. 313 313 . 314 314 BIBLIOGRAPHY TO PART IV XXV. COMMERCIAL POSSIBILITIES IN THE FAR EAST II. The Incorporation of American Companies in China 352 III. Extract from Hongkong Ordinances Relating to Com- TRADING WITH ASIA CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The people of that part of the world known as the Far East have been in more or less constant contact with the people of Europe and America since the early part of the sixteenth century. During that period they have watched the Western world develop a civilization by means of a series of epoch-making inventions, in which steam, electricity, and lately the internal-combustion engine, played the principal rôles. Because some of them have failed to realize the value of these new discoveries, they have been termed backward. They have more recently witnessed the logical result of what they have probably considered a mad struggle to overcome time and space in a world-destroying conflict which has left these same "advanced" nations economically paralyzed. For centuries they have been urged to adopt the new civilization of the West, to abandon their own customs and adopt "higher" standards, and some of these things they have done. They have readily acquired Western knowledge of sanitation, medicine, and hygiene. By successive stages they have evolved from oil lamps to electric lights, from oil-paper to glass windows, from thatched roofs to galvanized iron, from mud and straw houses to stone and brick. But by adopting these more useful evidences of Western civilization, they have by no means abandoned all the ancient customs and habits that long |