The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 26, 1903, Page 6

SIAN festivities in the East continuec. The latest grab at the Celestial grab-bag s a subject of which few know any- , and we least of all. But behind it things—the future of the revi several are world, the remodeling of the map, and perhaps, too, certain information which the press does not provide. There is China’s age, for instance. We do not know does; , she does not know herself. Yet in a land where ve no perfume and women no petticoats, where paradox is commonplace and everything goes by contraries, it follows that dates can hardly be pre- how old she is. Nobody ) rmation concerning China’s age may therefore n:\tr$ hed, and would not be of inordinate value if it \\'cre.fi s the fact that while we cannot com-( ot compute her population eithcr,) she is no wiser than we are. Oue> There are enough Chinese and { Another thing quite as obvious is that any con- ( may have for them is flattery by comparison to pt for us. That point is entirely too agreeable/ 3, mportant. ) old harri She may conceal her age, but She is the dowager of nations, the eldest of | monarchy and indifferent to all, , her skirts of silk about her, in Besides her arts and wiles d buried Rome were the creations of re Troy, before Nineveh, before Memphis, began, China was. The fact, always inter- recent events render momentous. In the fate of the ’s most ancient and contemptuous nation resides that yeafs we ca 1at is more curious however, is obvious. e A, one does not need to be a prophet to e by ne Russian India will follow, , and ultimately Europe as well. Behind Russia is the north wind. Where that sweeps bulwarks must be high and stanchions strong to withstand it. The solidity of the walls which England and Japan have thrown up time will demonstrate. Those of China are porce- lain In the cities of Cathay there once were sewers perfectly and prodigiously contrived. In Peking to-day the streets are cesspools. In them drown men and beasts. As the streets, so the executive. The Flowery Kingdom is a pretty name, but lilies that fester smell worse than weeds. The need there of landscape gardeners, and particularly of practical plum- bers, is generally understood, but nowhere so thoroughly as on the Nevski Prospect. To that appreciation recent festivities are due. After a breakfast at Batoum, a surprise party at Merv, an al fresco fete on the Amoor, a banquet at Neuchwang and the waltz through Manchuria, now, presently, weather permitting, there will follow a grand cotillon in the Yangtse Valley, with, for a wind-up, a series of state dinners in Peking. Such is the Russian programme. Such, rather, is part of it. Such, too, is the meaning of her saraband. In the progress of her festivities she has advanced from the Urals to the Pacific. A few centuries ago she was an insignificant monarchy. Her territories now cover one-seventh of the land surface of the globe. Yesterday the northern half of Asia was within her claws; to-day Manchuria is there be- sides Manchuria she has been invited by the powers to vacate. In September, she savs, she will do so. Perhaps she may, but only to return. That return is inevitable. It is part of her policy. It is part of her destiny. Both are as unstay- able as the wind at her back. Somebody said that England conquered half the globe in ) a fit of absentmindedness. A fit of abstraction would per- haps be more exact. Where England has abstracted Russia has absorbed. She has absorbed-steadily, with remarkable civility and without hardly striking a blo Her po ever forward—is one which there is no change of adminis- tration to alter, no incoming government to reverse. As such it js constant, and, i tally, the most successful that diplomacy knows. It co in considering always the end never the means; in turning treaties into memoranda of agreements that are not to be kept; in retreating, the better { to advance; in being never in a hurry, but in getting there all the same. That is what she is doing now in Manchuria. Manchuria is the key to China. That key once Russia’s for keeps, so is Peking as well. Then, after a state dinner in the Forbidden City, others will follow, notably, though of ) course not immediately, in Stamboul, Delhi and Ispahan, Already the Shah of Persia—the Shah-an-Shah, King « f Kings, Regent of the Prophet—is to Russ‘a but a soider in jelly. The winged bulls that on the Persepolian plain still | | E t guard the ruins of the palaces of Xerxes and of Darius arc; Krupps—he is doomed. And doomed, too, sooner or later, will be that other Regent of the Prophet who rules in Stam- east it provides a base from which to move on India. Hence its strategic importance. To-day, along the Oxus, beyond masses of Cossacks are peering. Anything else than peering the knell of Turkey and ultimately of India, will be ringing. Everything being possible, perbaps when that day comes impotent to release him. He may turn from the divan to the mosque, from Saadi to the Koran, from bulbuls to boul. To Stamboul Persia on the west gives access. To the the almond groves of Samarcand, down %t Hindustan would mean war, and at present war is one of the ew things that Russia does not want. But once China is hers it will be found that from Christiania to Yeddo, and diag- onally from Spitzbergen to Cape Comorin the sables of Rus- THE SUNDAY CALL. BY,. EDGAR. I she started from. Austria will crumble, Spain, divested of her colonies will turn Portuguese. The role of France will be purely intellectual. Italy will become united and null. Su- premacy will be dividled hetween England, mistress of Africa, and Russia, established at the Golden Horn.” Napoleon was speaking of to-morrow—of that chartless IN PORK. sia uninterruptedly stretch. That forecast has a false air of specious originality which we hasten to disavow. It is but a rearrangement of the prophecies of Napoleon. “Prussia,” the Emperor predicted, “will develop into a Germany reconstituted. But her ex- istence will be brief. Anarchy will throw her bagk where ~ PASTELS | This Is the Fourth of a Series of These Famous “Letters From a Seif-Made Merchant to His Son” Pierrepont, Which Have Created a Tremendous Sensation Both in America and Europe, to Be Printed in The Sunday Call. Is a “Fastel” on “Success.” It | | L =l OVYS are constantly writing me for advice about how to succeed, and when I send them my receipt they say that I am dealing out commonplace generalities. Of course I am, but that's what the receipt calls for, and if a boy will take these com- monplace generalities and knead them into his job, the mixture’'ll be cake. Once a fellow’s got the primary business virtues cemented into his character he’s safe to bitild on. But when a clerk crawls ipto the office in the morning like a sick setter pup, and leaps from his stool at night with the spring of a tiger, I'm a little afraid that if I sent him to take charge of a branch house-he wouldn’t always be around when customers were. He’s the sort of a chap who would hold back the sun an hour every morning and have it gain two every afternoon if the Lord would give him the same discretionary powers that he gave Joshua. And I have noticed that he’s the fellow who invariably takes a timekeeper as an insult. He's pretty numerous in business offices; in fact, if the glance of the human eye could affect a clock-face in the same way that a man’s country cousins affect their city welcome, I should have to buy a new time- piece for the office every morning. Boys are a good deal like the pups that fellows sell on street corners—they don’t always turn out as represented. You buy a likely setter pup anc) raise a spotted coach dog from it, and the prom- ising son of an honest butcher is just as like as not to turn out a poet or a professor. I want to say in passing that I have no real prejudice against poets, but I believe that, if you're going to be a Milton, there’s nothing like being a mute, inglorious one, as some fellow who was a little sore on the poetry business once put it. Of course, a packer who understands something about the versatility of cotton- seed oil need never turn down orders for lard because the run of hogs is light, and a father who un- derstands human nature can turn out an imitation patson from a boy whom the Lord intended to go on the Board of Trade. But on general principles it’s best to give your cottonseed oil a Latin name and to market it on its merits, and to let your boy follow his bent, even if it leads him into the wheat pit. 0 You've got to believe that the Lord made the first hog with the Graham brand burned in the skin, and that the drove which rushed down a steep place was packed by a competitor: You've got to know your goods from A to Izzard, from snout to tail, on the hoof and in the can. You’ve got.to know ‘em like a young mother knows baby talk, and to be as proud of ‘em as the young father of a twelve-pound boy, without really thinking that you're stretching it four pounds. You've got to be-! lieve in yourself and make your buyers take stock in you at par and accrued interest. You've got to have the scent of a bloodhound for an order and the grip of a bulldog on a customer. You've got to feel the same personal solicitude over a bill of goods that strays off to a competitor as a parson over a backslider, and hold special services to bring it back into the fold.You've got to get up every morn- ing with determination if you're going to g0 to bed with satisfaction. You've got to eat hog, think hog, dream hog—in short, go the whole hog if you're going to win out in the pork-packing Business. " That's a prettyliberal receipt, I know, but it’s intended for a fellow who wants to make a good- sized pie. And the only thing you ever find in pastry that you don’t put in yourself is flies. From “Letters From a Self-Made Merchant to His ” by Ge of Small, e nard & Co., publishers, Boston, Mass, o 7 Forey Mores Losiiier (D RGuSelon 55 =2 N S CaiNa SHOD () 5 RS OARRLIETE has charge, or rather of h coming events unfold and rhaps Sa- Idi, but not e of the Stars and Stripes. so. That omission i hich the ful to-morrow of v that immov present in in which he appears to have fore: gasta, indubitably Chamberlain, c the fall of the Dragon and the Or, if he did, he omitted to but a duty to supply. The Dragon, mnole yet watchful, for ages has guarded the walls of Catha That Dragon Russia must captivate. Should she fail she must take a back seat. Be- hind the walls is the gorgeousness of gold, mines richer and deeper than those of Ormuzd® and the Ind. Russia is none too well off; Russia is none too strong, either. Behind those walls there are, in addition to wealth, all the elements necessary for the production of a fighting force innumerable and superb. The extent of the population, and, as a quence, the possibilities of that ferce, China herself not know. But R a does, and, being semi-Asiatic, too, how to deal with both, which is more than can of England. Then, also, China leans to Russia. They are natural affinities—what Goethe called Wahlverwandtschaften —Arcades ambo, 1s some one else remarke, Moreover, there is the gold. The mineral resources of China, as yet barely scratched, are the greatest on earth. Minerals are the basis of modern industry. Our local production leads the world. We do not need those of nse- does China. Russia does; other countries as well. These are the plums in the grab-bag. Their possession means eco- nomic supremacy in the days that Napoleon foresaw. For that possession war is persumable. War is humanity’s normal condition. On the front page of the first history two brothers stand face to face. Their ideas conflict. One kills the other. The brothers are suc- ceeded by tribes. There are tents and passions. There are” clans, races, nations, empires. But always the conflict of ideas, always the scramble that ensues. The history of the world is a bulletin of battle The lesson which it disengages is the right of might. The Ro- mans expressed it in two words—Vae Victis. They were terse; they were also correct. The criterion of war is the result. In it there is, save for casuists, no question of jus- tice or of injustice. There is a questio:n merely of victory and defeat. Either makes for peace, but not for its perma- nence. Such peace would pass all understanding. War is the paradox of jurisprudence. It sanctions that which is forbidden, honors that which is penalized, and re- wards that which is reproved. It is an extralegal proceed- ing, in which murder is glorified and the scaffold is replaced by the triumphal arch. It is all these things, and others be- sides. It is hell, it is sport; but it is humanity's normal condition. When the war.for the grab-bag occurs it will for sheer splendor exceed anything that the world has beheld. For a parallel students will hunt from Marathon to Manila. They will hunt in vain. Beside it the Franco-Prussian argument will dwindle into the proporticns of a street row and the Trojan episodes into a scuffle. The contestants will refur- bish geography, tear out whole pages and set them up anew. There will be the totter @f thrones, the reversal of dynasties, the disruption of kingdoms, the effacement of nations, the passing of the Dragon, the fall of Iran, the sub- sidence of the Crescent, the glow of the sables and the re- modeling of the map. That remodeling which Napoleon foresaw and which Russia will oversee is demonstrable not through any gift which we do_not possess of reading the future, but through the ability which every oge enjoys of construing the past. It will be in the order of things; in accordance with a natural law which gives tg every dog his day and every dynasty her night. It will be a logical, evolutionary and, though revolutionary, too, will, when accomplished, be accepted, as"the inevitable always is. For nothing suffices unto itself. A nation is not an ex- ception. A nation resembles love—when it does not in- crease, it diminishes. In the destiny of nations but one thing is constant, and that is change. What happened to the an- cient monarchies? First Greece, then Rome surpassed them. Where is the glory of the one, the grandeur of the other? Spain usurped them. Then came England's turn. The turn of Russia is coming. So is ours. A century ago, barring a stretch or two here and there, Spanish rule was dominant over the lower and longer por- tion of the Americas. Barring an island or two, that rule extended over the West Indies. In addition Spain pos- sessed hereabouts a number of provinces that are ours to- day. Ultimately the rest will be ours also. We may not want them, and at present certainly we do not, but we can- not interfere with the law of gravitation. That law will precipitate Canada upon us. In its wake will come the El Dorados of the Caribbean, the kingdoms of the departed, Incas, the monarchies of the Aztecs that are gone. Then from Alaska to Araucania the flag of the United States of the Three Americas will float over a union extending from pole to pole. The pity is that we shall none of us be here to see it But those among the quick will behold the dominion of the earth shared by two powers, one ruling the Old World from the Baltic, the other from the Atlantic ruling the New. There, at least, is the horoscope which every seli-respect- ing astrologer must deduce, not merely from the Bear in the China Shop and the Napoleonic predictions. but from the influences of the Stars, and, particularly, of the Stripes. Meanwhile Russia has been to us a civil neighbor and a good friend. Other nations may object to her push, but there is-no reason why they should show their teeth over our shoulder. There is still less reason why we should un- dertake to interfere. The plums in our garden are big enough to compensate for any deficit in the grab-bag out Y \ | \