Tae maxim that directs us to speed the parting guest has been taken to heart by not only the Bri com. munity in Shavghai, and put in fall notion in the ceremony that took place on Monday at the Supreme Court, The presentation of addresses to departing officials is apt sometimes to become a iter of couree, and the oyuio may ocoa= sionally assert that such compliments ate really prompted more by satisfac tion than regret at the departure, Bat it is the merest trath to say that every word of the somewhat formal address which was presented to Mr, Alabaster on Monday was the honest expression of the feelings of the subscribers; in foot, that it did not got go far enough, inase mach as it contains so little mention of the regret that nearly the whole community feels at Mr, Alabaster's trausfor from Shanghai to Canton. It is a commonly expressed belief—-a belief first formulated by that moat able of newspaper correspondents and martyr to his duty, Mr. Wingrove Cooke—that an official who has been twenty years or more in China and speaks the language, becomes at the end of auch a period more Chinese than the Chinese themselves, and that his first thought is, when @ dispute between the two nationalities comes before him, that the Chinese are probably in the right, and the Englishmen la the wrong, There ig
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.