s who run across a friend from their own
city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.

The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro."
"I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
waters of Nyassa the Phoenicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
themselves out of pocket by some thousan