d yet {183} it costs you only five cents for
your ride, and five minutes' time. In Peking, on the other hand, it
takes forty men pulling rickshaws to transport the forty passengers;
and though the pullers are "cheap laborers," it costs you more money
and an hour's time to get to your destination--even if you are so
lucky as not to be taken to the wrong place.

Forty men to do the work that two would do at home! Men and women
weavers doing work that machines would do at home. Grain reaped with
sickles instead of with horses and reapers as in America. Sixteen men
at Hankow to carry baggage that one man and a one-horse dray would
carry in New York. Women carrying brick, stone, and timber up the
mountainside at Hong Kong--and the Chinese threatened a general riot
when the English built a cable-car system up the incline; they
compelled the owners to sign an agreement to transport passengers
only--never freight! No sawmills in the Orient, but thousands of men
laboriously converting logs into lumber by means of whipsaws. No
pumps, even at the most used watering places, but buckets and ropes:
often no windlass. No power grain-mills, but men and women, and, in
some cases, asses and oxen, doing the work that the idle water-powers
are given no chance to do.

These are but specimen illustrations. In the few industries where
machinery and knowledge are brought into play ordinary labor is as yet
but little better paid than in other lines because such industries are
not numerous enough to affect the general level of wages. The net
result of her policy of refusing the help of machinery is that Asia
has not doubled a man's chances for work, but she has more than halved
the pay he gets for that work. And why? Because she has reduced his
efficiency. A man must get his proportion of the common wealth, and
where the masses are shackled, hampered by ignorance and poor tools,
they produce little, and each man's share is little.

Suppose you are a merchant: what sort of trade could you hope for
among a people who earn 10 cents a day--the head {184} of a family
getting half enough to buy a single meal in a second-rate restaurant?
Or if you are a banker, what sort of deposits could you get among such
a people? Or if a railroad man, how much traffic? Or if a
manufacturer, how much business? Or if a newspaper man, how much
circulation? Or if a doctor, lawyer, teacher, or preacher, how much
income?

Very plain on the whole must be my two propo