Tus question "What is to be done with the Yellow River?" has been repeatedly asked in the last two years, and various suggestions have been made, of which the most practical is, that it should be divided, and while some part of it is allowed to continue in what is supposed to be its present course to the Gulf of Pechili, another part should be allowed to resume its ancient course eastward to the-Yellow Sea. One great advantage of this is that it would pro-engineering examination, it seems cer Htain that the outlays requisite for thorough reparation, if such be possible, cannot be repaid, and in such case it may be well to consider beforehand ether, as the damage already suffered is so vast and irretrievable, it would not {be better to let the river follow its natural course unchecked." Thus it would form permanent reservoirs such as the Yangtze is provided with in the Poyang and Tungting lakes, and the dispossessed country people could be removed ex bloc, as we have already suggested, to unoccupied territory in Manchuria and the north-west provinces.
We need not dwell on the difficulty vide another great navigable waterway; and expense of moving thousands of into the west of China, so that steamers families, scanty as.their household gods could run up to Shansi. Unfortunately are, ina country so poorly provided the Viceroy song Kuo-chuan is strongly with means of communication as China opposed to this proposition, and Peking is, A still greater difficulty would be is likely to defer to his representations; to persuade the people to go, for not only and we are told that he is a fixture at do they cling to their native province Nanking for life. The Chinese Times (so that to most of them, homogeneous in its issue of the 24th ultimo proposes as the people seem to us, another pro-cut the knot ina very different fashion. vince is as st as another country After dilating on the results of the, would be to a European), but these great present breaches in Shantung, and, as floods do not come often or regularly all we have been able to learn forces enoughtodishearten them altogether. As us to believe, somewhat exaggerating we reported some time since, the portions the effects of the silt deposited on the of Honan and Anhui that were inmcountry inundated, it reminds its readers dated by the Cheng Chou breach in that if the river is to be permanently 1887, have had magnificent crops this regulated by deepening its bed, opening its mouth and raising its banks, a length of at least 1,500 miles has to be dealt with, The cost of such a thorough work, it says, would be severa! teus of millions of pounds sterling, and many years would be required for the task. It must be remembered that when the embankments gave way at Chang Chin at the end of July, the river was full to the brim, while as a rule it does not rise to its greatest height until the middle of this month, when the autumn floods come down from Tibet and Mongolia so that the banks have to be raised, as well as the bed deepened. What those banks are uow is hardly realised. A traveller in the country tells us that he was told one day by his carters, as they were journeying along the plain, that they would cross the Yellow River next day, he next morning came and they trudged on and on, until at last he asked his carters where the Yellow River was. "There it is, ahead of us," they said, pointing to what he had taken to be a range of low hills in the distance. The regulation, then, of the river as it now flows our contemporary considers to be a practically impossible task, but its arguments are, to our mind, vitiated by its belief that " most of the ground now covered with silt must remain sterile to the end of time." We have more than once given facts which contradict this, and need not repeat them now. Believing, however, that the river has thus irreparably ruined a large portion of three provinces, Anhui, onan, and Shantung, the Chinese Times Toroie suggestion. It says:—" From a eposes to leave it alone, a decidedly
financial and economical, as well as year, and the people there would do all they could to resist deportation, even if they were toll with certainty that another flood was coming. They cultivate regularly the ground between the inner and outer embankments in Shantung, although they know that a freshet will inundate their fields; and we may be quite sure that if the river were allowed to make the lakes that our contemporary proposes, and two or three dry years were to come together, in which' the water in those es would recede, if it did not run off altogether, the portion of their beds left dry would be again cultivated and dotted with villages. Without a proper survey before us mone of us, Chinese or foreigners, can say distinctly {what ought to be done, but we do not believe that the case of the river is bad enough yet to make it advisable to abandon it altogether to its own devices.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.