Ove facetious Correspondent in Peking, whose letter we print on another page, evidently finds it easier to raise a cloud of dust about himself than to dispose of our arguments, This is a not un. common expedient for beaten contro. versialists or the champions of @ lost cause, and as our Correspondent appears to have been reading his Homer, albeit a version of suspicious authori he no doubt had in his mind how the radiant Goddess carried off her favourite from the field of Troy coucealed from his enemies @ cloud.
But our position remains untouched. The memorial from the Shanghai community is unanswered and presumably unanswerable, and our estimate of the state of public opinion in Peking la not altered by anything that has recently transpired. We know our Peking fairly well, and the perverted views of mundane affairs which live always prevailed there do nol in any way surprise us, A community which by the circum. stances of their position dare not sny their soul is their own cannot evolve any public opinion which is worth hearing. If we exclude the missionarier, who lave always their own peculiar media for breaking up the white light of conven into fragments of green and red, there is not ® soul among the foreigners in Peking who can ex. press to his neighbour an independent iden,—excepling only the Ministers of foreign countries and the Luspector-General of Customs, Bat these astute functionaries are fully occupied in con couling their thoughts and in throwing dust in each others eyes,—~if we may borrow the not very savoury metaphor—considering whence it comes—of our Correspondent, But just as muscles wed become atrophied, ao thoughts which never find expression die out, and this we tuke to be one explana. tion of the peoatine mental phenomena which visitors observe in Peking, and which the world without has occasional opportunities of confirming when dried specimens find their way abroad, Une doubtedly it is a misfortune that the residents in the Cxpital are 80 come pletely isolated from such currents of life Were they on terms of ini interoouras with the native population the misdiet would be mitigated, but nothing of the sort exists, and if the foreigners in Peking were imprisoned on Quelpart they could hardly be more completely cut off from all the influences which promote the healthy action of the brain, Of books they have great store, but minds that are nearished on books or the pro~ ceedings of the Peking Oriental Assooine tion alone are like Arctic voyagers who have no lime-juice, The scurvy may take one form or another, but it is cer in to show itself. We forbear to point {the moral by adda instances, which however will perhaps occur to our renders, of intellects originally sound which have lost their health and de loped a variety of chronic maladies through a too long seclusion in the Capital, MACK v, THE MUNICIPAL COUNCIL, The judgment of the Court, brief as it is, la still open to severe criticism. Take first that the Court has no desi cessary control of Municipal staff by the Council," etc. Such a statement is as wrong a8 it can be from every point of view. The Council is a body authorized to raise a largo revenue by means of rates and taxes levied on the public. It has to employ a large number Of servants, avd pay them with public money, and it has to carry on by means of its om nis, and by means of cut tracts, the arrangements for drail
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.