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Show CONING TO HER OWN. China ia getting along. The imperial Kov'rn-'ment Kov'rn-'ment haa just closed a contract with the Kiangnan " .araenal for th manufacture, of four warships for about 1.500.000 taeld. At the Mamel dock yard at Fukien one gunboat was count rurtetl in 1809 and another in the year following, which wan (tun-pleted (tun-pleted inalSO'J. - But thev were Hinall shipa, eaili having displacement of 861 tons. The prcseut order eon jut of two gunboata with a displacement displace-ment of 1000 tpna each and two smallcr.gunboats. In twenty years more. crhaps half that . time. China will be able to make the platea, the beams, the riveta, everything tised in a warship. She will be able to east the guns and man the ships entirely, fche will Lavj the coal riht at her doors to furnish fur-nish fuel, and will lack but one thing in the world, and possibly she will have, that the man behind the gun. What a crew of Chineso would do with only Chinese gunners in a battle it is hard to esti-; esti-; mate. All the same, with a few white men as a moral support, they would make good fighters. Admiral Dewey at Manila had a Chinese sen ant boy, ami when that fight eame on he was the mott t enthusiastic chap aboard. The told barbarian cruelty waa upon him and his thought was to kill and kill and kill, until there, were., no Spaniards Irf. They, are -a queen, race and the world will "find them a Very dangerous race one of these day when the men are trained, when they realize that " man 'a man for a' that," even if he ia Chinaman, China-man, and they may start out forhe conquest of the world. ' . In this connection it is natural to read that over the Hankow aaa and along the great uorthwext route to Mongolia a new railroad, destined jiomo day to conncet with the Trans-Siberia and shorten the railroad ride from Europe by several hnndrcd 'miles, has leen constructed, and from start-to fin-' ish it is a Chinese line, built by Chinamen ahd planned ly a Chinese engineer. Of it the Railway Age Gazette says: '. ' "From the pieturesquV side no part of the written description is half as appealing as the photograph, pho-tograph, which shows the chief engineer's triumph of the line, the tunnel under the summit pt Hankow Han-kow pass, the entering portal of which, resembling all similar entrances, is backed by the long stretch of the great wall of China.'which elimbs the ridge and reaches beyond the horiion. . "The Pekin-Calin railway has been completed for 150 miles, the most difficult - portion of the whole rout? to Mongolia. It was not merely constructed con-structed by Chinese, but is today operated entirely en-tirely by natives. .The funds for its construction .were obtained from the revenues of other Chinese -. railroads, and the operation of this portion of the line now open has shown a profit. The name of the engineer ia Jemc-Tien-Yu. He is a Yale graduate, whose technical education was begun in this country coun-try and completed in England." Along this line the Chinese have now established estab-lished their own shops for the construction of rolling roll-ing stock and for repairs. They have built one hotel for tourists and opened coal . mines which upply the necessary fuel for the railway and for the Pel. in market. A few American t built cars and locomotives at present furnish the only foreign for-eign detail of the road, and it is proposed that these shall ue ultimately replaced by rolling stock of local manufacture. |