An inexhaustible agricultural capacity remains unimproved in China, and the same may be said of her rich store of mineral wealth, which, under American enterprise and facilities, would soon revolutionize the country in its products and exports. Save the districts which are traversed by the canals, the present means of communication between different parts of the country are scarcely superior to those of Central Africa. The so-called national roads are nearly impassable. No other country in the world would be so surely and rapidly benefited by a thorough system of railroads as would China. Gold and silver are found in nearly every province of the Empire, the former being still procured by the most primitive processes, such as washing the river sands by hand, which are recharged by the freshets from the mountains,--a mode that would satisfy only Chinese labor. Coal is the most widespread, most valuable, and most accessible of all the buried treasures. If the twelve thousand miles of coal-fields have made Great Britain the workshop of the world, what may not be anticipated from the four hundred thousand square miles of Chinese coal-fields, which are capable of supplying the whole world, at the present rate of consumption, for thousands of years?
The depressing monotony in the customs, habits, and ideas of the Chinese, as contrasted with their neighbors, the Japanese, forces itself upon the notice of the traveler. There is no variety among the race, either in manners, dress, or architecture; one section of the country seems precisely like another, so far as the people are concerned, however widely divided, and all follow one model. There is no individuality. They look to the past not to the future. There is no such possibility as a nation's standing still; it either retrogrades or progresses. China, whose people do everything in a left-handed manner, advances like a crab, backwards. It would seem as if she must eventually dry up and die of old age; and yet, within the limits of the Chinese Empire is probably comprised one fourth of the human race. Strive as much as we may to be fair and liberal, it is yet impossible to disguise our strong dislike to the people whom we were now about to leave. A sense of relief on departing from pestilential Canton was inevitable, and there was little to attract us longer at Hong Kong, to which city we returned in the steamship Powan.