The history of China’s greatest steamship line, the China Merchants’ Steamship Company, is as follows: When Li Hung Chang was viceroy of Pechili province at Tientsin in 1871, on advice of Americans and British who were in his employ, he formed this government-controlled line, partly to carry tribute grain from the south; because the Grand Canal was allowed by the various governors to collect silt, while their pockets collected gilt (and guilt)! Merchants and guilds were invited or coerced to subscribe to some of the stock. In 1877 the company bought the Shanghai Steam Navigation Company and its dock for 2,000,000 taels silver. In 1878 Li diverted from the Grand Canal to the steamship company the Yunnan copper destined to the Peking and provincial mints. The great government university at Peking, with provincial branches, created by Kwang Hsu’s reform edicts of 1898, was to be financed partly by the revenues of this steamship company. The republicans used its revenues to aid the 1911 revolution because the imperialists used the railway revenues. The head office of the company is in Shanghai, and it has branches at Newchwang, Chifu, Tientsin, Chinkiang, Kowkiang, Hankau, Ningpo, Fuchau, Hongkong and Canton. The ships are distinguishable at the Chinese ports both by the yellow funnel, and by the immense Chinese characters which, in Austrian fashion, are not always borne on the bow, but midships. The fine vessels of this company were once put under the American flag in 1884 to save them from the French, who were at war with China. One of the great movements of the future in the reforming Far East will be the Malay Peninsular Canal, about fifty miles long, which will save 1,500 miles in the voyage from Saigon to Calcutta, Madras, etc. It will not cut off and make useless the expensive garrison port of Singapore, which holds the five equatorial seas for Britain, as the Singapore-Rangoon railway will run along the entire peninsula. All these probabilities in the Far East should be considered in full by the student of world politics, finance, commerce and ethnology. A dozen Chinas, Americas, Britains and Germanies could well work many centuries before the world is restored to the economic Eden state, where each man will be free, and have enough to support him and his in peace. Every work of commerce is then a world-work, claiming the altruist’s enthusiasm, and while we often use the phrase, “war of the ports of the Far East,” we mean that joyful exhibition of strength which the wrestler, rather than the warrior, puts forth.