Tuat this settlement with its striking evidences of the material progress attained by its native residents under quasi-foreign protection is a standing eye-sore to the higher Chinese officials, can scarcely admit of a doubt, Along. side of the broad quays and handsome streets covering the land "sot apart for foreign residence north of the Yang king-pang," we find the native city a congeries of squalid and tawdry filth, Manicipal regulations there are none, and the native mandarins whose supervision is, in China, supposed to take the place of the independent municipal institutions of the West, do absolutely nothing for the material welfare and comfort of the populations entrusted to their government. It was not always so. In the good old times to which every Chinaman so foudly alludes, all such knowledge as the science of the day afforded them was utilised by the officials for the improvement of the country; and the condition of the roads and bridges and of the cities themselves would compare favourably with that of medieval Europe their contemporary, and doubtless justified the panegyries bestowed upon Chinese administration by Marco Polo and other travellers of the period. But now the energies of the few honest officials are wasted in vain endeavours to reconstruct the past, and matters Lying immediately before their eyes are neglected in the distant prospect of missionary reforms or in a powerless struggle with the seething corruption with which the government is encompassed from top to bottom. If this be the case with the honest officials, what shall we say of the dis. honest, whose whole time is engrossed in feathering their nests while the opportunity is at hand, or in intriguing for further promotion, and who unfortunately comprise the great bulk of the rulers of this much enduring people The recent action of the native authorities in ordering the arrest of a compradore in foreign employ on a tramped up charge of participa. tiou in a rebellion which was crushed twenty yenrs ago and in issuing an edict forbidding the employment of the electric light in our streets appears to us to have been nothing more nor leas than an insidious attempt to undermine the autonomy of these settlements. Once concede the authority of the Taotai to dictate to his nationals residing here what light they shall bury, and no limit may be set to his interference with our trade and our peaceable intercourse with our Chinese neighbours. IE his recent attempt to forbid the use of electricity had been successful, it would have been equally open to him to arrest the consumption of gas or kerosene and to compel us to revert to the native dips to which the illu.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.