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One of the almost certain features of the effect of the Revolution, however, will be China's increased foreign trade—probably 100 per cent., says Sun Yat Sen.

The year 1913 should mark a stride in commercial progress in China such as the world never before has seen. 1912 will probably be a year of unrest and uncertainty. The formation of a permanent Government and the election of a Cabinet, the dispatch of competent officials to outlying places, and the putting down of outlawry in the provinces will be a big programme for this year—if it is accomplished. But 1913 and the following years will probably unfold a remarkably rapid advance in exports and imports. China has held back from all things foreign centuries enough, but during the past two decades the seed has been sown for such a harvest of trade and commercial prosperity as shall keep the factories of the West hard at work to cope with the demands—that is, if the merchants of the West are quick to seize their chances as they come. And in this volume the author feels that it were well at this juncture, when an opportunity is presented to English and American traders to come in and take possession of the trade China is prepared to foster, to speak of the commercial possibilities which the next decade will give.

The reader will probably understand that, despite the enormous foreign imports which for years have come into China, there is not a tithe of the trade done yet which will be done with the opening up of the country, now almost bound to ensue. China's market is stupendous. The possibilities are wider than the average home manufacturer has any conception of. From the China Sea to the British Burma border, from the southern port of Canton up through all the partially opened Eastern provinces, through the whole of the wonderful Yangtze Valley to the practically untouched west, and away into newly touched areas where the inhabitants are all anxious to buy foreign goods, there is presented an unparalleled opportunity for the foreign manufacturer. Any one who has taken an intelligent interest in China's trade with foreign countries must have been impressed with the fact that she was not importing one-hundredth part of what she could easily handle. And if he had studied closely any particular district where some foreign import had been taken or foreign industry had been started and watched the phenomenal commercial growth in that particular district, he immediately would gather some idea of the far-reaching possibilities for the expansion of foreign trade in China.

Even the recent changes in dress wrought by the Revolution have shown the enormous demand there is for re-dressing the Chinese; with the passing of the queue they decided against the little round Manchu hat, an article made almost exclusively in China. Immediately there came a cry for the foreign hat; at once a trade was created, into the country there came all kinds and conditions and shapes of foreign head-gear—felts, cloth caps, and all sorts; they sold in hundreds of thousands and had to be supplied by some one. China, at all events, could not make them; to her it was something quite new; they had to come from outside. Japan was watching. She collared the trade, and in two months she had practically re-hatted China. But this is merely an instance; many more might be given to show the rapidity with which commercial changes come. In over seven thousand miles of travel in China, mostly far away inland where the effect of the treaty port is least felt, the writer some time ago made a study of the commercial aspect of things and how far the modern spirit had penetrated the interior, with a view specially to ascertain how the British merchant stands in the business life of the nation. This chapter, therefore, should have especial interest so far as it embodies correct data, gleaned in two years and a half of travel in many parts of the Chinese Empire where the traveller is still to the Chinese a wonder of wonders. In China, even in far interior places, one finds life, business, prosperity—a strange commingling of Western ideas with Eastern. Four hundred millions of people have to all intents and purposes become civilised. They are anxious to swing into line and want the equipment. Their needs are making China the greatest market in the world. They want everything—railways, machinery, tools, guns, ships, and much else. That there is an unprecedented large trade to be done must at once be granted. During the last decade, without thinking for the moment of the Revolution, China's foreign trade has doubled; in the next decade, if peace prevails, it must be trebled, and although one cannot ignore the fact that under ordinary conditions of progress China must ultimately become a serious rival to Western countries as an industrial nation, that day is not yet at hand. She must be a stupendous buyer before she can hope to become a serious competitor.

But the point need not, I think, be pursued farther. The country has merely to regain its normal condition, and we shall see trade increasing by leaps and bounds. I say merely to regain its normal condition for this reason: whilst the prevailing uncertainty continues no permanent increase of trade can be expected, but let there be some stable form of government and we shall see China recuperate and begin trade again in a wonderful manner. No people have such recuperative power. No people have such power of adaptation. And in the era of trade development upon whose threshold we are now standing we may confidently look to probably an uneclipsed season of foreign commercial enterprise in all parts of China. In the increased demand for woollen goods, for engineering equipment of all kinds, especially mining gear, for railroad supplies, for the thousands of household requirements of daily use, motor-boats and all the varied paraphernalia required to place an antiquated nation upon the footing of modern civilisation there will be a demand such as will make even Japan's era of commercial progress pale into insignificance.

The trade will come. Let so much be granted. The next point is, Who is to get it, and how is it to be got?

I am not a manufacturer nor a trader, and cannot go deeply into the detail of how business should be pushed. But I have seen a good deal of China, have closely watched the methods adopted by various internationals in various parts of the Empire, and it may be that my remarks on the matter may have the effect of awakening British and American traders to the realisation of the opportunity now before them. Some time ago, when placing manuscript for a prospective work on China, the publisher said: "What people want to know is how to increase their trade—they don't want to know about the physical characteristics of the country and the people so much as how to increase their trade. Write a book on how trade can be improved, and your book will sell." But it is probable that those who would most readily buy and read such a book would be the Britisher's competitor.

Now, so far as actual trading advantages are concerned, it may be said of the British that they hold the highest advantage possible over other nations; that advantage is in the fact that they hold the confidence of the people. No foreigner, be he merchant, missionary, traveller, or official, is trusted in China as is the Britisher. I speak with no intention of hurting the susceptibilities of any one. In trade the Chinese believe in the British, they believe in his goods; in the Revolution the soldiers would congratulate you most heartily if they knew that you were an Englishman, telling you that there is none better in the world. They might be right or wrong, I am merely writing what they were saying, and it is a fair ensample of the general opinion of the common people. But despite this advantage, it is patent to the thoughtful student of Chinese affairs that a great need exists among British merchants as a whole to "wake up." I am a Britisher, am perhaps naturally quick to notice where British merchants fail, where they are outrun in the race for trade in this land of great promise. I know there will be many who will at once ask me to turn to the shipping in Shanghai, in Tientsin, in any of the ports, and notice the predominance of British shipping. I shall be told that Great Britain still controls the bulk of the trade of China, and that there is no need for fear of the future. But there is another side to the story.

Go any day to the Bund at Hankow or Shanghai; watch the progress being made also by Japan. Go into the godowns and watch the progress of the little brown men from the land of the Rising Sun and watch their methods; run your eye along the offices whose men work hardest and longest—the Germans; keep yourself informed on the doings of the day in exports and imports, and you will find that, even if he does hold the volume of trade he has held for years, the Britisher by no means advances with new trade as rapidly as his competitors. In the past no nation has done so much towards the true development of China as the British. The British have laid the foundation, have sown the seed, and it is only their due that they should reap the harvest now at hand. But in the period during which the trade of China has so phenomenally advanced the cry has gone up from all quarters that the Britisher is not only losing his grip of the increase of China's trade in her commercial dawn, but literally giving way to the German, and that but a few years will be necessary to prove that Great Britain occupies a position relatively nearer the bottom of the list of nations who have a commercial finger in the pie.

I am not the first writer who has had a wail to make over the loss of British trade. But I do not, at the same time, see any reason why the British merchant should not easily maintain an indefinite supremacy of trade in China. It only needs a little more vim, a keener outlook, a speedier business adaptation to needs, the maintenance of commercial wakefulness where business has a tendency to increase. Competitors of Great Britain hold no advantages; they cannot in the long run put better goods upon the market—Japan, the most serious rival, certainly is producing inferior goods in larger bulk, and is everywhere overrunning the land with cheap and nasty goods, but the British-made article will always hold its own side by side with that of any other nation. And to the British merchant who in China, as in most other trading commercial spheres, has almost always absorbed the external trade, it does not matter much whether people say he is or is not losing the trade—so long as he is not. It has always been a case of Britain first and the rest nowhere. The Britisher makes a good living, has an established connection, is the life and soul of the social community, keeps up a fair average of orders with home firms, and is content. But no right-thinking Englishman, no matter how optimistically he may view the general situation of Great Britain's trade in the Chinese Empire, can deny that British trade does not expand proportionately with what is to be done and what others are doing. This is not pessimistic. Optimism is the keynote of the British merchant, and Great Britain's returns of exports and imports in the China trade are beyond that of any other nation. But very powerful rivals—Germany and Japan, more powerful than British merchants will admit to themselves—are in the field and fighting in a way that we cannot afford to ignore.

Take Germany first. German success is undeniable. It is patent to all beholders. German merchants are at every port. In real interior China, far away from the beaten tracks, I do not remember ever having met a single British commercial traveller—Germans I have met often. They go out into the byways, beating up the trade and creating new trade, putting themselves to inconvenience and exertion to get orders, and undergoing in many cases greatest physical strain in travel to get business. Once I met a man not far from the border of British Burma; he had come right across China and had been away from his business house in Shanghai for several months, and was then going down to Rangoon and around to Shanghai by sea because it was the easier and quicker way back. This is perhaps an isolated case, but one may judge from it that the German merchants, while doing all they can as importers of the goods the people want to buy, spread their representatives far away from the buying centres to show the people what they can do. In Tientsin, during the past few years, the German has become a serious rival. German trade now at that important northern port is probably equal to British trade. In Eastern Siberia German is the business language, as a matter of fact, but to the German, unlike the nonchalant Britisher, it does not matter where he is placed in China, the first thing he does is to get a working knowledge of the language, a factor of far greater importance in China than appears on the surface. The German succeeds, not by political influence, not by tariffs nor underhand methods, but by sheer business application, and is building up an extensive scheme, founded on sound principles, to capture the lion's share of the growing trade which will go to Europe and to wrest from the Britisher a large proportion of that which has always been his. The average German reads about China—its history, of the physical characteristics of the country, of the people in the interior and the life they live, what they have and what they want. The Englishman does not trouble. He rarely learns the language, is careless to find out anything about the country unless it is to get an idea of sport, and so on.

The other dangerous rival is the Jap. If one were to go into detail and write regarding the Japanese methods of business, it is probable that much of it would subsequently be suppressed. The Japanese in business in China is not the soul of honour. He has to be watched. It is not possible here to speak at length on the unprincipled and shady tactics employed in China—and particularly in the north and in Manchuria—by Japanese traders. One and all seem to be alike, all endowed with that secret and clannish spirit permeating all Eastern nations, with a big dash of some peculiar virtue of unscrupulousness, and they have brought themselves into a position of the most favoured nation in the Chinese Empire. Japan has determined to get the trade by any means. Once in a Chinese city in the interior, where doors were closed to foreign trade, I saw the largest store on the street was Japanese. Business is not done there, they say in self-defence, but a show is maintained so that goods of the same kind may be secured from Tokio! The Jap is in everything, he is everywhere—to be first he cuts under, for he has little reputation to lose. Yet he is as good in his own opinion as the best-bred European, and he lets you know it. No man, however, unblinded by prejudice, can study the progress of Japan in China, can look upon its amazing national advance with either admiration or respect. I have met him in the interior, in Yunnan and Szechuen, prospecting quietly for minerals, tapping goldfields and iron beds that are lying waste, seeking out the best centres for the opening up of trade, finding out what there is a demand for, and marking out the strategic centres from whence his trade may be handled to the disadvantage of every one. The Jap, as I have said, is everywhere, in everything—rarely, however, to be trusted.

But no matter how many the rivals, I should think that no two nations have better prospects for the securing of China's new trade than Great Britain and the United States. It needs alertness, however.