Owing to the lack of means of transportation and communication at present these rich territories are left undeveloped and millions of laborers in the congested provinces along the Coast and in the Yangtze Valley are without work. What a great waste of natural and human energies. If there is a railway connecting these vast territories, the waste labor of the congested provinces can go and develop these rich soils for the good not only of China but also of the whole commercial world. So a system of railways to the northwestern part of the country is the most urgent need both politically and economically for China to-day.
I have intentionally left out the first principle—"the most remunerative field must be selected"—not because I want to neglect it but because I mean to call more attention to it and treat it more fully. It is commonly known to financiers and railway men that a railway in a densely populated country from end to end is the best paying proposition, and a railway in a thinly settled country from end to end is the least paying one. And a railway in an almost unpopulated country like our projected lines will take a long time to make it a paying business. That is why the United States Government had to grant large tracts of public lands to railway corporations to induce them to build the Transcontinental lines to the Pacific Coast, half a century ago. Whenever I talked with foreign railway men and financiers about the construction of railways to Mongolia and Sinkiang, they generally got very shy of the proposition. Undoubtedly they thought that it is for
