day through for the gain of a few cents; and apparently never dream of making further wage demands on their foreign and high-caste employers.
Or if the coolies dream such dreams of sudden wealth, they keep them to themselves, for they have labored under the same conditions all their lives, and their fathers and grandfathers did the same before them. So they believe — do the coolies — that they are fortunate in earning enough to keep the wolf from the door; they toil by day and by night, with hardly a word of serious complaint. They are a fatalistic people, many of them willing, curiously enough, to work all their lives for the purchase money of a coffin in which their bodies can rest after death.
Occasionally a coolie acquires wealth, either by a stroke of luck in his own locality or by emigrating to another country, where he succeeds in making enough to live in comfort for the remainder of his life. If such is the case, he usually returns to Canton, is soon drawn into the whirlpool of native life, and lives an envied life of leisure as an independent Cantonese.
The most important exports of Canton are tea, silk, paper, and preserves, and firecrackers — most of them going to the United States, where they are used, for the most part, in helping the small boy make himself heard on the Fourth of July.
In former years a majority of the imports and exports of Canton were carried in British bottoms, but with the amazing growth of the American merchant marine it is expected our country will take over a
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