Next after the education of his people the development of their material resources has been with Chang a leading object.  To this end he has opened cotton-mills, silk-filatures, glass-works and iron-works, all on an extensive scale, with foreign machinery and foreign experts.  For miles outside of the gates of Wuchang the banks of the river are lined with these vast establishments.  Do they not announce more clearly than the batteries which command the waterway the coming of a new China?  Some of them he has kept going at an annual loss.  The cotton-mill, for example, was standing idle when I arrived, because in the hands of his mandarins he could not make it pay expenses.  A Canton merchant leased it on easy terms, and made it [Page 232] such a conspicuous success that he is now growing rich.  It is an axiom in China that no manufacturing or mercantile enterprise can be profitably conducted by a deputation of mandarins.

Chang is rapidly changing the aspect of his capital by erecting in all parts of it handsome school-buildings in foreign style, literally proclaiming from the house-tops his gospel of education.  The youth in these schools are mostly clad in foreign dress; his street police and the soldiers in his barracks are all in foreign uniform; and many of the latter have cut off their cues as a sign of breaking with the old regime.  In talking with their officers I applauded the prudence of the measure as making them less liable to be captured while running away.

Chang’s soldiers are taught to march to the cadence of his own war-songs—­which, though lacking the fire of Tyrtaeus or Koerner, are not ill-suited to arouse patriotic sentiment.  Take these lines as a sample: 

 “Foreigners laugh at our impotence,
  And talk of dividing our country like a watermelon,
  But are we not 400 million strong? 
  If we of the Yellow Race only stand together,
  What foreign power will dare to molest us? 
  Just look at India, great in extent
  But sunk in hopeless bondage. 
  Look, too, at the Jews, famous in ancient times,
  Now scattered on the face of the earth. 
  Then look at Japan with her three small islands,
  Think how she got the better of this great nation,
  And won the admiration of the world. 
  What I admire in the Japanese
  Is not their skill in using ship or gun
  But their single-hearted love of country.”

[Page 233] Viceroy Chang’s mode of dealing with his own malady might be taken as a picture of the shifting policy of a half-enlightened country.

The first doctor he consulted was a Chinese of the old school.  Besides administering pills composed of

  “Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
   Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,”

the doctor suggested that one thing was still required to put the patient in harmony with the course of Nature.  Pointing to a fine chain of hills that stretches in a waving line across the wide city, he said:  “The root of your trouble lies there.  That carriage-road that you have opened has wounded the spinal column of the serpent.  Restore the hill to its former condition and you will soon get well.”