Meanwhile, also, the rest of the world is hard at work. Let us continue viewing that same industry of cotton-spinning. The value of the manufactured-cotton product of Austria has grown from fifteen million dollars in 1834, to thirty-five million dollars in 1860, and ninety millions in 1894. The textile manufactures of Belgium trebled themselves in three years previous to 1894; those of Germany have increased twenty-fold in sixty years; those of Italy nine-fold in twenty years, while even such backward countries as Russia and Spain have doubled their textile industries, one in thirty, the other in twenty years. Most unexpected and disconcerting of all, however, is Japan, who was once looked upon as a permanent customer, but whose home industries have been growing like a magic plant. The textile manufactures of Japan doubled in value in the three years between 1896 and 1899. From six million pounds of cotton spun in 1886, Japan advanced to ninety-one million in 1893, and to one hundred and fifty-three million in 1895, in nine years increasing twenty-four fold. The value of all her textile produce was six million dollars in 1887, and it was seventy million dollars in 1895. Therefore her imports of cotton goods from Europe fell from eight million dollars in 1884 to four million in 1895. And while this was going on in the rest of the world, in the United States the value of manufactured cotton was rising from forty-five million dollars in 1840, to two hundred and ten million dollars in 1880, to two hundred and sixty-seven million dollars in 1890, and to three hundred and thirty-nine million in 1900! Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that, at the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war, the factories of Massachusetts and Canada were running on half-time, and dozens not running at all; that British cotton manufacturers found that prices had decreased fifteen per cent. in as many years; that the weavers of Belgium were starving, and the country was full of riots and insurrections; and that all the nations of Europe were gathering in the Far East like vultures about a carcass—knowing that the sole condition upon which any one of them could maintain its industrial and social régime for another decade, was its ability to secure the custom of some hundreds of millions of Chinamen, who are so poor that a handful of rice and a cotton shirt are all they own in the world!