The wealth of old China had been one of the factors enabling it to resist destruction at the spear-points of its barbarian conquerors. Sun Yat-sen knew this, and knew also that the position of the United States—which had probably the greatest concentration of social and physical wealth and power under one political system that the world had ever known—made that nation impregnable in the modern world. Seeing that wealth was not only a blessing to individuals, but to nations as well, he was anxious that his beloved China should be guarded and assisted by the strength that the ideology of _min shêng_, once accepted and effectuated, could give it. _Min shêng_ is more than a vague aspiration for national welfare. The general theory of nationalism and democracy required an additional point to make them effective in the realities of international politics, and _min shêng_ was to supply the hygienic and economic strength that the Chinese race-nation needed for competition and survival; but it was to do more. _Min shêng_ is at the same time the last step of Chinese resistance and the first of Chinese submission to Western culture. In seeking an economic policy and an ideology which would lead to increased wealth of the nation, the Chinese were preparing to resist the West with its own weapons. _Min shêng_ is a submission in that it is a deliberate declaration of industrial revolution. It is beside the point to consider the ideological bases of the Western industrial revolution. It was perhaps neither a voluntary nor a deliberate process at all; no man in the first few decades of the nineteenth century could have foretold what the end of a process of mechanization would bring, or was likely to advocate the intentional following of a policy which would transform the orientation and organization of man more thoroughly than had any previous religious, political, and economic transition. The industrial revolution of Euramerica, when viewed from the outside, presents the appearance of a colossal accident, whether for good or for bad, which was but half-perceived by the participants in it. Even today, when the ideology and the institutional outline of the agrarian-handicraft past is fading swiftly away in the new brilliance of Western machine-culture, the new certainty, the new order have not yet appeared. The great transition works its way beyond the knowledge or the intervention of individual men.