"The area suitable for cultivation of cotton in China is almost as limitless as the supply of labor, and labor being very cheap, there can be no doubt that China will soon be one of the great cotton-producing countries of the world, and that this product, produced and manufactured in China, will command serious consideration in all calculations with reference to the cotton market. It will not be safe to discount the cotton of China because it now grades low, for it is certain to improve. At present it is estimated there are 3,000,000 tons of cotton seed, equal to 90,000,000 gallons of oil, now yearly lost to commerce which would find a ready market. The company will start with a capital of 250,000 Mexican dollars. One company has already ordered its machinery from the United States." The population of the Chinese Empire is estimated at 400,000,000, but Li Hung Chang declares, and experienced western observers confirm it, that the country with modern improvements could sustain more than twice its present population in a very high state of comfort. Of all the popular errors, however, the greatest is that of regarding India as an overpopulated, stagnant, and unprogressive land. Suffice it to say here that the population has trebled under British rule, and that the country is abundantly able to sustain in great comfort twice its present numbers by agriculture alone; that the extension of the railway system has recently been rapid, and along with this has gone on a growth of manufactures that is simply amazing. Only recently Burmah borrowed in London $15,000,000 for railway construction, a sum that was subscribed in that market five times over. In these vast fertile regions, which in comparison with what they are destined to be might be called new and undeveloped, live 290,000,000 of people, who are increasing at the rate of something like 2,000,000 per year. And these are but a few of the facts I might present to show that the early development of the Orient is the great fact America must take into account, and that it is almost a certainty that the world's greatest possible production of gold in the future may be absorbed in the East, leaving the West to struggle with an increasing scarcity. Indeed, Prof. Eduard Suess, the great German authority, after giving reasons for his belief that the larger part of the gold product is used in the arts, and that all of it will soon be, points out that Asia will soon, in all probability, absorb almost the entire silver product, and that we shall then have a "crisis" indeed.