S1st December.
To-NIGHT at midnight 1905 steps over our thresholds. e year that passes has been a year of war. This time last year we wrote, as we knew, that war could not be averted, and considering the many warnings given, it is strange that the Russians still persist that they did not know war was coming, that they were unprepared, and that they were treacherously attacked. If they did not know their own intelligence department was soming: thee is the fault unprepared of common they were; the universal corruption in their administration took care of that; treacherously attacked they were not. This the following telegram, which ai Proved, if poot is ne ing by in the Englith papers on the 13th of January last, supplied to them by the Press Association Port Arthur, January 11.—Owing to apprehensions of some coup-de-main on the part of the Japanese at Port Arthur, the Bussian authorities have taken extraordinary precautions in the town, and also along the whole Manchurian railway. Rumours are also circulated that the Japanese would take advantage of the festivities of the Russian Christmas to srprino the mon-of-war at Port yur, and lant watch was Kept night and day. The whole fleet is now in fighting trim."
While 1904 has been a year of, war, let us hope that 1905 will be before its close, if not at its beginning, a year of peace, and that the result of the present war will be 'a settlement which will vent another outbreak in the Far t for 'a generation at least, The Japanese and Russians are learning at the cannon's mouth to know and esteem each other, and they will be openly good friends before long, when the success of the reformers in Russia has put the Grand Dukes and their rotégés, the Alexeieffs and Bezorasoffs, in their proper place, has carried out honestly the Czar's repeated promises to withdraw from Manchuria, and has made internal development aad not extension of territory the chief care of a liberal Russian Government. War means fortune for a few with misery for millions; peace means prosperity for the people. Peace then we pray for in 1905; peace that Japan and Russia may bind up their wounds and reorganise their exhausted forces and their empty treasuries; peace that commerce may resume in the Far East its normal condition and its interrupted progress; peace, thas, is the first interest of all of us. that hope, which is perhaps nearer by one day the dispatch of ome realisation then the pessimists imagine, we close the book of 1904, and open that cf1905, wishing all our readers far and neat
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.