ECONOMIC CHANGES IN INDIA

Hastings Standard, Volume VIII, Issue 4206, 16 April 1904, Page 2 (Supplement)

ECONOMIC CHANGES IN INDIA

(By the Rev. Arthur Judson Brown, D.D.) During a recent tour in Asia of nearly sixteen months (from February, 1901, to June, 1902), in which I visited Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Cochin China, Sia.m, and Laos, the Straits Settlements, Burmah, India, Syria, and Palestine, I found everywhere a deep interest in the changing economic conditions. The common people in Asia cafe little for politics, but the price of food and raiment touches every man, woman, and child at a sensitive point. Almost everywhere the old days of cheap living are passing away. Steamers, railways, telegraphs, newspapers, labor-saving machinery, and the introduction of western ideas are slowly but surely revolutionising the Orient. Shantung wheat, which formerly had no market beyond a radius of a few dozen miles from the wheat field, can now be shipped by railway and steamship to any part of the world, and in consequence every Chinese buyer has to pay more for it. In like manner new facilities for export have doubled, trebled, and in some places quadrupled the price of rice in China, Siam, and Japan. The depreciation- in the value of silver has still further complicated the situation. The common Chinese tael, which formerly bought from fifteen hundred to eighteen hundred cash (the current coin of China), now buys only nine hundred and fifty cash. The Shanghai tael brings eight hundred and ninety-seven cash, and the Mexican dollar only six hundred and sixty-five cash. This, of course, means that the common people, who use only cash, have to pay a larger number of them for the necessaries of life. The same difficulty is being felt to a greater or less extent in many other countries of Asia, while in China an already serious advance in prices is heightened by the heavy import taxes which nave been levied to meet the indemnity imposed, by the Western Powers on account of the Boxer outbreak. j

The prices of labor and material have sharply advanced in consequence of the enormous demands incident to the construction of railways, with their stations, shops, and roundhouses; tiie vast engineering schemes of the Germans at Tsingtau and the British at Wei-hai-wei, and the Russians at Port Arthur: the extensive scale on which the legations have rebuilt in Pekin, the reconstruction of virtually the entire business portions of botn Pekin and Tientsin, as well as the coincident rebuilding of the mission stations of all religious bodies, Protestant and Catholic. It will be readily understood what all this activity means in a land where there are as yet but limited supplies of the kind of skilled laborers for foreign buildings, and where the requisite materials 'must be imported from Europe and America by firms who ''are not in China for their health."

It is futile to hope that the competition will be materially less next year, or the year after, or for many years to come. Commerce and politics are projecting works in China which will not be completed for & generation. Railway officials told me of projected lines which will require decades for construction. The German Government not only spent eleven million marks in 1901 for streets, sewers, water, and electric light works, barracks, fortifications, wharves, and public buildings in Tsingtau, but it has voted twelve million five hundred thousand marks a year for ten years for deepening and enlarging the inner harbor. China has entered upon an era of commercial development. The Western world has come to stay, and while there may be temporary reactions, "as there have been at home, prices are not likely to return to their former level. There are vast interior regions which will not be affected for an indefinite period, but for the coast provinces primitive conditions are passing for ever. The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods and articles lias created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no longer content to burn bean-oil; he wants kerosene. In scores of humble Laos homes I saw American lamps costing twenty rupees apiece, and a magistrate proudly showed me a coll*ction of nineteen of these shining articles. The narrow streets of Canton are brilliant with German and American chandeliers, and myriads of private houses throughout the empire are lighted by foreign lamps. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is equalled only by his passion for foreign clocks. The demand for clocks is insatiable. I counted twenty-senven in the private apartments of the Emperor of China, and my wife nineteen in tha bedroom of the Empress Dowager, while cheaper ones tick to the delighted wonder of myriads of humbler people. The ambitious Syrian scorns the mud roof of his ancestors, and will be satisfied only with the bright red tiles imported from France. In almost every Asiatic city I visited, I found shops crowded with, articles of foreign manufacture. "Madfe in Germany" is as familiar a phrase in Siam as in America. Many children in China are arrayed only in the atmosphere, but when J wae in Tai-an-fu, in the far interior of Shantung, hundreds of parents were in consternation because the magistrate had just placarded the walls with an edict announcing that hereafter boys and girLs must wear clothes, and that they would be arrested if found on the streets naked. In many out-of-the-way towns, as well as in all the large cities, I found men busily working American sewing-machines. At a banquet recently given to the foreign ministers by the Emperor and the Empress ■Dowager in the famous 'Summer Palace, twelve miles from Peking, the distinguished guests cut York ham with Sheffield' knives and drank French wines out of German glasses. Everywhere articles of foreign manufacture are in demand, and shrewd Chinese merchants are stocking their shops with increasing quantities of European and American goods.

Dozens of other illustrations of changed condition might be cited. Knowledge increases wants, and the Oriental is acquiring knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that his grandfather never heard of, and when ho goes to the shops to buy his daily food, he finds that the new market for it which, the foreigner has opened has increased the price. Americans are th? v:ry last people 'who can consistently criticise this tendency in Asia. It is the foreigner who lias created it, and the American is the m>o6t prodigal of all foreigners. I never realised until I visited other lands how extravagant is the seal© of American life, not only among the rich, but among the so-called poor. My morning walk to my .New York office takes me along Christopher street, and I have often seen in the igarbage-cans of the tenements pieces of bread and meat and halfeaten vegetables and fruit which would give the average Asiatic the feast of a life-time. In Europe, Americans are notorious as spendthrifts. In the Philippine Islands tihey have thrown about their money in a way which has instituted an era of reckless lavishness comparable only to the California days of '49. In all the port cities of 'China the porters andi jinrikisha runners asked me sextuple prices -because I was an American. At Tongku the sampan men calmly insisted on two dollars Mexican for a service which was worth only forty cents. Everywhere I found that it was wiser to make all purchases and bargains through trusty native Christians, or privately to ascertain in advance "what a given service was really worth, pay it, and! walk off, deaf to all protestations and complaints, even though, a« in Seoul, Korea, the men plaintively sat about for ihours. In Cairo a certain hotel charged me on the supposition that because I was an American I was a millionaire or a fool—perhaps both. True, we have hackdrivers and hotel-keepers in> America who are equally rapacious, and a New Yorker, in particular, need not go away from home ta be overcharged; but it is just because we have become so accustomed to this careless profusion at home that we exhibit it abroad.

But It is "useless to protest against the Increased cost of living in Asia. It is as much beyond individual control as the tides. The causes which are producing it are not even' national, but cosmopolitan. Nor should we ignore the fact that this movement is, in some respects at least, beneficial. It means a higher and broader scale of life, and such a life always costs more than a low and narrow one. This economic revolution in Asia is a concomitant of a Christian civilisation, -which brings not only higher prices, but a general enlarging asd uplifting of the whole range of life.

True, there are some vicious influences accompanying this movement, as brighter lights usually have deeper shadows. But surely it is for good and not for evil that the farmers of Hu-nian can now ship their peanuts to England, and with tho proceeds vary the eternal monotony of a rice diet; that the girls of Siam are bung taught by missionary example that modesty requires the purchase of a garment for street wear which will cover at least the breasts; that the Korean sWuld leam tliat ,it is better to have a larger house so tliat the girls of the family need not sleep in the same room with the boys; and that all China should discover the advantages of roads owr rutty, corkscrew paths, of sanitation over heaps of putrid garbage, and of wooden Hears over the filtli-incmsted ground. Christianity inevitably involves some of these things, and to some extent the awakening of Asia to the need of them is a part of the beneficent influence of a gospt-1 which always and everywhere renders men dissatisfied with a narrow, squalid existence. To make a man decent morally is to beget, in him a desire to be decent physically. Ihe native Christians, especially the pastors and teachers, are the very ones who first feel this movement toward a higher physical life. Nor should we repress it i m them, for it means an environment more favorable to morals and to the stability of Christian character, as well as n healthful example to the communities in which they live. To say, therefore, that the average annual income of a Hindu is twenty-seven rupees (nine dollars) is not to adduce a reason for holding the pastors and evangelists of India down' to that scale. They should, indeed, live near enough to the plane of their countrymen to keep in sympathetic touch with them. But they should not be expected or allowed to huddle in the dark, unventilated hovels of the masses of the people, or, by confining themselves to one scanty meal a day, have that gaunt, halffamished look which makes my heart ache every time I think of the walking skeletons I saw in India. I am not ashamed but proud of the fact that it costs the average Christian more to live in Asia than it cost the average heathen; that the houses of the Laos Christians are better than the singleroomed sheds about them; that the graduates of our Siam boarding schools for girl® wear shirtwaists instead of sunshine; that the members of any one of our Korean churches spend more money on. soap than a whole village of their heathen neighbors, whose bodies are caked with the accumulations of years of neglect; that the sessions of our Syrian churches are Christian gentlemen in appearance as well as in fact; and that the housts of our Chinese Christians do not mix pigs, chickens, and babies in one lousy, malodorous company.

But these altered economic conditions have not as yet brought the ability to meet them. The cost of living has increased faster than the resources of the people. Only France and Russia are primarily political in their foreign policy. England, Germany, and the United States are avowedly commercial. They talk incessantly about "the poor door." Their supreme object in Asia, is to "extend their markets." They are producing more than they can use themselves, and taey peek an opportunity to dispose of their surplus products. They are less concerned to bring the products of Asia into their own tterritories. Indeed, Germany and particularly the United States have built a tariff wall about themselves, expressly to protect home industries from outside competition, and not a few American manufacturers have recently been 1 on the verge of panic on account ocf Japanese competition. Europe and America are trying to force their own manufactures on Asia, and to take in return only what they please. Ini time this will probably right itself, in part at least. While the farmers of the Mississippi valley find living much, more expensive than it was two generations ago, they also find that they get more for their wheat and that they eat better food and wear better clothes and build better houses than their grandfathers. The era of railways ended the days of cheap living, but it ended: as well days when the farmer had to confine himself to a "diet of corn-bread and salt pork, when his home was destitute of comforts and his children had little schooling and no books. So the American workingman of to-day has to pay more for the necessaries of life than the workingman of Europe, but he is nevertheless the bestpaid, the best-fed, the best-clothed, and the best-housed workingman- in the world —a far better and more intelligent citizen because of these very conditions. The same changes will doubtless take place in Asia. That vast continent is capable of producing enormous quantities of food, minerals, and both raw and manufactured articles, which the re«t of the world will sooner or later want. Already this foreitrn demand is bringing comparative wealth to the rutr-dealers of Syria, the silk-embroiderers of China, and the cloisonne and porcelain-makers of Japan. But only an infinitesimal part of the total population ha® tliu« far profited largely by this wider market. Where one man amasses wealth in this way, a hundred thousand men find that aggressive foreign traders exploit their *a»s by flooding the chops with tempting articles which they can ill afford to buy. So the economic revolution in Asia is characterised, as such revolutions usually are in Europe and America, by wide-spread unrest and m some places by outbreaks of violence. The oldest of continents is the latest to undergo the throes of the stupendous transformation from which the newest is slowly beginning to emerge. The transition period in Asia will be longer and iperhaps more trying, as the numbers involved aj* vaster and more conservative ; but the ultimate result cannot fail to be beneficial both to Asia and to the whole world.