It is beyond his comprehension and repulsive to his common
sense that he should live up to his contract and thereby lose money.
He firmly believes that the changing conditions themselves absolve
him. And in so far adaptable as he has shown himself to be in other
respects, he fails to grasp a radically new idea where the Chinese
succeeds.
Here we have the Chinese, four hundred millions of him, occupying a
vast land of immense natural resources--resources of a twentieth-
century age, of a machine age; resources of coal and iron, which are
the backbone of commercial civilization. He is an indefatigable
worker. He is not dead to new ideas, new methods, new systems.
Under a capable management he can be made to do anything. Truly
would he of himself constitute the much-heralded Yellow Peril were it
not for his present management. This management, his government, is
set, crystallized. It is what binds him down to building as his
fathers built. The governing class, entrenched by the precedent and
power of centuries and by the stamp it has put upon his mind, will
never free him.
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