The Chinese nation could and should not continue, as a nation, on a scale of living lower than that of the Western nations. He urged the Chinese workers, as the class most affected, to fight for the economic advancement of themselves and of their nation. “Comrades, the people meeting here are all workers and represent a part of the nation. A great responsibility rests on Chinese labor, and if you are equal to the task, China will become a great nation and you a mighty working class.”(302) The Chinese workers were performing not only a duty that they owed to themselves—they were also acting patriotically. In advancing the national economic revolution by advancing themselves, they could not afford to lose sight of the political part of the revolution. “Beyond the economic struggle for the shortening of the working day and the increase of wages, there are before you other much more important questions of a political character. For our political objectives you must follow the three principles and support the revolution.”(303) The two parts of the revolution could not be separated from one another. Besides the economic part of the national revolution, there was another readjustment of which Sun did not often speak, because it was not an open problem which could be served by immediate political action. This was the problem of the transition of China from an autarchic to a trading economy. The old Chinese world had been self-sustaining, so self-sustaining that the Emperor Tao Kuang wrote to George III of England that he did not desire anything that the barbarians might have, but, out of the mercy and the bounty of his heart, would permit them to come to China in order to purchase the excellent things that the Chinese possessed in such abundance.(304) The impact of the West had had serious economic consequences,(305) and the Chinese were in the unpleasant position of having their old economic system disrupted without gaining the advantages of a nationally organized economy in return. They had the actual privilege of consuming a greater variety of goods than before, but this was offset by the fact that the presence of these goods threw their domestic markets and old native commercial system out of balance, without offering a correspondingly large potentiality of foreign export. Furthermore, the political position of the Western powers in China was such, as Sun Yat-sen complained, that trade was conducted on a somewhat inequitable basis.