A further proof is the undoubted fact that Oriental peoples, taken as a whole, have bought Western-manufactured products in preference to their own hand-made wares. To many Westerners this has been a mystery. Such persons cannot understand how the Orientals could buy the cheap, shoddy products of the West, manufactured especially for the Eastern market, in preference to their native wares of better quality and vastly greater beauty. The answer, however, is that the average Oriental is not an art connoisseur but a poor man living perilously close to the margin of starvation. He not only wants but must buy things cheap, and the wide price-margin is the deciding factor. Of course there is also the element of novelty. Besides goods which merely replace articles he has always used, the West has introduced many new articles whose utility or charm are irresistible. I have already mentioned the way in which the sewing-machine and the kerosene-lamp have swept the Orient from end to end, and there are many other instances of a similar nature. The permeation of Western industry has, in fact, profoundly modified every phase of Oriental economic life. New economic wants have been created; standards of living have been raised; canons of taste have been altered. Says a lifelong American student of the Orient: "The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods and articles has created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no longer content to burn bean-oil; he wants kerosene. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is equalled only by his passion for foreign clocks. The ambitious Syrian scorns the mud roof of his ancestors, and will be satisfied only with the bright red tiles imported from France. Everywhere articles of foreign manufacture are in demand.... Knowledge increases wants, and the Oriental is acquiring knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that his grandfather never heard of."[207]