CHINESE RAILWAYS AS INVESTMENTS.
IT is pretty clear that, if peace can be maintained, it is intended to get up a " boom " in Chinese railways. The Chinese Government is bombarded with requests for "concessions." equivalent, when they are once granted, to Acts of Parliament in Great Britain ; and seven or eight of these—two of great magnitude—have fallen to British syndicates, which, we may rest convinced, will lose no time in placing their shares upon the London market. They may find that market inclined to be receptive. Railways through vast thickly populated and -fertile regions are sure, it will be argued, to pay ; cheap labour exists in China in limitless quantities ; and as for difficulties in acquiring land, the absolute Government of Pekin will sweep all those away with a stroke of its pen. The public harassed by 21 per cent. is very ready to believe in things so substantial looking as railways; the Stock Exchange is eager for fresh blocks of shares in which to deal ; contractors are actually ravening for "work," big jobs for them having grown scarce ; and the great financiers see their way to schemes of under- writing which will bring most of the profits, when they are made, into their own carefully locked safes. Thousands of civil engineers are almost starving—we hear of skilled men in the profession working for ..e2 a week—an advertisement will bring together any number of managers, accountants, clerks, and telegraph hands, and every one of all these classes, partly from greed, partly from reasonable hope, and partly from despair of an alterna. tive, will be an unpaid agent devoted to "placing "shares. There will, we venture to predict, be a boom in Chinese railways of unusual dimensions, and involving classes not usually given to" wild-cat" speculation.
We are pleased to hear of any new opening for the profitable employment of capital, for our special client, the cultivated class, has been heavily hit by the reduc- tion in the rate of interest, and capital is accumulating so rapidly that it may be wasted before long in projects wilder than Chinese enterprise ; but, nevertheless, we trust the readers of the Spectator, before they plunge into this one, will pause a little to consider the diffi- culties in the way. It will not pay them to "regenerate" China at a profit of five shillings per cent., or to "open up the roads of civilisation among a fourth of the in- habitants of the globe" at such a cost that only con- tractors, rail-makers, financiers, and sharebrokers will make any gain thereby. They have not, to begin with, the slightest real knowledge as to the physical obstacles in the way of railways in a land where in the North and West the mountains are very high, while in the centre the rivers, besides being vast, constantly overflow their banks, sweeping away the villages by the thousand at a time. Take a railway like the magnificent one which is to join Bengal via' Burmah with some point on the Eastern coast of China. Surely, it is said, a road which connects Calcutta with Shanghai must pay? Certainly, if it can be built at a price ; but the road will have to thread, not mountains, but systems of mountains on the Burmese frontier; to cross, not rivers, but systems of rivers before it reaches the coast ; to disturb, not a few peasants carelessly tilling a desert, but great populations of small and greedy freeholders, every man of whom will have to be com- pensated. When built it will lie at the mercy of those peasants, while every station will be watched by officials raging for bribes, capable of spreading reports that the foreign engines are fed with Chinese children, and with full legal right to arrest and torture any one against whom they can allege the smallest act of violence. Things are bad enough in Turkey, as the managers of Ottoman railways know, but for such purposes Turkey is to China as the Strand is to a pass through a difficult hill range in Uganda. While building, and while working, a railway in China will be squeezed at every turn by men who are merciless in their hunger for bribes, who at heart detest the intrusive white men, and who have behind them the most unreasonable and bloodthirsty of mobs. Pekin and London will prevent all that ? Pekin can and will do nothing against the peasantry ; and as for London, do the advocates of these schemes really believe that a British Government, with slow-moving allies and jealous enemies, will once a week threaten war in the Far East in order that bondholders may have greater security for their dividends ? The Russian Government, which knows China, knows that the things we predict will happen, and when demanding concessions in Manchuria, demands also what are virtual rights of sovereignty, makes of its stations fortified barracks, and for ten miles on each side claims all executive power. Is the British Government to do that ? That would be practical annexation, and we do not believe that any British Cabinet, with an immense Empire to govern already, with an Army hardly sufficient for home defence, and with taxpayers to whom it is responsible, will ever embark upon so mad a project. If it does, of course bondholders will be safe while the Em- pire endures, which will not be for long; but let our readers before they embark money cross-examine the statesmen in Parliament, instead of the journalists and the project-mongers, and see if they then feel secure of future dividends. We entirely admit the extent of pos- sible passenger traffic. We make no question that the volume of goods delivered will be "vast," but we tell them that this traffic must be carried for half-farthings, that these goods will not be sent except at rates lower than Chinese boatmen charge, and that when their rail- ways, after difficulties which will sometimes produce despair, are actually built, they will find themselves in possession of a security yielding 5 per cent. every second year, and liable at short intervals to total suspension.
'But what can we do? Are we to keep our money use- less in a City vault ? ' Certainly not ; the use of money is to be useful,—that is, to facilitate communication, to develop industry, to extract from the earth the resources which it yields only after an expenditure of human labour. We have no intention of denying those truisms, but those truisms do not involve the rejection of the other truism, that one place or one people is better adapted for industry than another. The English people possess whole Empires which they can make as safe as the Strand, and which are positively languishing to return dividends on capital. There is not a Colony but wants more rail- ways. There is not a stretch of Africa now in our bands — and the stretches are bewilderingly vast — which does not pine for steam tramways built cheaply and roughly, with low speeds, and timber bridges, con- temptible in the eyes of engineers, but not contemptible in those of men with whom the alternative is to carry their own loads under a burning sun at a half-mile an hour. Australia needs railways, South Africa needs railways, Egypt is positively craving for railways ; and behind them all stands India, with its vast population, where a railway from nothing to nowhere passes through square miles of houses, where no man digs in the copper field of Beerbhoom, probably the richest, certainly the largest, on earth, where a native banker thinks 16 per cent. a poor return for money lent on absolute movable security, where the whole population are traders by nature, where land is conveyed in five minutes at a cost of less than a rupee a hundred acres, and where a violent wrong done to a European is righted as rapidly as in Westminster or the City. We do not hesitate to say that India could absorb .R200,000,000 of British capital in railway, mining, manufacturing, and banking ventures, return a steady dividend of 6 per cent., and still benefit immensely by the loan. It is said there are diffi- cultjes in the currency, difficulties in the tenure, and diffi- culties from native competition, and undoubtedly all exist; but with one-half the energy, and the writing, and the Parliamentary pressure which will be expended on planning, making, and defending these Chinese railways all the difficulties could be removed. We understand well the need that exists for new trades and new invest- ments, but it seems to us as foolish to neglect our own territory for that of China as to set up a shop in an East- End shim when shops in Regent Street or the Strand are remaining tenantless.
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