Take Germany first. German success is undeniable. It is patent to all beholders. German merchants are at every port. In real interior China, far away from the beaten tracks, I do not remember ever having met a single British commercial traveller--Germans I have met often. They go out into the byways, beating up the trade and creating new trade, putting themselves to inconvenience and exertion to get orders, and undergoing in many cases greatest physical strain in travel to get business. Once I met a man not far from the border of British Burma; he had come right across China and had been away from his business house in Shanghai for several months, and was then going down to Rangoon and around to Shanghai by sea because it was the easier and quicker way back. This is perhaps an isolated case, but one may judge from it that the German merchants, while doing all they can as importers of the goods the people want to buy, spread their representatives far away from the buying centres to show the people what they can do. In Tientsin, during the past few years, the German has become a serious rival. German trade now at that important northern port is probably equal to British trade. In Eastern Siberia German is the business language, as a matter of fact, but to the German, unlike the nonchalant Britisher, it does not matter where he is placed in China, the first thing he does is to get a working knowledge of the language, a factor of far greater importance in China than appears on the surface. The German succeeds, not by political influence, not by tariffs nor underhand methods, but by sheer business application, and is building up an extensive scheme, founded on sound principles, to capture {28} the lion's share of the growing trade which will go to Europe and to wrest from the Britisher a large proportion of that which has always been his. The average German reads about China--its history, of the physical characteristics of the country, of the people in the interior and the life they live, what they have and what they want. The Englishman does not trouble. He rarely learns the language, is careless to find out anything about the country unless it is to get an idea of sport, and so on.