arted the people tore it up and threw it into the river.

In Shanghai I met his Excellency Wu Ting Fang, formerly Minister to
the United States, and he told me of his troubles in building, under
Li Hung Chang's directions, what turned out to be the first permanent
railway in China. This was less than twenty-five years ago. Li Hung
Chang said to Mr. Wu: "If we ask the authorities to let us build a
railway, they'll refuse, so I am going to take the responsibility
myself. The only way to overcome the prejudice against railways is to
let the people see that a railroad isn't the evil they think it is."
Accordingly, Mr. Wu set to work on the Tongshan Railway. He built
first ten miles, then twenty more. Then as the road was working well,
and its usefulness demonstrated, he and Li Hung Chang thought they
might get permission from the Throne to construct a line from Tientsin
to Peking. Successful in this effort, they went ahead with the survey
and {140} imported from America the materials for building the
line--and then came a new edict forbidding them to proceed! The matter
had been taken up by the viceroys and governors, and 80 per cent, of
them had opposed building the line!

Now, less than twenty-five years later, John Chinaman is calling for
railroads in almost every non-railroad section, and the railroads
already built are paying handsome dividends. Everybody seems to
travel. Besides the first-class and second-class coaches, most trains
carry box-cars, very much like cattle-cars and without seats of any
kind, for third-class passengers. And I don't recall having seen one
yet that wasn't chock full of Chinamen, happy as a similar group of
Americans would be in new automobiles. A missionary along the line
between Hankow and Peking says that he now makes a 200-mile trip in
five hours which formerly took him nineteen days. Before the railway
came he had to go by wheelbarrow, ten miles a day, his luggage on one
side the wheel, and himself on the other. Thousands of these
wheelbarrows, doing freight and passenger business, are in use in
Shanghai and the regions roundabout. A frame about three feet wide and
four feet long is built over and around the wheel, and a coolie will
carry as much as half a ton on one of them.

Along the Yangtze a considerable quantity of cotton is grown, and I
went out into some of the fields in the neighborhood of Shanghai. The
stalks were dead, of course, and in some cases women were pulling them
up