21st June, Tue step which the Foreign Customs have announced their intention to take, the making the mail companies pay full tonnage dues after this month on all their steamers coming to Shanghai, may have inconvenient consequences for the community. For more than twenty years the English, and subsequently the French and German mail companies, have been allowed to pay once in four months alone, the sum being calculated on the tonnage of the steamer that happened to come first into port after the four-monthly period expired. In 1883, when this concession expired, the P.'& 0. Company had a long fight over it with the Customs and it was eventually renewed for five years. In 1888 there was another struggle, but the concession was again renewed for five years, with the reiterated warning that it would not be renewed again in 1893, It is obvious that if this concession is withdrawn, it will make a very great difference to the English and French companies, as, instead of paying on five steamers a year, as they now do, they will have to pay on 26 steamers, a very heavy exaction, considering the size the steamers have now attained. It is obviously unequal to make a steamer that only visits the port once in four months pay as much per ton as a coasting steamer that calls in three or four times or more a month. The inconvenience to the community lies in this, that it may pay the mail companies better not to bring their large steamers to Shanghai at all, but to evade the proposed exaction by running a branch line of small steamers between Shanghai and Hongkong, as was done in the old days, the' big mail steamers remaining at Hongkong. We believe that the Customs are partly actuated in their new determination by the recent introduction of a line or lines of so-called mail steamers which do not carry any mails at all, but which claim the privileges accorded to the regular mail services.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.