I am not the first writer who has had a wail to make over the loss of British trade. But I do not, at the same time, see any reason why the British merchant should not easily maintain an indefinite supremacy of trade in China. It only needs a little more vim, a keener outlook, a speedier business adaptation to needs, the maintenance of commercial wakefulness where business has a tendency to increase. Competitors of Great Britain hold no advantages; they cannot in the long run put better goods upon the market--Japan, the most serious rival, certainly is producing inferior goods in larger bulk, and is everywhere overrunning the land with cheap and nasty goods, but the British-made article will always hold its own side by side with that of any other nation. And to the British merchant who in China, as in most other trading commercial spheres, has almost always absorbed the external trade, it does not matter much whether people say he is or is not losing the trade--so long as he is not. It has always been a case of Britain first and the rest nowhere. The Britisher makes a good living, has an established connection, is the life and soul of the social community, keeps up a fair average of orders with home firms, and is content. But no right-thinking Englishman, no matter how optimistically he may view the general situation of Great Britain's trade in the Chinese Empire, can deny that British trade does not expand proportionately with what is to be done and what others are doing. This is not pessimistic. Optimism is the keynote of the British merchant, and Great Britain's {27} returns of exports and imports in the China trade are beyond that of any other nation. But very powerful rivals--Germany and Japan, more powerful than British merchants will admit to themselves--are in the field and fighting in a way that we cannot afford to ignore.