Perhaps the rich dividends made by the Oriental Consolidated (gold) Mining Company, at Unsan, in the Yalu district of Korea, made Japan as anxious commercially as diplomatically to secure Korea. This American company, with which Leigh Hunt was connected, and whose concession was obtained through the offices of United States Minister Allen, has made in a concession 500 miles square 4,000 per cent. in ten years. One hundred thousand dollars was put into the gold mining plant, and $4,000,000 has been paid in dividends, the mines themselves, instead of added capital, paying for their own development. The Unsan plant is largely self-contained, having crushers, a foundry, machine shops, a fleet, a railway and lumbering plant, hospital and barracks. The mining costs only one dollar and forty cents per ton, hand labor, the Koreans being the best miners in the Far East, owing to their docile patience. Some of the mines are one thousand feet deep. The Korean Exploration Company (half American and half Japanese) has a gold mining concession at Chicksan, south of Seoul. The new terms that will probably be imposed on foreign mining by Japan will be at least twenty-five per cent. royalty on the net profits, machinery imported and ore exported to be duty and loti taxes remitted, respectively. If Japan can do the smelting, of course ores must go there for treatment. In Formosa the three largest Japanese sugar companies are the Niitaka, the Taihoku and the Minami Seito (Southern Sugar Company), capitalized at about $2,000,000 gold each, with an output of 300,000 tons a year. Japan can increase this, and supply the world. The government grants subsidies to the cane growers for fertilizer, and money prizes for model plantations, the high tariff against Hongkong, of course, being a subsidy for the Formosan sugar mills, as far as supplying Japan is concerned. Japan has opened an electric-driven cotton mill, the Naigai Wata, at Suchow Creek, Shanghai, sending to America for the boilers, to Germany for the dynamos, and to England (Oldham) for the spinning machinery. The owners and foremen are Japanese, the workers Chinese. Eighty-five per cent. of the material is local grown, and fifteen per cent. comes from India in Japanese steamers. The finished product, mainly yarns, is sent up the Yangtze River and along the coast in Japanese steamers, and is admitted into Japan preferentially as far as foreign products are concerned. The Japanese are extending their ownership of cotton mills erected in China, for the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha has bought the Hua Hsuan, the Shanghai and the San Tai mills at Shanghai, and the Wuchang Spinning Mill at Wuchang. The Mitsui Bishi Kaisha has bought the Chen Hua mill at Shanghai, and the Nippon Mill Company has bought the Jih Hsin mill in China. There is much food for thought in this situation. The Japanese also own one-third of the largest translating press in China, the Commercial Press of Shanghai.