The inland Chinese are sometimes clever in working themselves into the foreigner’s personnel of staff. First the father brings his boy, and the boy brings his cousin, imploring the foreigner to let them wait around the office to pick up a little English. They insist on doing or pretending to do chores; they whisper to the staff to halve their work with them, and then they beg for or demand a wage “while they are learning English.” Seldom does the kind-hearted foreigner refuse it, and he is really spreading the commercial and literary gospel of the West by doing so. In some of the Yangtze provinces designs are even yet stamped into the dyed cotton and silk, by stencil with lime, which takes out the color, as compared with our system of rolling the inked design on plain goods. The old will be rung out by the new, as Tennyson prophesied. Man as a beast of burden must depart in patient earnest China, which is associated with such unique sights of physical slavery as dozens of coolies harnessed to a wagon-load of teak in Hongkong, or several hundred trackers tied to long bamboo hawsers, while they pull junks through the terrific rapids of the noble Yangtze gorges between Ichang and Wan Hsien. Men for thousands of years have also supplied with their legs the motive power of irrigation wheels for raising water, and of tread wheels for turning paddles. Billions of tons of freight have been carried on the backs and from the shoulders of men, women and children over the hundreds of mountain passes on the great trade routes of mountainous China, such as the steep Mei Ling pass of Kwangtung, the Tangyueh pass of Yunnan, the Tachien pass into Tibet, etc. Hongkong’s thousand palatial villas and châteaux eighteen hundred feet above the clouds were carried up brick by brick and stone by stone in baskets and on bamboos balanced on the bare shoulders of human beings, who panted piteously in a stifling hot and humid atmosphere in the equator region. Men have pumped the brine from the deepest brine wells in the world. Their arms have lifted the weights that have driven the wells for gas and brine. A pulley, a rope, an endless chain, have been unknown, and hearts and feet have strained up the thirteen stories of the pagodas with the coping stone and upcurled eaves. The day of labor-saving devices dawns for a China whose population is going to decrease within reason, not with the intent to starve labor, but so that labor may devote itself to better-paying work. Government officials only can supervise this condition in China or in America, government’s work being to govern the big as well as the small, as we are just discovering in the West.