be development in China along the lines of the expansion in business so manifest and so rapid in Japan. The growth will be slow, but it must begin soon and continue. Mr. F. X. Schoonmaker, of New Jersey, for many years connected with the Associated Press, and engaged in gathering news from China, has made a most careful study of the Chinese situation. He is a man of high intelligence and a skilled economist. He has great familiarity with the resources of this Coast from personal observation and study of them on the ground. He says the most reliable estimate of China's population places it at five hundred and fifty millions, and that it is increasing at the rate of fourteen millions per annum; that in 1892 Li Hung Chang, who is one of the great statesmen of the world, discovered that China was then passing the point at which it could feed itself; that rice, which is their chief food product, was losing much of its nutrition through centuries of inbreeding, and that some substitute for rice must be found or at least a food to supplement it; and that after a thorough research and examination of the question it was found that wheat was the best substitute. Looking over the wheat regions of the globe, it was determined that China must look to the United States. While admitting the importance of trade in other articles which must rapidly come to us from the Orient, Mr. Schoonmaker thinks that it is through the supplying of food to China that this country is to be enriched beyond the dreams of statesmen of the past.

In a recent bulletin of the Bureau of Statistics of the Treasury Department, the population of China proper is given by provinces, of which there are eighteen. These are brought into comparison with the area and population of States of our

Union. The purpose seems to be to show the density and overcrowded population of China and the comparatively sparsely populated States of the Union. Inferentially, I suppose, is the lesson that we are capable of sustaining for a long time all the people likely to inhabit our country and shall have a large trade in supplying China. For example, Hupeh, which has 70,450 square miles of territory and 33,322,850 inhabitants, or 473 to the square mile, is contrasted with Ohio and Indiana, which together have 76,670 square miles and only 5,864,720 people; Kwantung has 29,706,249 inhabitants on 79,456 square miles, or 377 to the square mile, while Kansas with 81,700 square miles has 1,427,096 inhabitants. province of Czechuan has about the area of the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, and supports 406 to the square mile, or 67,712,897 population, which is nearly as many as we had in the United States in 1890.

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It may be said that when we teach these teeming, poorly fed, and worse clothed millions how to live and enlarge their wants so as to consume our products, they will also acquire the knowledge of our arts and will become competitors in our lines of manufactures and undersell us. sibly this may happen in some directions, but there will come compensation in the mutual exchange of commodities not produced in both countries. We are invading European countries with our manufactures and underselling the factories at their own doors. When the Chinaman is better fed, clothed, and paid, he will require better prices for his commodities and higher wages for his labor.

I invite attention to a recently published and most interesting interview with the Honorable Ho Yow, the Chinese ConsulGeneral, in this city. It is in part inspired by Lord Charles Beresford's new book, called "The Break-up of China." Ho Yow says, with a touch of humor, the book should be called "The Wake-up of China. He says:

It is folly to talk of China "breaking up." What is it going to break up into? The Chinese Empire contains a population of four hundred millions of people. They are a race strong in traditions, exceedingly set in their ways, who have a most idolatrous esteem for their own government and its

forms, and who would resist to the death the imposition upon them of any other government by a foreign power. . . . No doubt there are nations who have gained a foothold in the East who want Chinese territory, but they would be fooled if they got it. and they would be prevented from taking it, not alone by China, but by each other, for they are exceedingly jealous over an advantage gained by one in the country which the other does not share. It is for this reasou that China and the Chinese look so favorably upon the Americans. You do not want our territory; you only want our trade, and there is less of suspicion, apprehension, investing the Chinese mind toward Americans than in the case of any other nation, England not excepted, and she has not only resolved not to encroach upon our territory, but has practically undertaken to keep it intact.

Again, he says:

The Chinese need to be taught. They are hungering now for a knowledge of Western ways. They want Western machinery, appliances, methods. pliances, methods. No country can furnish these in such a degree as the United States. Your invention and engineering are in advance of those of any other nation. The country to conquer China-or rather, I should say, to convert China-is not Russia, in many respects nearly as dark as itself, but the United States, with all its marvels of mechanics and its ingenuity in turning the forces of nature to the uses of man. Iu such a conquest China extends the welcome hand, for it is one which would raise our people to a higher plane.

Upon the question of our power to capture the China trade, after devoting a paragraph to dispelling the impression of the Chinese character created by Bret Harte's Heathen Chinee," by showing that a leading characteristic of the Chinaman in trade relations is that of the highest integrity and honesty, he says:

This leads me to say that a vast opportunity now lies open to the American in the Orient. You are most aggressive people for trade when you once get started. If you would pursue the methods of trade-getting among the Chinese in China that you employ among yourselves, the country would be at your feet in a few years. We are not a poor nation; we have among us the accumulated wealth of thousands of years of continuous nationality. We have gold to buy with, and we have dominion over a region of the earth's surface inferior to no like scope in undeveloped resources. The greatest opportunity which exists on the globe to-day for a vast aggregate of people is open to the Americans in China. Now is the time; heretofore the minds of our people were not prepared to receive you; now they are.

He relates the recent instance of some American gentlemen who went to China. on a pleasure-trip exclusively, but having the entrée to the higher and official element of the country they became aquainted with some of the merchants. When these visitors returned to the United States, they had contracts aggregating five million dollars. He spoke of the concession to Mr. Rockefeller to build a thousand miles of railroad from Canton to Hankow, through one of the most populous and cultivated districts of the empire. Besides this road, he says there are 2,577 miles of other railroads projected for which contracts are being signed, and nearly two thousand miles of other lines. are actually being built, making nearly six thousand miles of new railroads to be in operation within a few years. He adds with just pride:

This will give you some idea of how China is waking up, and of the business there is there for Americans if they will only go after it. China needs thousands of things you have here to sell. She needs your flour, your sugar, petroleum, your metals, implements, glassware, and infinite else. In only one town in China-Hongkong-is there a water-works; there are no electric light plants, no telephones or telegraphs or streetrailway lines. With all these advantages offered Americans in China, we feel that the people of the two nations should be brought closer together.

But California will not take its proper and natural place at the head of the commercial movements on this coast in their relation to the countries of Asia without an effort. We have strong, active, and intelligent rivals at the north. Four transcontinental lines of railroad converge at Puget Sound, one of which is in sympathy with the determination of England to control the trade of the East. The other three are controlled by men of power and influence and by large Eastern capitalists. Motives of self-interest and loyalty to stockholders will move them to the greatest effort to secure the trade to which we are looking. The cities of Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma are in the hands of an aspiring and energetic people who will not yield us supremacy without a struggle. There is a vast country of great resources tributary to Puget Sound. If the wealth of San Francisco were placed VOL. XXXIV- 14

in the control of the citizens of Seattle, their alertness and intelligent comprehension of the situation would lead me to fear our battle to be already half lost. But the presence of capital alone will not give San Francisco preeminence in the contest. It must be thrown into those channels which are essential to our success. It was not only the gun, but the man behind the gun, that did the business at Manila; and it is not only the money, but the man behind the money, who is to do the business now in hand. My duties in life do not lead me much into commercial circles, although I am not entirely unfamiliar with business movements in our city; but I must confess that I do not discover any adequate awakening on the part of our business men and capitalists to the seriousness of the situation now confronting us. I do know for I have it from a most observant authority that our rivals at the north are active and aggressive and do not intend that San Francisco shall be the great mart for Pacific Ocean trade on this Coast.

The Greater California which I am forecasting presupposes internal development of more or less magnitude and the performance of certain important duties by the State or through State legislation, and an appeal may possibly be required to the Federal Government. I can only suggest one or two matters.

The preservation of our of our forests is essential to the continuation of the highly favorable agricultural and climatic conditions now existing in this State. This by no means involves the prevention of legitimate lumber enterprises prosecuted with intelligent reference to the future welfare of the State. But it does mean Government control of the sources of our water-supply and the prevention of their utter destruction by the denudation of our mountains, and this may demand the withdrawal from entry of all timber-lands. It may mean even the regulation by the State of private ownership of timber-lands in our mountains. The maxim, Sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas, has very wide application. It perhaps may not become. me to speak with certainty as to how far this principle may go toward restraining