America's
total loss, but the English exporters made up a large part of the
shortage by much larger sales of printed and dyed goods. But while
America remained almost stationary last year in selling cotton
manufactures to the world, Great Britain made a tremendous stride. Her
cotton fabric exports for the first nine months of 1906 were valued at a
little more than two hundred and seventy-six million dollars, an
increase of about twenty million dollars over the same period of 1905,
and of nearly fifty million dollars over the first nine months of 1904.
This was accomplished almost wholly by marketing wares wrought from
fiber grown in our Southern States, let it be remembered.

And what would happen to British trade, let us inquire, were America to
cease exporting raw cotton, to permit our staple to emerge from our land
in a manufactured state, only?

The mere suggestion of the thing is sufficient to cause a cold shudder
to play down the spinal column of John Bull. But the American people
will never play the game of commerce in that way.

CHAPTER XV

JAPAN'S COMMERCIAL FUTURE

A nation has risen in the Far East that is earning high place among
enlightened governments, and in all probability the new-comer may
already be entitled to permanently rank with the first-class powers of
the earth. Japan is day by day a growing surprise to the world.

That the diminutive Island Empire should have been able to humble the
Muscovite pride was no greater marvel than that she should in a brief
half-century advance from the position of a weak and unknown country to
the station of a highly civilized nation. The government of the Mikado
is to-day the best exponent of Asiatic progressiveness. And of a people
with a capacity to perform in two generations such amazing things who
shall dare say what to them is impossible?

Europe has never been in joyful mood over the rise in Japanese prestige,
and she was more than reluctant to recognize the New Japan as the
dominant force in the East. That a yellow people should claim fellowship
with European countries guided by houses of lofty lineage was never
believed to be possible. Continental Europe was unprepared to admit
that Japan's triumph proved anything beyond a genius in the art of war
that was nothing short of a menace to the rest of mankind, and that luck
and geographical position helped the Mikado's legions in all ways. The
great Hohenzollern spoke of the Japanese as the "scou