'Tux remarks which we quote in another page from the Hongkong Telegraph as to the' position taken up by the leading officers of the London Branch of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in the promotion of the new joint-stock comty "Dakin Brothers of China, Limited," have found a responsive echo in Shanghai, which is not unreasonable. The announcement of the formation of a joint-stock dispensary business in London, which is to carry oh its trade, and make its expected profits, in China, does not as yet touch our pockets as nearly as it does those of our friends in the south; bat if there is a sort of rivalry, there is also a considerable solidarity, between the two towns, and the menace which is held immediately over Hongkong, may soon, and we cannot tell how soon, impend over Shanghai, At present one retail trade, which is supposed to be a very lucrative one, is threatened;-and if the new enterprise is successful, the hungry capitalists at home, who are wilh buy 23 per cent. consols at something over 98 per cent., may soon tum their attention to other trades, They will _pethaps confine themselves at first to the retail trades, and we may see a " Whiteley of China, Limited" started, to compete with the general stores; but the appetite of the promoter at home is insatiable, and wholesale tea and silk and piece goods companies will follow, while some smaller firm could no doubt be found willing to be absorbed into a company for: the sui of spurious cottons and woollens, wit imitations of Manchester chops, aniline dyes, worm tablets, and nail rod iron marked to suit the taste of the consumer, without any reference to the real manufacture. There is, as we have long known and realised, a dark side to the beautiful pictures of progress and advancement which are so often held up for our admiration, It is wonderful and interesting and sometimes useful that a mail steamer will take us to London now in something under five weeks, instead of the six or seven weeks which were required thirty years ago; or that we can send a message to London by an invention which will deliver it before we send it, But in the: past benighted days twelve per cent. was the interest we made in China on our money. China was too far off and too little known for the home shareholder to be willing to risk his money here, and when he did do it through the medium of the branches of joint-stock banks, whose direction was in London, he got such a lesson now and then, as in 1866, that he soon retired into his shell. If one tried to persuade a steamer company, public or private, at home to send a steamer out to trade on the coast, even with the promise of the handsome returns that were often earned in those days, the answer was "No, it's too far off; the British shareholder likes to havea look at his property sometimes, and see what his steamer is really doing." There was an idea, too, that the merchant in China was a wild, reckless sort of person, used to violent fluctuations, sometimes up and sometimes down, the very worst person to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.