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hai there are pure Chinese factories making glass, cigarettes, yellow-bar soap, tooth-brushes, and roller-process flour. The Han-yang Iron and Steel Works, with 5000 men in the plant and 17,000 more mining and transporting its ore and coal, is doubling its capacity, having last spring contracted with an American syndicate to furnish annually for fifteen years from 36,000 to 72,000 tons of pig-iron to a steel plant building at Irondale on Puget Sound.

Those who judge by surfaces anticipate a development swift and dramatic, to our race a catastrophe or a blessing according as one cares for the millions or the millionaires. But, peering beneath the surface, one descries certain factors which forbid us to believe that the industrial blooming of the yellow race is to occur in our time.

Before flooding world markets the yellow-labor mills must supply the wants of the Chinese themselves for manufactured goods; and, even if, man for man, they have not more than an eighth of the buying power of Americans, China still offers a market more than half as large as that of the whole United States. Its estimated annual consumption of cotton goods would carpet a roadway sixty feet wide from here to the moon. Owing to the indefinitely expanding market eastern Asia will afford for the cheap machine-made fabrics, utensils, implements, cutlery, toilet articles, and timepieces to pour forth from the native factories to be established, the evil day is yet distant when the white man's product will be driven from the South American or African fields by the handiwork of the yellow man.

Then, production is not always so cheap as low wages would indicate. For all his native capacity, the coolie will need a long course of schooling, industrial training, and factory atmosphere before he inches up abreast of the German or American working-man. At a railway center in North China is a government establishment that imports bridge materials from Europe, builds up the beams, fits and punches them, and sends them out in knock-down state to the place where the bridge is needed. Yet, with labor five times as cheap, it cannot furnish iron bridges as cheaply as they can be imported from Belgium, which means that at present one Belgium iron-worker is worth five

Chinese. It will take a generation or two for the necessary technical skill to become hereditary among these working people.

Gone

Active China, which is about as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, has less than 7000 miles of railway. Owing to the thick population and the intensive agriculture the traffic potency of most parts is so great that, no doubt, ten times the present mileage, if economically constructed and managed, would yield handsome dividends on the investment. Now, at best, it would take China's spare capital for the next thirty years to build the railways the country ought to have. It must be borne in mind, too, that, outside a few treaty ports, the new industries await the initiative of the Chinese. forever are the halcyon days of Li Hung Chang's railway and mining concessions, when a single foreigner could obtain the exclusive right to mine coal and iron over 5400 square miles of the richest mineralbearing province. The rising nationalism with its cry "China for the Chinese!" has put an end to all that. The government recovered certain of the railway concessions and the people of Shan-si paid the Peking Syndicate two and one quarter millions to relinquish an undeveloped concession. China will, no doubt, block the path of the foreign exploiter as carefully as Japan has, and her mills and mines will be Chinese or nothing.

But the courage of the Chinese capitalist is chilled by the rapacity of officials unchecked by courts or people. One of the directors of the Shanghai-Hang-chau Railway-a purely Chinese line-tells me their chief trouble in building the road was the harassing "inspections" which obliged them to bribe the officials in order to go on with the work. Moreover, Peking forced upon the company a large, unneeded foreign loan, which would have been expended by government men without the stockholders knowing how much stuck to the fingers of the officials. So, instead of using the money for building the road, the company loaned it out in small amounts at a high interest, and will repay it as soon as the terms of the loan permit.

The case of Fu-kien shows how irresponsible government paralyzes the spirit of enterprise. For half a century Fu-kienese have been wandering into the English and Dutch possessions in southeastern

Asia, where not a few of them prosper as merchants, planters, mine operators, contractors, and industrialists. Some of them return with capital, technical knowledge, and experience in managing large undertakings. Yet, aside from a sawmill-the only one I saw in China-I hear of not one modern undertaking in the province. The coal seams lie untouched. The mandarins lay it to the difficulty of getting the coal to tide-water. The Fu-kienese rich from his tin-mining in Perak - there are thirty Chinese millionaires in the Malay States-tells you it is dread of official "squeeze."

The country back of Swatow is rich in minerals. But what probably would happen to a retired Singapore contractor so rash as to embark on a mining venture there? The tribes of Hakkas in the neighborhood of the ore deposit would demand something for letting him work it unmolested. The local mandarin would have to be squared. The li kin officials would sweat him well before letting his imported machinery go up the river. The magistrate of every district his product touched in going down the coast would hold him up. Finally, to cap the climax, at any moment his operations might be halted by an outbreak of superstitious fear lest they were disturbing the earth dragon and spoiling the luck of the community. Small wonder a high imperial official confessesin confidence that not one penny of his fortune ever goes into a concern not under foreign protection.

His Excellency Wu Ting Fang is so impressed with the blight of insecurity that he suggests that, instead of clamoring for an early parliament, the people exact of the imperial government a Magna Charta guaranteeing the following rights: no arrest without a proper warrant; public trial within twenty-four hours; no punishment nor fining of the relatives of a convicted person; no confiscation of the property of his partners or business associates.

ALTHOUGH vast in aggregate the agriculture of China is petty agriculture and its industry is petty industry. Its business men are unfamiliar with the management of large-scale enterprises, and have had no experience with the jointstock company. Highly honorable as mer

chants and bankers, they have never worked out a code of ethics for the stock company, and in such relations they are the prey of a mutual distrust which is only too well warranted.

The taking of commissions has become so ingrained in the Chinese that it is no longer a moral fact but only an economic fact. Your cook takes his wages as a recompense for his technical services only; for his services as a business man in buying for your household he feels himself entitled to a profit. Bray him in a mortar, but you will not get the notion out of him. This is why as soon as a business capital is anywhere got together it begins mysteriously to melt away. A company formed to build a certain railway maintains an idle office staff of ten, and station-masters have been engaged and put on the payroll, although not a rail has been laid. Much of the pay of these lucky employees goes, no doubt, to those who appointed them. Sleepers were bought in great quantities, and after lying for a year were sold to carpenters. One of the government railways called for tenders for sleepers. A German firm bid lowest and filled the order. Later, when more sleepers were wanted, the purchasing official, instead of calling for new bids, telegraphed to the firm, "Your Japanese competitor has come down to your figure, but you may have the contract for a moderate commission." The offer was ignored, and the Japanese supplied the sleepers, no doubt after giving a douceur.

In a big government works the foreign expert after due tests designated a certain coal as the best in heating capacity. The first lot supplied him by the purchasing agent of the works was all right. The second was poor, although the agent stoutly insisted it was the same coal. He had been given a commission to substitute the inferior fuel. The railway engineer, whether foreigner or Chinese, is continually put out by the arrival from oversea of machinery or materials different in kind or grade from what he had ordered. The cause is not inadvertence. There are thirteen railways now being constructed on the basis of "everything Chinese," and most of them have one trait in common: the money goes faster than the construction. The Amoy-Chang-chau line, the first in Fu-kien, proceeds with disappoint

ing slowness. Great piles of rails and ties lie deteriorating, waiting for road-bed. The construction of the Canton-Hangchau line advances at what the stockholders feel to be a snail's pace. The Anhui Railway Company has disbursed five million taels and not a mile of track is completed. The piers for the bridges are ready, the structural iron for them is on the ground, and thirteen miles of grading is completed. But the company's money and credit are gone, the shareholders are disgusted, and work is nearly at a standstill. There is enough of such experiences to make one call China "the land of broken promise." Some of the trouble is due to bad judgment, but too often the management has been pulled out of plumb by the itch for commissions.

IN China there are few duties more sacred than that of helping your kinsman, even at other people's expense. A man regards it as right to provide berths for his relatives and no scruple as to their comparative fitness tweaks his conscience. The manager of a government plant, on looking into a department which was going badly, found that thirty-three out of the fifty-five men in that department were relatives of the foreman. Since two years ago, when the Peking-Han-kau Railway came under Chinese management, the positions along the line have been filled on the basis of sheer favoritism, with the result of loading the pay-roll with incompetents. No wonder the ticket-seller regards the crowd at the ticket window as a nuisance, and lets them fume while he chats with his friends. And you may hear the track manager complain bitterly of having to put in and retain certain relatives of the director who cannot do the work assigned them.

So desperate is the struggle to live and so ingrained is the spirit of nepotism, that whenever capital is laid out by any one else than the owner, employees multiply like locusts. They drop out of the clouds and spring up from the ground. The government offices at Peking are clogged with useless place-holders. You marvel that colleges with twenty-five or thirty teachers maintain ten officers of administration until you realize that half of them are sinecurists. In one plant the foreign expert found thirty-six parasites sucking the water-pipe all day and drawing good pay.

One was purchaser of coal, another purchaser of wood, another custodian of the steam fittings, and so on.

At Lin-cheng a Belgian company came to terms with a Chinese company with a concession by giving them half the stock and agreeing to pay a Chinese director and a Chinese engineer in addition, of course, to the foreign director and the foreign engineer. The theory is that the Belgians and the Chinese are partners in operating the colliery; but the naked fact is that the latter are mere parasites on the enterprise. The Chinese director lives at Tientsin on his $700 a month, and never goes near the mine. The Chinese engineer with his $225 a month and a fine house built him near the mine gives no technical services whatever, but goes about suppressing the petty native coal diggings that impair the exclusiveness of the company's concession!

Ar the present stage the Chinese business man can neither get along with the foreign expert nor without him. Four hundred miles up the West River you see tons of heavy machinery lying on the bank. It was imported for smelting silver ore in the mountains fifteen miles away. The Chinese found themselves unable to set up the smelter, so the machinery rusts while the ore is smelted in England. An engineer will be given lot after lot of bad coal because his manager never thinks of fuel in terms of heating capacity. To him coal is coal, and the cheapest is the best. Shan-si is the Pennsylvania of the Empire, and at great price the provincials regained the right to exploit its mineral wealth themselves. Yet a certificated colliery manager has been four years at Shan-si University as professor of mining, and not once has his professional opinion been sought on a mining question!

The Han-yang Company appreciates the expert and employs twenty-two French and Belgians to supervise the making of steel. But not always are the Chinese so fortunate. In one city an electric light company failed, it is said, for want of sufficient expert assistance. About three years ago the "Protection of Shan-si" Mining Company undertook to develop coal-mining in the province. The first expert they employed was to reconnoiter and report. He spent several months go

ing about, but as he failed to map his wanderings and finds his reports were worth little. Then a great English expert was engaged, but when, on reaching Tientsin, he learned that he was expected to spend months in the field instead of a few weeks, he took his expenses and went home. When, finally, a twenty-foot vein of coal was attacked, expert after expert quit because he insisted on having things done right, and the company would not follow his advice. It is plain that both the native capitalists and the imported experts have grievances. The situation is unfortunate, and cannot but retard development until China has good engineering and technical schools for training experts of her

own.

The inefficiency of the management of Chinese undertakings is heartrending in its waste of sweat-won wealth. The superintendent of construction of a railroad will be a worthy mandarin, without technical knowledge or experience, who has to rely wholly on his subordinates. Or the prominent financier chosen president of the company feels himself quite above the vulgar details of management, and so delegates the task to some one of lesser consequence. This gentleman, too, feels above the work, and passes it down to some one else. So the big men become figureheads and little men run the enterprise. Any government undertaking suffers from the conceit and unpracticality of the mandarins. The initial price of the cement from a government plant was fixed at a dollar a barrel more than the cost of good for

eign cement. The officials thought that the people would beg for "imperial cement" regardless of price.

The fact is the faulty past lies too heavily on the mind and the character of contemporary Chinese. The real strength of the race will not generally declare itself till another generation is on the stage, bred in the new education and enforcing a higher code. Perhaps the moral atmosphere will not clear till there has come a marked let-up in the struggle for existence. At the back of the business man's mind lurks, I fancy, a dim sense of a myriad clutching hands. People do not judge one another very strictly when each acts with the abyss ever before his eyes. The excellent reputation enjoyed by the Chinese business men in Malaysia suggests that only in a land of opportunity does the natural solidity of character of the yellow race show itself.

IT is not likely, then, that the march of industrialism in China will be so rapid and triumphant as many have anticipated. Jealousy of the foreigner, dearth of capital, ignorant labor, official "squeeze,' graft, nepotism, lack of experts, and inefficient management will long delay the harnessing of the cheap-labor power of China to the machine. Not we, nor our children, but our grandchildren, will need to lie awake nights. It will be along in the latter half of this century that the yellow man's economic competition will begin to mold with giant hands the politics of the planet.

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SHAKSPERE ON THE STAGE

THIRD PAPER: RICHARD THE THIRD

BY WILLIAM WINTER

OR about four centuries the memory

FOR about Richard the Third has been

persistently blackened by the ascription to him of a sinister character, a malignant will, and the ruthless commission of infernal crimes. An occasional word, indeed, has been spoken in his vindication, but historians in general, in their narratives of his life, have followed, as Shakspere did, in his play on that subject, the authority of the chroniclers Hall and Holinshed, who followed that of Sir Thomas More; and it is incontrovertible that More's account of King Richard the Third was inspired, if not actually in great part written, by Morton, whom King Henry the Seventh, Richard's successor, made Archbishop of Canterbury, and who was one of the most inveterate of Richard's foes. More was a boy five years old when Richard fell, at Bosworth. In youth he became a member of Morton's household at Canterbury, and he was educated virtually under the supervision of that primate. It is possible that Morton may have told him, and that he believed, a story of Richard's career. There is authority for the statement that Morton wrote, in Latin, a narrative of Richard's life, which at his death in 1500 fell into the hands of More. The "Tragical History" which has served to make Richard's name infamous was begun by More in 1513, and he left it unfinished at his death

in 1535.

For the actor the text of Shakspere is the arbitrary guide in undertaking to impersonate Richard the Third as drawn. in Shakspere's play, and in Shakspere's play Richard is represented as an incarnation of craft, treachery, cruelty, and heaven-defying wickedness, not, however,

without conscience and some of the usual attributes of humanity. It is desirable, though perhaps it is not essential, that the actor of Richard should be acquainted with every fact ascertainable relative to the actual character, aspect, and conduct of the man; for the reason that such comprehension of him might tend to augment weight, authority, and sincerity in an em bodiment of even a wrong conception of him. It certainly is essential that every student of Shakspere's play should bear in mind its gross inconformity to ascertained facts of Richard's life.

Bacon, although he wrote in the time of Queen Elizabeth, granddaughter of King Henry the Seventh, and wrote like the servile courtier that he was, nevertheless declared of King Richard the Third that he was "jealous of the honor of the English nation, and likewise a good law-maker for the ease and solace of the common people," adding, however, in the mean spirit of political detraction, that Richard's motive was not the purpose of doing justice to his subjects, but of winning popularity. The fact is that Richard relieved the English people of an unjust, extortionate taxation; caused the laws of England to be printed in the English language, and thus made them accessible for the first time; abolished all imports on books; fostered the arts, particularly the arts of printing and of music; and throughout his career strove to advance civilization.

This is not the place for a minute examination of the history of King Richard the Third, but it will not be amiss to say that such an examination educes material facts tending to show that Shakspere's portrayal of that prince is a fabric of the imagination, reared on a basis of calumny.

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