were throwing hundreds of thousands of Chinese out of employment. The growing importation of American and British cotton fabrics were making idle looms and untilled cotton fields. American kerosene was destroying the husbandry of vegetable oils. And in an infinity of other ways was Western commerce affecting the domestic industries, and this with a people who were intensely conservative, wedded to ancient customs, and inveterate enemies of foreign trade.
The construction of railroads was bitterly opposed by the masses of the people, not only for the reasons just stated, but because it disturbed their venerated ancestral worship. Chinese burial places are not segregated, but are found all over the face of the country. Their desecration is regarded as the most heinous of crimes. It is stated that the Germans, in constructing a line from their port of Kiaochau, a distance of forty-six miles, though using all the care possible to pass around the most thickly located burial places, had to remove no less than three thousand graves. It is not strange to learn that all lines of railway have to be guarded by soldiers.
After the Japanese war a new impetus was given to commercial enterprise. Foreign traders as well as missionaries visited the interior, and the Chinese saw their country being overrun by the hated people. A scramble for railroad and mining concessions followed, supported by the influence of the representatives of the foreign governments; grants were made to Russians, French, British, Americans, Belgians, and others; and the whole territory of the empire seemed destined to be
