218 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE.

financiers, shipowners, and agents, etc. Many of them are actively
interested as general managers, agents, or majority or large stockholders
 in cotton mills, silk filatures, paper mills, egg-product factories,
 tanneries, etc. They contract for the financing and construction
 of electric light, telephone, street railway, and other public
utilities, and through a multiplicity of interests, a wide organization,
and almost unlimited capital, with their close financial connections
with foreign banks and bankers, represent such combinations of
trade and manufacture, with the exclusion only of political powers,
as did the early trading companies, such as the British India
0., ete.
Perhaps the most conspicuous examples of this type of trading
combination or organization is Jardine, Matheson &amp; Co., with an
organization extending from London through all the treaty ports
of China. They are closely allied with the a &amp; Shanghai
Banking Corporation and with that bank are the representatives in
China of the British &amp; Chinese Corporation, so largely interested
in the railway and other loans, acting as purchasing agents of these
railways under their loan agreements, and at the same time tendering
 on purchase requirements from these lines; maintaining at
Shanghai alone an establishment with an office force of about a
hundred; with extensive import, export, and engineering staffs;
serving as general managers for cotton mills, silk mills, ete.; operating
 coast and riverine steamer lines and agents of the Royal Mail
Steam Packet Co., and the Indra Line; agents of the Russian Bank
for Foreign Trade, Petrograd, and the Mercantile Bank of
India; agents of extensive wharves and warehouses, of marine and
fire insurance companies; engaging in the past in the opium trade;
and holding a great share of the British engineering and railway
business of China, besides being large importers and exporters of al?
character of foreign and native goods.
They do not make public the British and other manufacturers
whose representation they hold in this country, nor the terms and
conditions of their representation, and it is impossible to say what
combinations or syndicates of manufacturers operate through them.
As of possible interest in this connection, reference is made to the
article in the Far Eastern Review for January, 1915, by George
Bronson Rea, entitled “ Roads toward peace,” which purports to be
an exposition of the fundamental commercial problems which make
forsnational discord and strife with special reference to the activities
 of official trade organizations in China. With, in no sense, any
indorsement or corroboration. of the statements and opinions expressed
 therein, this pamphlet is referred to for the interesting comment
 on the operations of the so-called British engineering 2 railway
 monopoly in China as represented by the house of Jardine,
Matheson &amp; Co. (Ltd.), and the Hongkong &amp; Shanghai Banking
Corporation, operating as the China agents of the British &amp; Chinese
Corporation.
Some idea of the operations of this corporation with the Chinese
Central Government alone in railway enterprises may be had from
the schedule of loans from foreign sources set out on pages 50 and
51 of the China Stock and Share Handbook. The dominant influence
 of this corporation in Chinese railway history is readily