ose who supply all of these classes. In short, there would be a general
quickening of all branches of production and trade as a certain result of
the transfer of foreign silver and securities for our agricultural
surplus. Is there anything in all this to alarm Americans?

ASIA'S DEMAND FOR THE PRECIOUS METALS.

Among the many errors which distort men's opinions on the so-called
"silver question" is the belief that the gold supply of the present and
near future need be considered merely as it may affect Europe and America.
Asia and Africa are in most men's minds entirely excluded from the
calculations. The popular belief in the United States may be briefly
stated thus: Asia is and is long to be the land of stagnation. Asiatics
are unprogressive and will remain so. In contact with the higher
civilization of Europe the yellow and brown races are likely to fade away
as did the Maori and the American Indian; or if they continue to increase,
their trade and government will be conducted chiefly by Europeans.

One finds this belief expressed in many standard works. "The helpless
apathy of Asiatics" is a favorite phrase of Macaulay. "Man is but a weed
in those vast regions," says DeQuincey. "In Asia there are no questions,
only affirmations," says another philosopher. And no amount of experience
seems to shake the popular faith in this notion that what Asia was she is
always to be. And yet enough has occurred within the memory of men still
middle-aged to dissipate it. Only a few years ago Americans looked upon
Russia as an inert mass, semi-barbarous in large part; and when Kennan
pictured the horrors of Siberia most readers thought the condition only
such as might be expected from such a government and such people as they
believed the Russians to be. But Russia is to-day one of the world's
greatest powers, with 120,000,000 of people, building the two longest
railways in the world, developing the Siberian and Transcaspian region
with a rapidity only exceeded in our own far West, and drawing gold from
this country and western Europe at a rate that threatens the stability of
our financial system.

It is only forty-one years since our Commodore Perry astonished the world
by securing admission to Japan and proving to the western people that it
was at least worthy of their notice, yet that empire has undergone a most
beneficent revolution in which the Daimios or local lords consented to a
self-sacrifice without a parallel in