26th Feb.
Tne community will hear with great satisfaction that the visit to London of the P. & O. agent in Shanghai, Mr. H. H. Joseph, has resulted in the arrange ment of a homeward (from this) mail table, which embodies the points most desired by all residents here. From the tenth of May next, the homeward mails by the English and French lines will leave regularly every Saturday at Toco from Woosung. The French were very anxious to make Sunday the day of departure from Shanghai, but Mr. Joseph represented forcibly the grave inconvenience which this entailed on the residents of one of the most important places served by the Messageries Maritimes, and ultimately Saturday was fixed on, and the French and English mails will leave on alternate Saturdays, without regard to the monsoons. Here another good old tradition dies; monsoon allowances are dead and buried. The absurdity of sending two steamers away from here, with an interval of one day between them, which were expected to arrive home a week apart because on the intermitted day the monsoon had changed, is done with. For the last two years or so the steamers have arrived here just as soon in the northeast as in the southwest monsoon, and the framers of the schedule at home have had this borne in upon them at last, with the result that the eccentricities involved in the monsoon allowances will no longer amuse, and sometimes annoy, as before. Another excellent change is the provision that the steamers shall leave Woostng at noon. Nhe recent habit of leaving during the night or at daylight has been fraught with actual danger, at times, as well as constant discomfort to passengers, while ti has always been risk to the mails in It is quite unnecessary to dwell on the discomfort of leaving this in a tugboat at eleven o'clock at might for a two hours' voyage, regardless of the weather; it has been always disagreeable, though not always so bad as it was the other night, when the passengers for Japan who left here at seven in the evening to join the Messageries' steamer, which was to sail at nine the same night, did not reach her owing to fog until nine the next morning. By the new rule the transit will be made at the most convenient time of the day, the forenoon, and the passengers will get comfortably on board in time for lunch, and will have the afternoon to settle themselves down in their staterooms. 'I'he German mail, we presume, will continue to be the comet to the two planets. It is not to be inferred that the visits of the fine steamers of the North-German Lloyds are erratic or irregular, for they keep their four weeks' intervals with the utmost steadiness; but the ordinary mind which finds the regular weekly dispatch quite enough to occupy its energies cannot grasp without the assistance of reference to a schedule, the dates on which this extra communica-ion with Europe arrives and starts. {The Chamber of Commerce and the ress have been fighting for a long time to secure these simple and beneficial reforms, and it is pleasant to know that they are to be adopted at last. When we have made these suggestions before, we have been told that their adoption would upset the Bombay schedule, and bring despair into the offices of all the merchants in India; we have accepted the rebuff without in the least understanding how the commerce of India could be demoralised by "our mails being despatched from here on Saturday at noon instead of on Sunday at daylight; we realised with complacency that we suffered in order that Bombay might be happy. We shall hear by and by how Mr. Joseph has succeeded in pacifying Bombay, and leading the General Post Office back into the path of common sense; it is enough for us at present to know that has done it, and that we shall have all our Saturday afternoons henceforth free for those recreations on which we depend to preserve our health and spirits in this most trying climate.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.