December, 14, 1907.]
direction: but here other economic causes are at work. ́Although the circulation of gold has been arrested by the increasing desire to hold, this tendency has bad, of course, no effect on the demand for food stuffs, as the same number of mouths require to be filled. The tendency to safeguard whatever gold is available has, however, had a disastrons effect on the population at large, inasmuch as there is a general tendency to reduce to a minimum all current expenses; and in consequence thousands of ordinary wage earners are thrown out of employment without any realised surplus of capital t› fall back on.
Here again the impossiblity of separating ouse nud effect i crea es tue difficulty of effecting relief. The throwing out of employment of thousands of working men is on one side the direct effect of increased need of gold, while on the other it cannot but have the effect of diminishing the flow, and thereby increasing the stringency of the market. It is thus that even a country so remote from the contingencies that have created the present panic as China is made to suffer for the sins of the false financial system of the United States. For the first time, probably, in the financial history of China, the Government has found itself called upon to take measures to ease the strain in Newchwang.
This may be the beginning of a happier gra for China, but such measures, unless undertaken with a more profound knowledge of the economic questions at the bottom of all these move- ments, it is well to recall, may be productive of more harm than good; stil it is well that Government should awake to some sense of its responsibility, and the effort is one of the signs that the conscience of the Government is at last awakening. We have always been of those who hoped for the best, and are not yet prepared to give up reform in China as hopeless or impossible. There is the stuff there, but there is vast accumula- tion of vis inertia to be overcome, and China evidently, though amidst many mistakes largely proceeding from long disuse, is evidently beginning to discover that she is not yet dead as a nation.
6
FIRST PHILIPPINES
CARNIVAL.
|
C
|
CHINAOVERLAND TRADE REPORT.
"
379
It would have been strange enough if a France, or Austria, even the huge belt of whole country of the larger sort-Spain, or fertility in the United States-had served: to give standing-room to a race of man that could
not manage to live in comfort on the entire surface of the planet. Bat an island that was at best but a geological afterthought! The implications were too frightful in regard to the sauity of mankind.”
have had no opportunity of noting kill each other to make room ? The the signs we have seen, We may calculations were as correct as they were mention that mail matter that otherwise startling, however. The Isle of Wight hâs makes no reference to the approaching 93.905 acres of solid standing ground. “At fête is, when received from Manila, now in 4,840 square yards to the acre 'this works most cases decorated with rubber-stamp out at 454,500,200 square yards, to acétim- impressions and mottoes to prevent us
modate with comfortable standing room forgetting what is to be. The idea is the at four to the square yard-and *"the same that prompts some pious people to military measure for soldiers crowing enclose tracts in all their correspondence. | bridges in close marching order is one to the From Manila, the broadcast gospel is the square foot," or nine to the square yard→→ good news' that the time is at band for the no less than eighteen hundred and eighteen first annual Philippines carnival. All are millions of people. In 1883 the population welcome-even Japanese; at least, so w of the globe was put at a trifle under fifteen trust; for if the renoun of race hatred is hundred millions. An increase of three permitted to besmear this fraternal nani- hundred millions is hardly possible in that festation of businesslike enterprise, then time, but asaume it, and there is 'the the whole thing becomes a mockery and possibility of the Isle of Wight as calculated. a farce, like the old story that the valley This "indic ment of the scheme of things of the Mississippi offers hospitality to all was too severe "for Mr. WHITEING. mankind, or at least that part of it that was supposed to be writhing under the oppres- sion of feudal and effete Yurrup. Though American ports are daily turning back undesirable immigrants, though the cry is America for the Americans, it might not be so if the biggest thing in Empires were promoting_a carnival. Manila wants visitors. It is sending out into the highways and byways of the world invitations to come and Bee. It is a good idea. Far Eastern society is supposed to vote "calling" a bore, but perhaps that was au invention of somebody whose calls were not returned. Certainly from the international point of view, the more the merrier. Let there be more of these parties, these carnivals, these international visits. To see more of each other is to know better. The Chinese carnival last week must have persuaded at least some visitors that the white people of Hongkong are not such devilish devils after all. The Manila carnival will do good; the Japan exhibition of 1912 will do good; all that sort of thing does good. But say it seems appropriate here to use a colloquialism picked up from Manila visitors to Hongkong-what about that poll-tax of eight pesos on aliens Those of us, British, Japanese, Chinese, or other, who hasten to mingle with the merry mob at the first Philippine carnival, are we to be welcomed as friendly guests or taxed as alien intruders? Does Manila want us, or only our money? We are not from Missouri, but we want to know.”
(Daily Press, December 11th). The Manila papers are co-operating with noticeable enthusiasm to keep the forth- coming Philippines carnival w I in the public eye. We have already published the elaborate prospectus, showing what big things are to be done during the week commencing Monday February 3rd. It is quite refreshing to find local differences ignored, local squabbles dropped, and all hands united in a pull-together mood to do something for the prosperity of the islands they occupy. At carnival time the cur mudgeon has to exercise self-restraint; the irritable man must not obtrude himself; the general tone is one of tolerance, of indulgence, of acquiescence by all and sundry in the little nonsense that in homeo- pathic doses is believed to make better and wiser men of us all. Here, two months
45
18
before" the Monarch of the Occident' timed to call upon
'the Monarch of the Orient" at Manila, we find the people of that sunny city wreathed in preparatory smiles of anticipatory hospitality. The guest chambers are being prepared with the energy born of a determination to give the Visitors a good time. From house to house, from office to office, from editorial sanctum
to editorial sanctum, we get the impression as of people calling to one another, "there's going to be a party." Lest this should appear exaggerated to such readers as
WHY WAR?
There was no getting out of it, though. The figures stood, and stand. Think of the tens of thousands of habitable and fertile acres to sp.ire. Picture the peoples marshallel int that frag ment of an English county, and then "all the huge mileage of depopulated Europe, of mighty Asia, of the Americas, ob, the oppression of thought of giant Africa, with the isles, hundreds of them bigger than the condezvous, lying ready to give them har bourage, and, as one might have hoped, Such a handfui provender, under sun or 8 ars.
(Daily Press, December 12th.) The justificatory excuse for a good deal of national expansion or colony grabbing has been that the centres of civilization are becoming overcrowded. The alternatives for an over populated country are said to be Malthusianism or colonization. RICHARD WHITEING, the John the Baptist of the saner sort of socialism, has just published, through GɛO. BELL & SONS of London, a remarkable book called "All Moonshine," in which his "astrul". body explores this
>
is this anfeedable, uulodgable population of the world; such an unspeakably poor provider is Mother Nature who has them all to board."
Mr. WHITEING thinks of all that, and makes due allowance for the wide inhospit
able areas of the world. Still, with all that, there is the huge balance of the earth fair and beautiful, "limitless for all present and reasonably prospective needs of man.' Then why wars? Mr. WHITEING slept,
27
and had a vision. All the peoples of the world, every mother's son and daughter of them did assemble in the Isle of Wight, in their "astral forms. The ninety millions of United States Americans were comfort. ably standing in a very small corner, yet with all their nearly four millions of square miles at home they seem afraid of being crowded out by a few thousand Asiatics! Leaving the astral population of the world for an hour or two, massed in the Isle of Wight, Mr. WHITEING takes a flight round the world to see how their physical counter- parts are doing. He saw the great stretches of space where there seemed no sigă of
buman
vccupation, a huge incalculable mileage of fertile land where next to nothing pastured or grew, like a world waiting to begin in human life, and this even in Europe the most thickly peopled parts." measures close on four million miles, “and yet all this almost unimaginable barbourage of human kind cannot give three square meals a day to a population that can be folded with the greatest ease in a corner of the Isle of Wight." Russia was even then sending the hat round for famine-stricken Who, he asks, will audit the populations. accounts of the bounteous earth? He
cver-peopled sphere to some purpose. Alarmed by a newspaper scare-head, he wonders "how soon would the last new baby squeeze the first old inhabitant off our orb into infinite space." He is relieved to read, while going further into the subject, that "at four persus to the square yard, the entire population of the globe, standing shoulder to shoulder, could find room and to spare in the Isle of Wight." If every living human being in the whole world could move about com- fortably in that mere dot of a epeck of land, what could they not do in the verdant valleys and prairies of the continents, it properly saw the foolishness of wars of expao- distributed? Why be overcrowded?
sion as Mr. WHITEING sees it, hence
Why
looked at the undeveloped miles of prolific Manchuria, and marvelled that Russia should fight for more.
China alone seem-
millions, morg
ed sufficient for its own than sufficient. Doubtless the Chinese