Sept 21.
Dr. Sun Yat-sen's scheme for! the construction of some 70,000 niles of Government railways in China has, not unnaturally, arouse ed considerable interest among foreigners as well as Chinese. In our correspondence column yesterday appeared a letter from Mr. A. W. U. Pope, General Manager of the Shanghai Nanking Railway, in which he pleaded for sympathetic consideration of the scheme and for the withholding of adverse criticism of the proposals that have been made. But, while the first request should be at once granted, healthy criticism of any such proposals should be welcomed, even before they have been worked out in detail, when, to the foreign mind, Dr. Sun's hypotheses are erroneous. Briefly, the scheme provides for the construction of 200,000 li of railways) within ten years. Dr. Sun proposes to divide the country into twenty districts and to form in each an organization which would have some 10,000 labourers} under its control. Construction works would be begun simultane oonsly in each of these districts, and Dr. Sun anticipates that at, the end of ten years his projected trunk lines would be completed. These trunk lines are three in number, and are to consist of a southern trunk line running from Kuangtung through Kuangsi, Kueichow, Yunnan and Szechuan) to Tibet, terminating on the southern slope of the Tienshan; a central trunk line running from the mouth of the Yangtze through Kiangsu, Anhui, Honan, Shensi, Kansu, Hsinchiang and terminate ing at Ili: and a northern trunk line beginning at Chinwangtao and running through the Liaotung peninsula, Outer Mongolia, and ending at Kokonor. Alternative lines have been suggested, but although the question of route is most important, it would be useless to discuss iti until questions of ways and means. have been more definitely settled. Gigantic as is the scheme, it is stated that the National Railway Union has proposed a still more comprehensive one involving an ultimate junction with lines running from Constantinople through Persia. But the proposals before' the country at the moment are those of Dr. Sun, who has secur-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.