In these countries, and upon these islands, live more than half the human race, and with all the barbarism of some, and the old-fashioned civilization of even the best, the large majority of these people are producers of a multitude of articles wanted by the civilized world. And of late these peoples have become possessed with a strange desire to avail themselves of the products of European and American art. This market will not only grow rapidly in its demands, but the currents of trade will be diverted from Europe to America. In fact, the settlement of the west coast of America inaugurated a revolution greater than that which substituted the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope for the camel train across the Asiatic continent. It gave America a standpoint from which she would ultimately wrest the bulk of the vast trade of the Orient from Europe. The cutting of the Suez Canal mended the hold of England and other maritime European states on the Oriental market, in fact secured for them the advantage of a shorter line to the Southern Asiatic market as far as the Malay Peninsula; but as for the rest of that great market included in the Pacific Islands, the Chinese Empire, Japan and Siberia, the revolutionary movement has commenced, whereby the bulk of that trade will be taken from England and Holland by the merchants of San Francisco and Puget Sound. [Sidenote: The China trade.] The trade of China alone has been estimated at $130,000,000 per annum, the greater part of which is absorbed by England, and the annual value of the export and import trade of England with the Pacific Islands has been put at $75,000,000. This already immense market may and will be enlarged, especially in China, by means of railroad and steamboat connections, which will bring to the coast the products of the interior sections. Much of the China trade now goes overland into and through India, and also through Siberia, to be consumed by the way, or pushed through to the termini of European railroads and ship-lines which are reaching to get it. And, as the transportation becomes better, so will the production increase. Railroad building, until lately forbidden in China, has now commenced, and will, in the nature of the case, go on rapidly. The result will be to bring most of the trade to the Pacific coast, and thus reverse all the interior movements.