A great contrast between the Yangtsze and its wild gorges is the great trunk line from Peking to Canton which runs at right angles through the Yangtsze north and south, and must make Hankow, the place where it crosses the Yangtsze, one of the greatest cities in the whole world. The railway is only completed as far as Hankow. It runs from Peking right across the plains of China, which are so desolate in the spring and so fertile in the summer, and which depend for their fertility on the July rains. At every station a great Chinese inn is erected--that {90} is to say, a big courtyard with rooms round. At first, of course, trade was small; the Chinese village community has but little that it wants either to buy or sell; each community is to a great extent self-supporting. A farmer reckoned, I was told by a Chinese official, that if he had made 30s. a year, he had done well. That does not mean that he lived on 30s. a year, though in a country where men are paid threepence a day, one would almost have been ready to believe it; but it means that he had fifteen dollars a year to spend on things outside his daily food. His farm supplies him with food and drink and his vicious luxury, opium; his women make his clothes; it only remains for him to buy material for the clothes and the little extras that they cannot make, besides salt. He pays for the few things that he has bought, probably with the opium he produces, or in Manchuria with beans; but the trade has been of microscopical dimensions owing to the difficulties of transit. When the railway is made he finds at the railway inn the Chinese merchant ready to buy and sell anything that he on his part is ready to trade. At first, such things as sewing cotton and cigarettes are the things that are traded against silk or opium, and then comes Chinese medicine and mineral oil, and so trade begins, and soon the Chinese inn becomes a market-place, and the railways begin carrying goods. Of course the full development of the railway system must depend on the feeding lines and in what {91} we had in Europe before the railway system, and what the Chinese have not got, the feeding roads. In Manchuria--for China, like England, is more go-ahead in the north than in the south--they are already moving in this direction. The Russian railways, possessed now by the Japanese, are very busy carrying beans to Dalny, and soon the Japanese lines from Mukden to Antung will be equally busy, and the line from Mukden to Tientsin also will carry this crop. What they are now considering at Mukden is how they can arrange a feeding system of light railways, by which a bigger area of ground can be brought within reach of the railway system. To give some idea of the energy and progressive character of the officials in those parts, I may mention that they are already making inquiries as to the mono-rail system for such railways.