For all schemes to tame the wild and fierce Yangtsze are clearly impossible. The river rises and falls more than a hundred feet with great rapidity, and no human hand could ever throw a dam across this mass of surging water. Possibly it might be used as a source of power for electrical work, but it is far more probable that the smaller rivers which fall into the Yangtsze will be chosen for that purpose. This district may be a tourist resort, and dwellers in the plains of China may seek coolness and beauty on one of the crags that overhang the river; the modern hotel may perch itself beside the ancient Buddhist temple; but the days of the river as a great commercial route of China are numbered as soon as the railway linking far-western Szechuan to the rest of China is completed. One wild scheme proposes that the railway should come from Russia straight down from Szechuan, in which case more than probably Szechuan will fall completely under the influence of the Russian Government. One of the results of Westernising China must be to produce an industrial revolution. All those men, for instance, who make a living by leaping from crag to crag, from rock to rock, and swimming, struggling, rowing in that river Yangtsze will find their living gone. But not only will the railway make many poor who had a competence, but it must make many rich {89} who before were poor. In this case, for instance, all those commodities which are now extremely dear in Szechuan, because of the cost of transit, will fall in price, and there will be a period when there will be a wide margin of profit between the cost of importation and the conventional price the people are used to pay, and those who live by trade will grow rich. What has happened in the West must also happen in the East. The introduction of steam did not make the official classes or even the working classes immediately rich. The people who immediately profited by improved means of production and communication were the great middle class; afterwards as the working class realised that the margin of profit would allow of larger wages, they compelled the masters to share these advantages with them. So it will probably happen in China. With the railway will come a rich middle class who will be a factor of growing importance in future China.