The modern spirit is spreading speedily into the
domains of life everywhere--in places swiftly, in places slowly, but
spreading inevitably, _si sit prudentia_.
Nothing will tend, in this particular part of the country, to turn it
upside down and inside out more than the cult of industrialism. In a
number of centers in Eastern China, such as Han-yang and Shanghai,
foreign mills, iron works, and so on, furnish new employments, but in
the interior the machine of the West to the uneducated Celestial seems
to be the foe of his own tools; and when railways and steam craft
appear--steam has appeared, of course, on the Upper Yangtze, although it
has not yet taken much of the junk trade, and Szech'wan has her railways
now under construction (the sod was cut at Ichang in 1909)[G]--and a
single train and steamer does the work of hundreds of thousands of
carters, coolies, and boatmen, it is wholly natural that their imperfect
and short-sighted views should lead them to rise against a seeming new
peril.
Whilst in the end the Empire will profit greatly by the inventions of
the Occident, the period of transition in Szech'wan, especially if
machines are introduced too rapidly and unwisely, is one that will
disturb the peace.
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