Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin: “Woe to Europe, if on the day that the steam engine invades China she is still relying on foreign customers!”

At Oyonnax, a small town on the Ain, we have a big centre for the fabrication of combs, an industry more than 200 years old, which took a new development since the last war through the invention of celluloid.

Every farmer is more or less of a gardener, and he gives free scope to his inventive powers for devising some cheap type of greenhouses.

But now it is capable, thanks to the work of the Flemish peasants and to irrigation, to produce the food of one milch cow per acre--the dung of the cattle being utilised for further improvements.

As to the yet neutral markets, China will never be a serious customer to Europe: she can produce much cheaper at home; and when she begins to feel a need for goods of European patterns, she will produce them herself.