No one who has studied the history of institutions in Shanghai can fail to perceive how much force is lost by divided administration. It was but the other day that we had, in the case of the General Hospital, to object to the latest of these developments, The impractiability of having two heads to manage an institution—one a responsible Board of Trastees in Shanghai, and the other an irresponsible body, 10,000 miles away—seems not to have entered into the minds of people until it was forcibly exposed by the Council laying the Sisters' agreement before the public, and even yeh to have been hardly realised by the Trustees with whose predecessors that agreement was concluded. Yet the management of the General Hospital is only a sample of what passes daily, and which, were the energy of the Foreign residents less than it is, must before this have resulted in collapse. To begin with, the Municipal organisation is needlessly crippled by its sub-division into two, the mutual relations of which, never very friendly, at times border on open hostility. Then we have the divided authority even within Municipal limits. We find all manner of irresponsible institutions claiming a concurrent right of levying taxes, and sending their employes into the streets of the Settlements, to the manifest injury of peace and good order. It is from no love to the Opium Trade that we have steadily opposed the admission of runners from the Opium Guild, but from a well. founded conviction that, under the continuance of such a system, the morale of the Police force must become deteriorated, and that to admit native tax gatherers of any kind is to admit a mistaken principle which cannot after. wards be controlled, Again, our system of punishing irregularities against Muni. cipal regulations is absurd in the ex. treme, Ab-kwei, Dick, and Pierre, all three, are engaged in the same row; the same evidence is forthcoming against all three, yet each has to be conveyed before a different tribunal, swayed by different influences and working on no common system. The Registration of Land within the Settlements seems one of the simplest of devices, and readily could be made so were it cen. tralised in some one office. At present, there are as many offices and as many systems as there are nationalities in the place, and the result is that the labours of an Assessment Committee, which should be capable of being carried out in a few days or weeks, get protracted into as many months. The same absurdity is carried still farther in the case of the Post Office. No reasonable or business man could see the slightest difficulty in establishing a Central Post Ottice, at which letters from the various mail packets could be teer': xd and dise tributed. At present, besides the extremely convenient system adopted by the Local Post Office, we have a British Post Office, © United States Post Offée, and a French Post Office, to the manifest inconvenience and delay of the residents, not to speak of the extra expense of keeping up four instead of one establishment. We are not now speaking ©: he more important matters of national jurisdiction. The time has not yet arrived-—in all probability is far distant—when any scheme for the concentration of extra-territorial jurisdic. tions could be even discussed. In all that we have mentioned above, no insurmountable difficulty exists in the way of a settlement. Hongkew and the Yang-king-pang have already united for Manicipal purposes, and find that no international difficulties need arise in Municipal discussions. We have before suggested n way of escape with regard to the Opium Tax, at lerist. We certainly do not desire that the Foreign Settlements should become the haunt of Opium smokers and a congo-ries of Opium dens, Confucius, when asked about good government, said, in words which the Municipal' Council might adopt as its motto, that it bree vailed when "those who were near were made happy, and those distance attracted and an approach to this condition is certainly not likely to be engendered by offering encouragement to the vicious. We do not, moreover, desire to see the government
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