Tuere are rumours in the air there is to be a fight at the forthcoming election of Municipal Councillors for the present year. Asa rul-, the outgoing Council manage, not always without difficulty, to ge nine fied ratepayers to protnise to serve, and there is no contest. here was a contest last year, two American citizens having Leen proposed in addition to the one who consented to continue in office. Neither was elected; there appeared to be no reason why Mr. Quackenbush should be displaced by Mr. Ball, however excellent a candidate the latter was in himself; and subsequent events have shown how right the ratepayers acted in placing Mr, Boeck very }much at the bottom of the poll, trumpeted though he was by one of our contemp"raries "s a reformer whose new blood would start Shanghai on a new career of activity and prosperity. A seat on the Municipal Council isa very arduous as well as a very responsible post, and fortunately hitherto the scats have not been occupied by men who have taken {them in order to serve their own private interests. Knowing this, it has been the custom, and a very good custom too, of the ratepayers to support, except there were special reasons for favouring an outsider, the nine gentlemen whose consent the outgoing Council has secured, It is sometimes objected by people whose knowledge" of the facts is directly proportionate to the length of their residence in Shanghai, that it is a scandal and an injury to the progress of the municipality that the "outgoing Council should nominate, and as a lo thereby elect, its successors, This must b+ done as long as there is so little demand for municipal honours on the part of men who would wear them worthily and in whom their fellow citizens would have confidence; and there would be great outery if an outgoing Council were to renounce what is by no means a welcome with the result that it was found, when the nomination papers were opened, that only some half-dezeon names had been proposed for the nine vacancies.
It has been tha custom of late years fur these nine vacancies to be [filled by seven British s objects, an American, and a German, This is about the proportion of representation to which the various nationalities are entitled by their interests in the Settlement north of the Yangking-pang, but that consideration has not really had any weight in the {sclection, The British community has always felt that there must fbe at least one American and one German on the Council, to make it fairly representative of the foreign population. That there have as a rule been only one American and one German has been due not to avy desire to restrict their numbers on the Council, but to the difficulty of finding suitable candidates who would give up the necessary time to the duties of the post. There is no jealousy in the matter; we have had 'American Chairmen of the Council in the pas', and there is no reason why we should not have again American or German chairmen, An attempt was made a little while ago to get a second German on the Council, and it was unsuccessful not because there was any objection to the candidate himself or to two Germans being on the Council; but because it seemed unfair to oust without good reason any one of the nine gentlemen whom the outgoing Council! had persuaded to serve. There has never been, we are glad to say, any cleavage in the Council on national lines; it has been the invariable rule for the nine members to work together, irrespective of nationality, for the general good of Shanghai. That the destinies of the Settlement north of the Yangkingpang should have been mainly shaped and controlled by the British and Americans is inevitable, considering that it essentially still is what it originally was, an Anglo-American settlement, the other nationalities being welcome gues's who have been given equal rights in accordance with our custom, the Open Door is to us no new policy.
There are rumours—and we shall be very glad to hear that they are biseless—that an effort is to be made at the forthcoming election to impose three or four German candidates on the ratepayers. For some reason or other the German Government seems anxious to persuade the world that the interests of Germany in Shanghai and on the Yangtze are as important as those of Great Britain. To support, this de-Iusion a German garrison is, we are told, to remain in Shanghei after the British garrison has been withdrawn and all necessity for the maintenance of a foreign garrison here of any kind has ceased; to support it German steamers are being run ab a steady loss up and down the Yangtze; and now to support it efforts are to be made to zeta disproportionate German representation on the Municipal Council, The delusion injures nobody but the taxpayers in Germany, who find the money for the garrison, for the subsidies of such of the German lines of steamers as are subd, and for the enormous deficiency in the budget of the German colony at Kiaochou. We see no objection whatever to the maintenance ofa German garrison here; the men are on the whole extremely well-behaved and the officers are orna-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.