Given a sensible world, the best arrangement would seem to be not for each country to be self-sufficient but for each to produce or manufacture what it was best fitted to do, and to exchange these goods for those things which were needed from abroad. Then no one would struggle to make wheat grow where it didn't want to, or tediously to turn cheap coal into expensive oil, or to build a curious substance which behaves rather like rubber but isn't anything like so good. Things being instead as they are, one must look around and applaud the efforts of Shanghai to make itself independent of what goes on outside.
Porcelain, of course, is in its own ancestral home—whateyer is wanted could not, one would say, be more satisfactorily produced anywhere else than in China. But the weaving of woollen cloth, the making of knitting wools; waterproofing of fabrics; manufacturing of modern style furniture—all these things, and more, are new industries growing up to fill widely-felt needs. China has its own beautiful manufactures which must never be allowed to grow less important—there always being a demand for beauty in the world. But such are not for every day. Not only is modern furniture easier to keep in order, but it is easier to live with for the average householder. Children for instance—or lacking children, dogs—don't agree too well in confined spaces with the polished surfaces of expensive woods. Neither are hand-woven silks, warmed up for winter wear by rich furs, really happy in a bus. It is well worth while taking the trouble to find out to what extent requirements can be satisfied by Shanghai's efforts and how little necessary it really is to depend on the imported article with its almost prohibitive cost in Chinese dollars.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.