Naturally the excitement caused by the story that a Chinaman had been kidnapped and imprisoned in the Chinese Legation subsided pretty quickly when it became known that the man had been released in obedience to the demand of Lord Salisbury. But we have not heatd the last of the matter yet.. Sun Yat-sen has, it is announced, supplied to the Foreign Office at their request a sworn statement of the facts, and communications on the subject will no doubt pass between the Tsungli Yamen and the Foreign Office. Meanwhile Sir Holliday Macartney has been subjected to some very severe criticism; and it is understood in addition that the Chinese physician and his friends aru considering the advisability of proceeding against Sir Holliday for false imprison: ment. Sir Holliday declares that the man was never kidnapped, but entered the legation of his own accord; and he is very indignant that many people should be inclined to believe Sun's account rather than his own. It is a question, however, how far Sir Holliday speaks from his own knowledge, and how far he has trusted to the statements of his Chinese subordinates, who notoriously lied though thick and thin when enquiries about Sun were made at the Legation. A rather significant fact, too, is that according to Sun Yat-sen's account he was to have been smuggled on: board a Glen liner in a chest, passed off to the passengers on board og a lunatic, and so got into China; and when the Glen line people were asked by the energetic reporters whether a passage had been booked for such a man they refused to either affirm or deny the story. From this, people naturally infer that the story was true. Yet Sir Holliday emphatically denies that there was any intention of smuggling Sun out of the country—an act which he admits would be a most serious violation of the law. Unfortunately Sir Holliday does not offer any very lucid explanation of what the object of Sun's detention was. He says something about extradition; but apnct from the tick that extradition is obviously impossible in such a case, surely the proper course would have been to apply for a warrant for the man's arrest—it is admitted that they knew where he lived—and proceed against him in the police court in the ordinary way. The general feeling here is therefore one of amazement—not unmixed with indignation—that an Englishman should have been a party to if not even the prime mover in this very high-handed proceeding.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.