Even in America within the memory of men still living, the lumbering, white-topped ''prairie schooner'' was the only conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California.

Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi Valley, and the bold Whitman was ''half a year'' in bearing a message from Oregon to Washington.

The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his ''Century of American Diplomacy'' that ''General Lane, the first territorial governor of Oregon, left his home in Indiana, August 27, 1848, and desiring to reach his destination as soon as possible, travelling overland to San Francisco and thence by ship, reached his post on the first of March following--the journey occupying six months. At the time our treaty of peace and independence was signed in 1783, two stage-coaches were sufficient for all the passengers and nearly all the freight between New York and Boston.'' It is only seventy years since the Rev. John Lowrie, with his bride and Mr. and Mrs. Reed, rode horseback from Pittsburg through flooded rivers and over the Allegheny Mountains to Philadelphia, whence it took them four and a-half months to reach Calcutta.

Nor was this all, for scores of the conveniences and even necessities of our modern life were unknown at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To get some idea of the vastness of the revolution in the conditions of living, we have but to remind ourselves that ''in the year 1800 no steamer ploughed the waters; no locomotive traversed an inch of soil; no photographic plate had ever been kissed by sunlight; no telephone had ever talked from town to town; steam had never driven mighty mills and electric currents had never been harnessed into telegraph and trolley wires.''[21] ''In all the land there was no power loom, no power press, no large manufactory in textiles, wood or iron, no canal. The possibilities of electricity in light, heat and power were unknown and unsuspected. The cotton gin had just begun its revolutionary work. Intercommunication was difficult, the postal service slow and costly, literature scanty and mostly of inferior quality.''[22]

[21] The Rev. Dr. Theodore Cuyler.

[22] Address of the Bishops of the M. E. Church, 1900.

How marvellously the application of steam as a motive power has united once widely separated regions. So swiftly have the changes come and so quickly have we adapted ourselves to them that it is difficult to realize the magnitude of the transformation that has been achieved. We can ride from Pittsburg to Philadelphia in eight hours and to Calcutta in twenty-two days. The journey across our own continent is no longer marked by the ox-cart and the campfire and the bones of perished expeditions. It is simply a pleasant trip of less than a week, and in an emergency in August, 1903, Henry P.

Lowe travelled from New York to Los Angeles, 3,241 miles, in seventy-three hours and twenty-one minutes. Populous states covered with a network of railway and telegraph lines invite the nations of the world to join them in celebrating at St.

Louis the ''Purchase'' of a region which a hundred years ago was as foreign to the American people as the Philippines now are. The Rev. Dr. Calvin Mateer, who in 1863 was six months in reaching Chefoo, China, on a voyage from whose hardships his wife never fully recovered, returned in a comfortable journey of one month in 1902. To-day, for all practical purposes, China is nearer New York than California once was.

No waters are too remote for the modern steamer. Its smoke trails across every sea and far up every navigable stream. Ten mail steamers regularly run on the Siberian Yenisei, while the Obi, flowing from the snows of the Little Altai Mountains, bears 302 steam vessels on various parts of its 2,000-mile journey to the Obi Gulf on the Arctic Ocean. Stanley could now go from Glasgow to Stanley Falls in forty-three days.

Already there are forty-six steamers on the Upper Congo.

From Cape Town, a railway 2,000 miles long runs via Bulawayo to Beira on the Portuguese coast, while branch lines reach several formerly inaccessible mining and agricultural regions.

June 22, 1904, almost the whole population of Cape Town cheered the departure of the first through train for Victoria Falls, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science has been invited to meet in 1905. Uganda is reached by rail. Five hundred and eighty miles of track unite Mombasa and Victoria Nyanza. Sleeping and dining cars safely run the 575 miles from Cairo to Khartoum where only five years ago Lord Kitchener fought the savage hordes of the Mahdi. The Englishman's dream of a railroad from Cairo to the Cape is more than half realized, for 2,800 miles are already completed. In 1903, Japan had 4,237 miles of well managed railways which in 1902 carried 111,211,208 passengers 14,409,752 tons of freight. India is gridironed by 25,373 miles of steel rails which in 1901 carried 195,000,000 passengers.

A railroad parallels the Burmese Irrawaddy to Bhamo and Mandalay. In Siam you can ride by rail from Bangkok northward to Korat and westward to Petchaburee. The Trans- Siberian Railway now connects St. Petersburg and Peking. In Korea, the line from Chemulpho to Seoul connects with lines under construction both southward and northward, so that ere long one can journey by rail from Fusan on the Korean Strait to Wiju on the Yalu River. As the former is but ten hours by sea from Japan and as the latter is to form a junction with the Trans-Siberian Railway, a land journey in a sleeping car will soon be practicable from London and Paris to the capitals of China and Korea, and, save for the ferry across the Korean Strait, to any part of the Mikado's kingdom. The locomotive runs noisily from Jaffa to venerable Jerusalem and from Beirut over the passes of Lebanon to Damascus, the oldest city in the world. A projected line will run from there to the Mohammedan Mecca, so that soon the Moslem pilgrims will abandon the camel for the passenger coach. Most wonderful of all is the Anatolian Railway which is to run through the heart of Asia Minor, traversing the Karamanian plateau, the Taurus Mountains and the Cilician valleys to Haran where Abraham tarried, and Nineveh where Jonah preached, and Babylon where Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, and Bagdad where Haroun-al-Raschid ruled, to Koweit on the Persian Gulf.

In a single month forty-five Philadelphia engines have been ordered for India. The American locomotive is to-day speeding across the steppes of Siberia, through the valleys of Japan, across the uplands of Burmah and around the mountainsides of South America. ''Yankee bridge-builders have cast up a highway in the desert where the chariot of Cambyses was swallowed up by the sands. The steel of Pennsylvania spans the Atbara, makes a road to Meroe,'' and crosses the rivers of Peru. Trains on the two imperial highways of Africa--the one from Cairo to the Cape and the other from the upper Nile to the Red Sea--are to be hauled by American engines over American bridges, while the ''forty centuries'' which Napoleon Bonaparte said looked down from the pyramids see not the soldiers of France, but the manufacturing agents of Europe and America. Whether or not we are to have a political imperialism, we already have an industrial imperialism.

Walter J. Ballard declares[23] that the aggregate capital invested in railways at the end of 1902 was $36,850,000,000 and that the total mileage was 532,500 distributed as follows:-- Miles United States ................... 202,471 Europe .......................... 180,708 Asia ............................ 41,814 South America ................... 28,654 North America (Except U. S.) .... 24,032 Australia ....................... 15,649 Africa .......................... 14,187

[23] New York Sun, July 13, 1903.

Jules Verne's story, ''Around the World in Eighty Days''

was deemed fantastic in 1873. But in 1903, James Willis Sayre of Seattle, Washington, travelled completely around the world in fifty-four days and nine hours, while the Russian Minister of Railroads issues the following schedule of possibilities when the Trans-Siberian Railroad has completed its plans:--

From St. Petersburg to Vladivostok ..... 10 days '' Vladivostok to San Francisco ....... 10 ''

'' San Francisco to New York .......... 4 ''

'' New York to Bremen ................. 7 ''

'' Bremen to St. Petersburg ........... 1 ''

----- Total ............................. 33 days

As for the risks incident to such a tour, it is significant that for my own journey around the world, a conservative insurance company, for a consideration of only fifty dollars, guaranteed for a year to indemnify me in case of incapacitating accident to the extent of fifty dollars a week and in case of death to pay my heirs $10,000. And the company made money on the arrangement, for I met with neither illness nor accident. With a very few unimportant exceptions, there are now no hermit nations, for the remotest lands are within quick and easy reach.

And now electricity has ushered in an era more wondrous still. Trolley cars run through the streets of Seoul and Bangkok. The Empress Dowager of China wires her decrees to the Provincial Governors. Telegraph lines belt the globe, enabling even the provincial journal to print the news of the entire world during the preceding twenty-four hours. We know to-day what occurred yesterday in Tokyo and Beirut, Shanghai and Batanga. The total length of all telegraph lines in the world is 4,908,921 miles,--the nerves of our modern civilization. And it is remarkable not only that Europe has 1,764,790 miles, America 2,516,548 miles and Australia 277,419 miles, but that Africa has 99,409 miles and Asia 310,685 miles, Japan alone having, in 1903, 84,000 miles beside 108,000 miles of telephone wires.

I found the telegraph in Siam and Korea, in China and the Philippines, in Burma, India, Arabia, Egypt and Palestine.

Camping one night in far Northern Laos after a toilsome ride on elephants, I realized that I was 12,500 miles from home, at as remote a point almost as it would be possible for man to reach. All about was the wilderness, relieved only by the few houses of a small village. But walking into that tiny hamlet, I found at the police station a telephone connecting with the telegraph office at Chieng-mai, so that, though I was on the other side of the planet, I could have sent a telegram to my New York office in a few minutes. Nor was this an exceptional experience, for the telegraph is all over Laos, as indeed it is over many other Asiatic lands.

From the recesses of Africa comes the report that the Congo telegraph line, which will ultimately stretch across the entire belt of Central Africa, already runs 800 miles up the Congo River from the ocean to Kwamouth, the junction of the Kassai and Congo Rivers. A Belgian paper states that ''a telegram dispatched from Kwamouth on January 15th was delivered at Boma half an hour later. For the future, the Kassai is thus placed in direct and rapid communication with the seat of Government, and Europe is also brought close to the centre of Africa. Only a few years ago, news took at least two months to reach Boma from the Kassai, and the reply would not be received under another two months, and this only if the parties were available and the steamer ready to start.''

More significant still are the submarine cables which aggregate 1,751 in number and over 200,000 miles in length and which annually transmit more than 6,000,000 messages, annihilating the time and distance which formerly separated nations. When King William IV of England died in 1837, the news was thirty-five days in reaching America. But when Queen Victoria passed away January 22, 1901, at 6:30 P. M., the afternoon papers describing the event were being sold in the streets of New York at 3:30 P. M. of the same day! As I rose to address a union meeting of the English speaking residents of Canton, China, on that fateful September day of 1901, a message was handed me which read, ''President McKinley is dead.'' So that by means of the submarine cable, that little company of Englishmen and Americans in far-off China bowed in grief and prayer simultaneously with multitudes in the home land.

Not only Europe and America, but Siberia and Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia, Korea and the Kameruns, Laos and Persia are within the sweep of this modern system of intercommunication. The latest as well as one of the most important links in this world system is the Commercial Pacific Cable between Manila and San Francisco.

President Roosevelt gave a significant illustration of the perfection of this system when, on the completion of the Commercial Pacific Cable July 4, 1903, he flashed a message around the earth in twelve minutes, while a second message sent by Clarence H. Mackay, President of the Pacific Cable Company, made the circuit of the earth in nine minutes.

What additional possibilities are involved in the wireless system of telegraphy we can only conjecture, but it is already apparent that this system has passed the experimental stage and that it is destined to achieve still more amazing results. A startling illustration of its possibilities was given by the Japanese fleet March 22, 1904. A cruiser lay off Port Arthur and by wireless messages enabled battleships, riding safely eight miles away, to bombard fortifications which they could not see and which could not see them.

Commerce has taken swift and massive advantages of these facilities for intercommunication. Its ships whiten every sea.

The products of European and American manufacture are flooding the earth. The United States Treasury Bureau of Statistics (1903) estimates that the value of the manufactured articles which enter into the international commerce of the world is four billions of dollars and that of this vast total, the United States furnishes 400,000,000, its foreign trade having increased over 100 per cent. since 1895. While the bulk of the foreign trade of the United States is with Europe, American business men are gradually awaking to the greatness of their opportunity in Asia. A characteristic example of their aggressiveness was given when President James J. Hill, of the Great Northern Railroad, testified before a Government Commission, October 20, 1902:--

''We arranged with a line of steamers to connect with our road so that we could get the Oriental outlet. I remember when the Japanese were going to buy rails, I asked them where they were going to buy, and they said in England or Belgium. I asked them to wait until I telegraphed.

I wired and made the rates, so that we made the price $1.50 a ton lower and sold for America 40,000 tons of rails. Then I got them to try a little of the American cotton, telling them if it was not satisfactory I would pay for the cotton, and the result was satisfactory.''

In these ways, the interrelation of nations is becoming closer and closer, their separation from the world's life more and more difficult. Dr. Josiah Strong well observes:--

''Until the nineteenth century, there was but little contact between different peoples throughout the world. They were separated, not only by distances hard to overcome, but by differences of speech, of faith, of mental habit and mode of life, of custom and costume, of government and law, and isolation tended steadily to emphasize the divergence which already existed. Thus increasing differences of environment perpetuated and intensified the differences of civilization which they had created. In other words, until the nineteenth century, the stream of tendency down all the ages was towards diversity. Then came the change, the results of which are, in their magnitude and importance, beyond calculation.

Steam annihilated nine-tenths of space, and electricity has cancelled the remainder. Isolation is, therefore, becoming impossible, for the world is now a neighbourhood. This means that differences of environment will, from this time on, become constantly less. The swift ships of commerce are mighty shuttles which are weaving the nations together into one great web of life.''

IX

THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION IN ASIA[24]

THE result of the operation of this commercial force is an economic revolution of vast proportions. When ever I went in Asia, I found wider interest in this subject than in the aggressions of European nations. The reason is obvious. The common people in Asia care 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, labour-saving machinery, and the introduction of western ideas are slowly but surely revolutionizing 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 railroad and steamship to any part of the world, and every Chinese buyer has to pay more for it in consequence.

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 Consul-General of the United States at Shanghai reports that the prices of seventeen staple articles of export have increased sixteen per cent. in twenty years while in Japan the increase in the same articles for the same period was thirty-one per cent.[25]

[24] Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the Century Magazine, March, 1904.

[25] ''Commercial China,'' p. 2902.

The depreciation in the value of silver has still further complicated the situation. The common Chinese tael, which formerly bought from 1,500 to 1,800 cash (the current coin of China), now buys only 950 cash. The Shanghai tael brings 897 cash, and the Mexican dollar only 665. 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 being heightened by the heavy import taxes which have been levied to meet the indemnity imposed by the Western Powers on account of the Boxer outbreak.

The prices of labour and materials have sharply advanced in consequence of the enormous demands incident to the construction of railways, with their stations, shops and round-houses, the vast engineering schemes of the Germans at Tsing-tau, the British at Wei-hai Wei and the Russians at Port Arthur, the extensive scale on which the Legations have rebuilt in Peking, the reconstruction of virtually the entire business portions of both Peking and Tien-tsin, as well as the coincident rebuilding of the mission stations of all denominations, 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 labourers required 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 the year after that. Commerce and politics are planning works in China which will not be completed for many years. Railway officials told me of projected lines which will require decades for construction. 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 forever.

The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods and articles has created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no longer content to burn bean oil; he wants kerosene. In scores of humble Laos homes and markets I saw American lamps costing twenty rupees apiece, and a magistrate proudly showed me a collection of nineteen of these shining articles.

Forty thousand dollars worth of these lamps were sold in Siam last year. The narrow streets of Canton are brilliant with German chandeliers and myriads of private houses throughout the Empire are lighted by foreign lamps. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is only equalled by his passion for foreign clocks. I counted twenty-seven in the private apartments of the Emperor of China and my wife counted nineteen in a single room of the Empress Dowager's palace, 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 only be satisfied with bright red tiles imported from France. In almost every Asiatic city I visited, I found shops crowded with articles of foreign manufacture.

''Made in Germany'' is as familiar a phrase in Siam as in America. Many children in China are arrayed only in the atmosphere, but when I was in Taian-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. At a banquet 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. The new Chinese Presbyterian Church at Wei-hsien typifies the elements that are entering Asia for it contains Chinese brick, Oregon fir beams, German steel binding-plates and rods, Belgian glass, Manchurian pine pews, and British cement.

India is eagerly buying American rifles, tools, boots and shoes, while vast regions which depend upon irrigation are becoming interested in American well-boring outfits. Persia is demanding increasing quantities of American padlocks, sewing- machines and agricultural implements. German, English and American machinery is equipping great cotton factories in Japan. I saw Russian and American oil tins in the remotest villages of Korea. Strolling along the river bank one evening in Paknampo, Siam, I heard a familiar whirring sound and entering found a bare-legged Siamese busily at work on a sewing- machine of American make. Nearly five hundred of them are sold in Siam every year, and I found them in most of the cities that I visited in other Asiatic countries. When I left Lampoon on an elephant, six hundred miles north of Bangkok, a Laos gentleman rode beside me for several miles on an American bicycle. There are thousands of them in Siam. His Majesty himself frequently rides one and His Royal Highness, Prince Damrong, is president of a bicycle club of four hundred members. The king's palace is lighted by electricity and the Government buildings are equipped with telephones, and as the nobles and merchants see the brilliancy of the former and the convenience of the latter, they want them, too. In many parts of Asia people, who but a decade or two ago were satisfied with the crudest appliances of primitive life, are now learning to use steam and electrical machinery, to like Oregon flour, Chicago beef, Pittsburg pickles and London jam, and to see the utility of foreign wire, nails, cutlery, drugs, paints and chemicals.

Many other illustrations of a 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 he 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.