th.)

The two facts with which you may stir up your servants in Washington
are just these:

First, in regard to the parcels post. Here in China the other day I
mailed a package by parcels post to another country for about half
what it would have cost me to mail it from one county-seat to another
at home. How long are we going to be content to let so-called
"heathen" countries like China have advantages which so-called
enlightened, progressive America is too slow to adopt?

Secondly, the tariff. Here in the hotel where I write this article one
of the foremost journalists in the Far East tells me that the average
tariff-protected American industry sells goods to Asiatic buyers at 30
per cent. less than it will sell to the people at home. Thirty per
cent., he says, is the usual discount for Oriental trade. An electric
dynamo which is sold in America for $1000, for instance, is sold for
Chinese trade at $550 or $600. Quite a number of times on this trip
have men told me that they can get American goods cheaper over here,
after paying the freight ten thousand miles, than we Americans can buy
them at our own doors. For example, a man told me a few weeks ago of
buying fleece-lined underwear at half what it costs at home; a
missionary tells me that he saves 20 cents on each two-pound can of
Royal baking powder as compared with American prices; Libby's meats
are cheaper in London than in San Francisco; harvesting machinery made
in Chicago is carried across land and sea, halfway around the world,
and sold in far-away Siberia for less than the American farmer can buy
it at the factory gates.

And these are only a few instances. Hundreds of others might be given.
How long the American people are going to find it amusing to be held
up in such fashion remains to be seen.

Peking, China.

{102}

XI

THE NEW CHINA: AWAKE AND AT WORK

Within eighteen months China will have a parliament or a revolution
(she may have both). Such at least is the prediction I am willing to
risk, and it is one which I believe most foreigners in Peking would
indorse.

And the coming of a parliament, popular government, to guide the
destinies of the vast empire over which the Son of Heaven has reigned
supreme for more than four thousand years--this is only one chapter in
the whole marvelous story, not of China Awakening, but of China Awake.
For the breaking with tradition, the acceptance of modern ideas, which
but yesterday was a matter of