The Chinese have made up their minds to welcome railways, and though they would far prefer railways to be built with Chinese capital, they are of necessity compelled to accept European capital, since their fellow-countrymen want very high interest for their money. The Germans have taken very full advantage of the Chinese desire for railways, and have linked Kiauchau with the railway system of China. The effect of all this must be very far reaching. To begin with, it will alter the influence of foreign powers. As the railway service is completed, Kiauchau will become a very much more important centre than it is now. If a railway that links Peking to Nanking, {92} or, to be accurate, to a town on the Yangtsze opposite to Nanking, is cut by a railway from Kiauchau, the result will be that Kiauchau will become the nearest ice-free port for an enormous district of China. This cannot fail to strengthen the German influence, and the German influence is connected, as we have already explained, too much with that political side of missions which has caused them to be distrusted by peace-loving Chinese. The Chinese will ask themselves, will there not soon be a missionary incident which will justify a further aggression by Germany along the railway, which lies so handy for a military advance, and they will be suspicious of any German missionary effort in that quarter. But the effect of the railways is much more far reaching than any casual advantage that it may give to various powers, whether it be to Germany in Shantung, or to Russia or Japan in Manchuria, or to France in Yunnan, or to Russia in Szechuan. It will have two main effects. First and foremost it must place the whole of China in the same position that Shanghai and Tientsin occupy at the present moment--that is, it must make the whole of China a mixture of Eastern and Western civilisation. It may be urged that the rivers of China have already been the means of bringing East and West into close contact with one another, and yet that China remains still a separate and different country to the treaty ports. {93} The answer is, firstly, that it is comparatively only a short time since the river has been opened to foreign trade, and that a great advance has been made in the treaty ports, so much so that a man in the customs service living by the gorges of the Yangtsze described the difference between the treaty ports and the rest of China by saying, "A man who has only seen Shanghai and Hankow has never seen China." Secondly, a railway has a great educational effect. When a railway is first opened the Chinese crowd to see it; they get in the way of the engine, they are run over, they accuse it of malign powers, and then they come to the conclusion that it is after all only a machine, and they take readily to travelling by rail.