unending beds of
rape alternated with peas and beans and tobacco. T'ong would persist in
stealing the peas and beans to feed me on, and for the life of me I
could not get him to see that he should not do this sort of thing. But
how continually one was impressed with the great need of roads in
Western China! It is natural that, walking the whole distance, I should
notice this more than other travelers have done, and, to my mind, roads
in this part of the country rank in importance before the railways.

To the foreign mind it is more to the interests of China that railways
should be well and serviceably built than that the money should be
squandered to no purpose. If the railway has rails, then in China it can
be called a railway, and China is satisfied. So with the roads. If there
is any passage at all, then the Chinese call it a road, and China is
satisfied.

As one meanders through the country, watching a people who are equalled
nowhere in the world for their industry, plodding away over the worst
roads any civilized country possesses, he cannot but think, even looking
at the question from the Chinese standpoint so far as he is able, that,
were free scope once given for the infusion of Western energy and
methods into an active, trade-loving people like the Chinese, China
would rival the United States in wealth and natural resources. The
Chinese knows that his country, the natural resources of the country and
the people, will allow him to do things on a scale which will by and by
completely overbalance the doings of countries less favored by Nature
than his own. He knows that when properly developed his country will be
one of the richest in the world, yet even when he is filled with such
ideas he is just as cunctative as he has ever been. He has the idea that
he should not commence to exhaust the wealth of his country before it is
absolutely necessary.

Above all, he has now made up his mind that he himself, unaided by the
foreigner, is going to develop it just as he likes and just when he
likes.

The day of the foreign concession is gone. The Chinese now is paddling
his own canoe, and it is only by cultivating his friendship, by proving
to him by acts, and not by words, that the intrusion of privileged
enterprises--such as great mining concessions and railway concessions,
in which the foreigner demands that he be the only principal--is no
longer contemplated, that the day will be won. But it is equally true
that o