vast changes in East Asia, and it was with my mind full of such thoughts as are suggested by considerations of this kind that I started on a journey which was to take me into the very heart of China, up the swelling bosom of the mighty Yang-tsze, into the recesses of the wide-stretching and wealthy province of Ssŭch'uan, across the bleak highlands of Yün-nan, and out, finally, on the far side, through the tropical swamps and jungles of British Burma. Let me invite the reader whose interest is sufficiently aroused to accompany me.
One steals away from Shanghai at some indefinite hour in the dead of night, and when one wakes up in the morning the great buildings of the busy bustling commercial metropolis are lost to sight, and on all sides the waters
12,000 miles by sea and then journeying inland within a stone's throw of the greatest iron ore deposits in the world, there to be sold at high prices because a working plan without restrictions has not yet been found by which to drive a little way into the bowels of mother earth." (See 'The Truce in the Far East and its Aftermath,' by Mr Putnam Weale, p. 405.) Sooner or later the "working plan" now lacking will be found, and when this comes about it is difficult to see what is to prevent China from becoming the greatest industrial country in the world.
