9th March, Arrer we have been working for years to get the Foreign Office at home to realise that British interests in China were not being guarded as they should be by Sir John Walsham, it would be affectation to express regret at the news we circulated on Monday afternoon. We should unaffectedly regret it if we thought that Sir John Walsham felt personally aggrieved by his removal to Bucharest, and had felt personally injured by the constant animadversions of our contemporaries in the south and ourselves. He is, however, too old a public servant not to know that these animadversions have been directed against the Minister, not against the mau, for whom, and for his geniality, hospitality, and courtesy to all who come in personal contact with him, thiversal respect is felt. No one visits Peking on pleasure or business, even if he has to come away—as is generally the case—with his business where it was when he went, without bringing away the happiest recollections of the kindness of the tenants of the British Legation. here are Legations in Europe—there are not so many of them as there were—where the duties are simply of a kind that SirJohn Walsham would perform most admirably, but his best friends have been forced to admit that he is "over-parted" in Peking. When he first went to Peking he answered the most trivial request for information from a Consul with a letter of five or six pages, and he proposed to do the whole work of the Legation himself, including details that every man with a talent for organisation would at once delegate to his subordinates. Ihe task he set himself at once was one that no one man could perform, and the result has been the practical collapse from which British interests in China have been suffering for years. We and some of our contemporaries have been blamed' for harping so constantly on. Sir John's shortcomings; but.those who: lame us
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