To the Editor of the "Nonta-Cuisa Dany News."
Sin,—The view taken by one of your evening contemporaries, with regard. to the landing of foreign troops in Shanshai, is another instance of that egregious {system of temporising that proved so disastrous:
ous at. the commencement of hostilities in South Africa and that has recently brought about the unfortunate predicament in which the foreigners find themselves in Peking. Granting for the sake of argument that the measure ad. vocated by Admiral Seymour is calculated to inflame the populace, I submit that there are reasons which justify its adoption, even at such a risk, for the ad-outages that would result from the above step would more than counterbalance the suggested by your" contemporary. effects of the improbable—contingenc} should, however, say that the presence of regulars in Shanghai, far from increasing, would tend to allay any fears which the natives might entertain of approaching trouble here.
The impression produced on the majority of Chinamen by the arrival of the twontyone warships in Shanghai furnishes ample proof of this. Every new arrival has been welcomed with unfeigned satisfaction, and there does not appear to be any tendency to regard the presence here of the international fiver as' sign of impending trouble, Tt may not be oat of place in this connection to quote a few extracts from a lending article in the Spectator" of the 23ed December last under the heading "Military Preparation."
The leader docs not of course deal with the crisis in China, but the arguments used being eminently applicable to the subject of this letter, I have taken the liberty of making the necessary substitution of names and words to adapt them to the question now at issue. My adaptation reads as follows "What we miss in our preparations is not provision for the situation of the moment, but for the larger issues involved in the present war with China. We hold that in addition to what the allied powers are now doing they should begin sending troops to Shanghai, We do not advocate this step because we are in the least afraid of an attack on Shanghai. We have no. such drool, But in our opinion the rejection of any such dread is quite compatible with desire to see the Settlements put into such A position of defence that it shall not be possible for even the wildest dreamer amongst the Tuan-Boxer tribes to contemplate the notion of an attack without feoling the thing to be utterly impossible and absurd. We want to give the Chinese It is needless for me to ridd anything to the above remarks. Their reasonableness will strike anybody who is persuaded that prevention is better than cure.
Thanking you for printing this letter, lam, etc., Ap Tempcs, Shanghai, 9h August.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.