Phere has been more change in the man-of-war anchorage during the past than for some time previously. On the Ist instant, the British gunboat Linnet arrived from Shanghai, and on the 4th instant, the British sloop Rosario and the hospital ship Carthage arrived from Weihaiwei, the German cruiser Hansa from Tsingtao, and the French cruiser Styx from Canton. The departures were the Ist instant, the British gunboat Brisk for Hankow and the surveying-vessel Waterwitch for Borneo; on the 2ud instant, the British flagship Centurion, the dispatch vessel Alacrity, and the tor-Pai; and, on the Sed instant, the Russian ido-bout destroyer Whiting for Shang-
battleship Sevastopol for Nagasaki. nition was also a canard. Since the "Times" let itself go in the deplorable manner I have just described, all the sensational newspapers in London seem to have been trying hard to go one better, and necessary part of the competition consisted of course in rousing their Far Eastern correspondents to the reality of a danger that did not exist. It was hard, I may remark en passant, for respectable, wall-informed correspondents to be repeatedly "roused" and hysterically appealed to in this way, for an appeal to "wire freely" could only be regarded under the cireumstances a8 an invitation to evolve some big, big lie. Some injudicious journalists in the ports seem, however, to have risen nobly to the occasion, But after all it is hard to blame them. With no knowledge of Japan and surrounded by a body of clerks and translators who know little or nothing of the policy of their own country, they work themselves into a frenzy which soon leaves them in a fit state to credit any rumour, no matter how monstrous.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.