JAPAN
circumstances, though in truth his gains amounted to forty or fifty per cent.[1] It happened that, just before Japan's raw silk became available for export, the production of that staple in France and Italy had been largely curtailed owing to a novel disease of the silkworm. Thus when the first bales of the Japanese article appeared in London, and it was found to possess qualities entitling it to high rank, a keen demand sprang up, so that in 1863, the fourth year after the inauguration of the trade, no less than seventeen thousand piculs were shipped. Japanese tea, also, differing radically in taste and bouquet from the black tea of China, appealed quickly to American taste, and six million pounds of it were sent across the Pacific in 1863. The corresponding figures for these two staples in 1899 were sixty thousand piculs and twenty-eight million pounds, respectively. That remarkable development is typical of the general history of Japan's foreign trade in modern times. Omitting the first decade, the statistics of which are imperfect, it is found that the volume of the trade grew from five and three-fourths millions sterling in 1868 to forty-nine millions in 1900. It was not a uniform growth, however. The period of twenty-three years divides itself conspicuously into two eras: the first of eighteen years (1868-1885), during which the growth was from five and three-fourths millions to thirteen millions, a ratio of one to
- ↑ See Appendix, note 61.
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