Considering the road, it was not unnatural that my men gibbed a little at the eleven-day accomplishment.  I had a long parley with them, however, and agreed to reward them to the extent of one thousand cash among the three if they did it.  Their pay for the journey, over admittedly some of the worst roads in the Empire, was to be four hundred cash per man as before, with three hundred and thirty-three cash extra if the rain did not prevent them from getting in in eleven days.  They were in good spirits, and so was I, as we walked along the river-bank, where the poppy was to be seen in full flower, and the unending beds of rape alternated with peas and beans and tobacco.  T’ong would persist in stealing the peas and beans to feed me on, and for the life of me I could not get him to see that he should not do this sort of thing.  But how continually one was impressed with the great need of roads in Western China!  It is natural that, walking the whole distance, I should notice this more than other travelers have done, and, to my mind, roads in this part of the country rank in importance before the railways.

To the foreign mind it is more to the interests of China that railways should be well and serviceably built than that the money should be squandered to no purpose.  If the railway has rails, then in China it can be called a railway, and China is satisfied.  So with the roads.  If there is any passage at all, then the Chinese call it a road, and China is satisfied.

As one meanders through the country, watching a people who are equalled nowhere in the world for their industry, plodding away over the worst roads any civilized country possesses, he cannot but think, even looking at the question from the Chinese standpoint so far as he is able, that, were free scope once given for the infusion of Western energy and methods into an active, trade-loving people like the Chinese, China would rival the United States in wealth and natural resources.  The Chinese knows that his country, the natural resources of the country and the people, will allow him to do things on a scale which will by and by completely overbalance the doings of countries less favored by Nature than his own.  He knows that when properly developed his country will be one of the richest in the world, yet even when he is filled with such ideas he is just as cunctative as he has ever been.  He has the idea that he should not commence to exhaust the wealth of his country before it is absolutely necessary.

Above all, he has now made up his mind that he himself, unaided by the foreigner, is going to develop it just as he likes and just when he likes.

The day of the foreign concession is gone.  The Chinese now is paddling his own canoe, and it is only by cultivating his friendship, by proving to him by acts, and not by words, that the intrusion of privileged enterprises—­such as great mining concessions and railway concessions, in which the foreigner demands that he be the only principal—­is no longer contemplated, that the day will be won.  But it is equally true that only by combining European and Chinese interests on the modern company system, the real Opening of China can be effected.