cannot always wax opulent on home trade alone; he must know that in time we are certain to reach a period of overproduction, when it will aid the nation to have alien peoples for customers of our mills and workshops. Every land in Asia east of Singapore can be commercially exploited by the United States more easily, and with greater success, than by any other people, if the task be gone about systematically and practically.
The Chinese envoy of a few years ago to Washington, Minister Wu, said many wise things, and no epigram fell from his lips containing a profounder sermon for the American people than when he remarked that two inches added to the length of the skirts of every Chinese would double the market value of every pound of cotton.
Small as it was, our commerce in China was severely lessened last year, not alone by the boycott, but through the enterprise shown by other nations having a share in Celestial trade. The cotton cloth exports of the United States to China and Manchuria for the nine months ending September 30 fell off by over ten million dollars as compared with the same period of 1905. The respective amounts were $15,416,152 and $25,566,286. The Chinese buyers gave preference to the British, taking $34,245,129 worth of cotton fabrics from the United Kingdom for the first nine months of 1906, a decrease of $3,770,584 from last year. The British loss on bleached and gray goods was about half that of America's total loss, but the English exporters made up a large part of the shortage by much larger sales of printed and dyed goods. But while America remained almost stationary last year in selling cotton manufactures to the world, Great Britain made a tremendous stride. Her cotton fabric exports for the first nine months of 1906 were valued at a little more than two hundred and seventy-six million dollars, an increase of about twenty million dollars over the same period of 1905, and of nearly fifty million dollars over the first nine months of 1904. This was accomplished almost wholly by marketing wares wrought from fiber grown in our Southern States, let it be remembered.
And what would happen to British trade, let us inquire, were America to cease exporting raw cotton, to permit our staple to emerge from our land in a manufactured state, only?
The mere suggestion of the thing is sufficient to cause a cold shudder to play down the spinal column of John Bull. But the American people will never play the game of commerce in that way.
CHAPTER XV
JAPAN'S COMMERCIAL FUTURE
A nation has risen in the Far East that is earning high place among enlightened governments, and in all probability the new-comer may already be entitled to permanently rank with the first-class powers of the earth. Japan is day by day a growing surprise to the world.
That the diminutive Island Empire should have been able to humble the Muscovite pride was no greater marvel than that she should in a brief half-century advance from the position of a weak and unknown country to the station of a highly civilized nation. The government of the Mikado is to-day the best exponent of Asiatic progressiveness. And of a people with a capacity to perform in two generations such amazing things who shall dare say what to them is impossible?