6,000,000
in the last fiscal year bears eloquent testimony alike to the progress
of the post office and to the growing intelligence of the people. By
telegraph the people of remotest Cathay now make their wishes known to
the Son of Heaven and the {114} Tzucheng Yuan; it was by telephone
that this Tzucheng Yuan, or National Assembly, requested the Grand
Council of the Dragon Empire to appear before it on the day of my
first visit. The slow and stately camel caravans still come down from
Mongolia to Peking--I have seen them wind their serpentine length
through the gates of the Great Wall at Nankou as they have been doing
for centuries past--but no longer do they bring the latest news from
the tribes about Desert Gobi. Across 3500 miles of its barren wastes
an undaunted telegraph line now "hums the songs of the glad parts of
the earth."

It is no longer worth while to speculate upon the probability of a new
China; the question now is as to how the new China is going to affect
the United States and the rest of the world. From our Pacific Coast,
China is our next-door neighbor, and vastly nearer in fact than any
map has ever indicated. Even New York City is now nearer to Shanghai
and Hong Kong, in point of ease of access, than she was to Chicago a
century ago. How Japan's awakening has increased that country's
foreign trade all the world knows--and China has eight times the
population of Japan proper, and twenty-eight times the area, with
almost fabulously valuable natural resources as yet untouched! Some
one has said that to raise the Chinese standard of living to that of
our own people would be (from the standpoint of markets) equivalent to
the creation of four Americas. The importance of bringing about closer
commercial relations between the United States and the Middle Kingdom
can hardly be overestimated.

It is to be hoped, however, that in our desire to cultivate China's
friendship we shall not go to the length of changing our policy of
excluding Asiatic immigration. To the thoughtful student it must be
plain that in the end such a change would lead only to disastrous
reaction. At the same time we might well effect a change in our
methods of enforcing that policy. There is nothing else on land or sea
that the Celestial so much dreads as to "lose face," to be humiliated,
and it {115} is the humiliation that attaches to the exclusion policy
rather than the policy itself that is the great stumbling-block in the
way of