sth Feb.
Tue value of the silver tael has again gone below half-a-crown, and the dollar, the unit of the ordinary trausactions of our social life, is worth considerably less than two shillings, though there are some still amongst us who remember its being worth five shillings, The Bitter Cry of the Customs Staff, whose appeal we lave printed, is accentuated by the renewed decline in the value of "the pale and common drudge," which failed its possessors as miserably in the days of Solomon, There have been some, we are told, who thought there was a hint of sarcasm in the heading we gave to the pathetic appeal of the hundreds, if not thousands, of foreigners employed in one of the most honourable services in the world, the Imperial Maritime Customs of China. But nothing so disgraceful was ever even thought of when that heading was put to the letter and appeal. It is in all seriousness an exceeding bitter cry that the employees of the Customs make to the Inspector-General, Yenrs ago, some thirty years ago in fact, "Mr. Crowguill " sang in a bur: lasque here a famous song in which the thymer said of the Foreign Ministers in Peking, that "Snag in Pekin, 'They hear not the dit'
Of merchants praying till hoarse 1"
We do not believe that' Sir Robert Hart hears not the din that his distressed subordinates are making now, There is nothing fictitious or exaggerated in it. 'Themen who are suffer: ing are prone to conceal the details of their calamities; but if the world knew hom women and children' who had good reason to expect a' better fate,) are being pinched and actually anguished by the res augusta domi that has fallen upon them with the full in silver, there would be an even stronger feeling than there is, that the 'I'sungli Yamen and the head of the Service must not neglect the prayer that has gone up to them, It is an axiom that no: service can be carried on with integrity and satisfaction whose members are underpaid. Ihe Customs Service lias hitherto been remarkably free from any suspicion of corruption; but to keep it so—and it is an undying honour to the Service that it has been kept so up till now—its members must be paid a living wage, a wage that will keep them above the ecarking care in which no man can do his work properly, anil that will pat them above the reach of the temptations that specially beset the members. of such a service.
It must not be supposed that the suffering is confined to the lower ranks of the Customs hierarchy. It is universal the man who thought he had a salary of £1,500 a year, and orders his life accordingly, and then: finds it geduéed by candes' entirely beyond his' own control" to" £750, suffers
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.