From interior China may be drawn the goods for half a continent. The tea-freight which Russia receives over the long sea-trip to Odessa, or by the trans-shipped Vladivostok route, can be loaded then at Kalgan on the car that goes to Moscow. By it the silks of the Tien-tsin merchants may be rolled through into the freight-yards of St. Petersburg, and the timberless cities of interior China may build with the wood of the Yakutski Oblast forests. By it the dwellers in the valley of the Hoang-ho, “China’s Sorrow,” may be nourished in their need with the wheat of the Angara Valley; the Manchu mandarins may be clad in the furs from the Yenesei; the ploughshares tempered in Petrovski Zavod break the ancient soil of the Chi-li Province; the silver of the Altai Mountains make the bangles that deck the anklets of the purdah women. For America the road will open a commercial highway into the very heart of a new and expanding empire. American rails may carry American cars,--those ever moving shuttles which weave the woof of trade. American woolens and felts may protect the Siberians against their Arctic cold, American machinery mine and refine their gold. New England cottons, utilizing the Panama Canal, may clothe the myriad coolies of interior China. Here is the mail-route of ten days from Paris to Peking, against the thirty-five days needed by the fastest ships. Here is the quickest passenger-route from London to Yokohama. All these potentialities lie as the fallow heritage of the Urga Road, if beyond Kalgan it is given its avenues to China and the sea. It is civilization that must profit when the equilibrium of the East is restored, and over the old Urga Road China is relinked to the West by the trains of the great Asian Railway. The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A [Illustration: ASIA] Transcriber's Notes: Italics are shown thus: _sloping_. Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained. Perceived typographical errors have been changed.