ratio of progress, will be £109,000,000 in 1909. But here, again, the adverse point for Englishmen is that Asia will deal principally with the Asiatic. Dividing up the Japanese imports and exports into Asiatic, European, and American, the Asiatic come easily first, while the American and European about balance each other. But how, in the long-run, can we compete against the Americans, with their Philippine base, their Pacific seaboard, and their boundless resources?
(d) Assuming, however, that China and Japan, together with the other Eastern nations, do maintain a fair trade with ourselves, the telegraphic route from the East appears to be either across the Pacific to America and thence to Europe, or else across Siberia by land-line and thence to Europe. But neither of these through routes is controllable by us. We can only run our cables down the coast of China to Singapore, and so home viâ India, a circuitous route.
(e) So far, then, the conditions of trade and the facts of geography in the Far East appear to suggest that (1) the expansion of its European trade may be limited and slow, and that (2) whether expansion be slow or fast, the nearest telegraph routes homeward are otherwise than British.
(f) The politics of the Far East point in the same direction as regards British cable enterprise. During the decadence of the Ming Dynasty two European nations established themselves in the Far East—Spain, since succeeded by the Americans, in the Philippines, and Holland in the Dutch Indies. The succeeding, and still reigning, Manchu Dynasty stopped further European aggression for two centuries, until the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. By the latter date the Manchu Dynasty, which had been, in the persons of Kangshi and Kienlung, more politic than the Moguls and more successful than the Cæsars, was decadent. Since then feeble Princes have sat on the dragon throne. So France seized the south and Russia the north, and Germany acquired her existing possessions of 30,000,000
