country to live in. This is a misconception owing to the common notion of measuring everything by the value of money. If we measure the cost of living by the value of labor then it will be found that China is the most expensive country for a common worker to live in. A Chinese coolie, a muscular worker, has to work 14 to 16 hours a day in order to earn a bare subsistence. A clerk in a shop, or a teacher in a village school cannot earn more than a hundred dollars a year. And the farmers after paying their rents and exchanging for a few articles of need with their produce have to live from hand to mouth. Labor is very cheap and plentiful but food and commodities of life are just enough to go round for the great multitude of the four hundred millions in China in an ordinary good year. In a bad year, a great number succumb to want and starvation. This miserable condition among the Chinese proletariat is due to the non-development of the country, the crude methods of production and the wastefulness of labor. The radical cure for all this is industrial development by foreign capital and experts for the benefit of the whole nation. Europe and America are a hundred years ahead of us in industrial development; so in order to catch up in a very short time we have to use their capital, mainly their machinery. If foreign capital cannot be gotten, we will have to get at least their experts and inventors to make for us our own machinery. In any case, we must use machinery to assist our enormous man-power to develop our unlimited resources.
