THE NEW CHINA.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume LX, Issue 9346, 17 April 1909, Page 7

THE NEW CHINA.

Fifteen hundred tons of pig iron from the irou aud steel worKS of Hanyang, China, travelled six hundred "miles down the Yaugtse Kiver, aud fourteen thousand miles by sea, and were laid down iv Brooklyn, Is.V., in i'.iOT. Thus did commercial ■competition come knockiug at America's doors to serve notice that the new China was no longer a surmise, but a fact. Under semi-official management three thousand live hundred workmen at Hanyaug turu out daily five hundred tons of pig iroc aud t>vo hundred aud Hfty tons -of steel. They made the rails aud much other constructive material for the seypii hundred and fifty miles ot Pekiu-Hankow railroad, antt for most of the other Chinese lines since then, besides exporting iv 11)07 thirtyseven thousand tons. They are putting up another plant for the manufacture of cars, steel bridges aud other structural material. That is a partial expression of the new Chiua, aud in such language there ia no equivocation. Thirty years ago the Chinese (•' u'ernment purchased the iirst railr.ad constructed ou Chiue.se soil, tore it up, and dumped it in the sea. It had, unfortunately, offended the Earth Dragon. Thirteen years Sago the mammoth Empire was pitifully beaten by little Japan. She had not considered her army worth attending to. Ten years ago the late Emperor tried to deduce the logic of events and reform his people, but au auti-foreign court aud a reactionary Dowager dethroned him, exiled his counsellors, aud uudid his ■work. Then they set about to defy the world. They incited the Boxers, murdered the foreigners, aud besieged the Legations in Pekiu, but they only succeeded in encompassing their own ruiu. A wiser court came back to Pekin in 1902. Perhaps they had not learned to love the foreigner any better for his instruction, but they bad discovered that the only China that would resist his encroachments •was a unified China, a China of railroads and telegraphs, a China of welldrilled soldiers and modern rifles, a China that exploited its mines and pushed its manufactures, aud, above all, a China with a national spirit and a thorough-going education.