Collum, non animus, mutant, qui trans mare current, has been a motto often adopted by Englishmen whose fortune has Jed them to settle in distant climes.
In many respects it is, or possibly has been, characteristic of the race, and we may feel confident that when we see aman with puffed and lurid cheeks, tightly enveloped in a dark coat, and covered with a tall hat under a tropical sky, we shall on investigation discover him to bean Englishman. We are in fact particularly tenacious of the more ridiculons points of our national character, and bear all those peculiarities of appearance and expression for which we have become noted, no matter at what personal inconvenience. If, however, we are in those externals not to be changed, we have in other respects come to be more or less influenced by surrounding circumstances, or even the ideas of those amongst whom we sojourn, Who, after reading the manifold memorials on treaty revision of the past five years, would expect to find that the English communities in China, with all their good advice to Ministers and Celestials, were dropping into the same frame of mind which they deprecated in others? Yet appearances seem to point out that a continued residence in China has really the effect, whether consciously or not, of developing the obstructive side of our character. We chafe and growl, when Chinese offer obstructions to carrying out our own particular measures, yet, after all, when placed in a similar position, we are not unlike them ourselves. Lately, both Shanghai and our Southern neighbours at Hongkong, have been showing symptoms of an epidemic of this nature. In the South, the mismanagement of the Police Force has long been a byword, and at the urgent request of the inhabitants, a Commission has been appointed to investigate the causes, and suggest remedies. No sooner, however, has that body published what on the whole may be denominated a very sensible report, than we find the public Voice of the Colony at once raised to obstruct. Yet, after all, if we come. to examine into the cause of the offending, we find it in the rational piece of advice of the Commission, that Chinese should be employed in the Force. Now if this were a thing untried, and if Sikh police. men hasbeen even a passable success, we could have comprehended this state of affairs, But it so happens that Chinese policemen have been tried, and been found vastly more effective than their dark neighbours, from Scinde or elsewhere. The question seems to us to be simply a choice between disorganization, or an organisation, perhaps not the best possible, in the abstract, but withal the best for the peculiar circumstances of the Colony. Our countrymen seem to have been somewhat astonished to hear from Sir Edmund Hornby, that in Turkey they had Turkish policemen and that on the whole they got on pretty well. Perhaps, they would look upon it as still more extraordinary, to find in India, Hindoo police, in the West Indies, Negro protectors of the public peace, in Egypt, Egyptians, and actually in Paris itself native born French constables! We are not going to affirm that all or any of these are equal in ability and discretion to their confreres from Scotland Yard, but yet we may be perfectly justified in the assertion that, for all practical purposes, the localities alluded to are more efficiently policed, than were all the members of the Force to be drawn from the same source as the metropolitan police of London. We can imagine what a fine time the thieves and gamins of Paris would have, were the local gendarmeries to be withdrawn, and their place supplied by fresh caught recruits from London, ignorant alike of French ways and French language. Nor can we ourselves boast of practical superiority, as a glance at our last Ratepayers, meeting may fairly show. Consuls, Council and Ratepayers seemed there to be trying to assist each other by: working at cross purposes. The one little piece of business actually passed in a clear and intelligible manner, was the re-arming of the Volunteer Force. For years we have been grumbling about the inadequacy of our means of communication; we have been fretting over toll bridges, and crying out against narrow streets. Brokers traps have searcely room to pass, while the crowd of wheelbarrows and cogues daily aug-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.