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respectables, organized the China Railway and Concessions Project.
Its object was to obtain and exploit concessions from the Government of China. With this distinct object of robbing China, they procured subscriptions of which a part was employed in sending agents to China, and a part in paying for the incorporation of the project, thereby legalizing their robber scheme.
By 1898 their plans were working splendidly and everything looked good for a big haul; up to this time but $27,000 had actually been put up by the subscribers, but millions of dollars worth of concessions were secured; one for a railroad from Hankow to Canton, a distance of 1,000 miles, and coal lands which William Blarely-Parsons, after a personal investigation, had declared to be richer than anything in Pennsylvania, had been obtained. Out of this original company there grew two others—they were syndicates within syndicates—and in time the name was changed to the American-China Development Company, and the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Morgans became financially interested. Just how these chiefs got in on the game, Mr. Barnes could never explain. Nor could he understand how Elihu Root and Justice Ingraham got in. It was the mind of Root that outwitted the subtle Oriental intellect in the final closing of the transaction, and this only a few weeks before Mr. Root became Secretary of State in President Roosevelt's cabinet.
Five years previously Mr. Root, as Secretary of War in the McKinley cabinet, had conducted ail the diplomatic negotiations that preceded and followed our participation in the invasion of China by the allied armies of Christendom to suppress the Boxer uprisings. Thus his name was very familiar at Peking and in the councils of the mighty at the Chinese capital,
Two Chinese ministers to this country also figured conspicuously in the transaction. One of them was the talkative Wu Ting Fang, who, for the second time, was representing China at the capital of the United States. The other was Chentung Liang Chang, who came over to succeed Wu, fresh fom the inner circle of the Foreign Office at Peking.
The original company consisted of 27 men, each of whom put up $1,000 only. Among these 27 were such men as Andrew Carnegie, J. E. MeGrow, ex-Gorvernor of the State of Washington, and others prominent in public life. Now what really took place? After the
