The latest reform here is the starting of a Police Force, Rumour has it that one of the officials was badly robbed and the robbers could not be found. Thereupon the victim at once propounded the unani swerable theory that if he, in active office, was unable to obtain redress it must be a bad time for ' the man in the street" if he should happen to be robbed. The Vicervy was induced to give a favourable ear to a plan for the establishment of a force which should perform. the same sort of duties here that are so familiar to us who come from other lands, but so "foreign" to the Chinaman. The start has been well_made by securing the services of an Englishman who has seen some 15 years of life in China, all of them in connection with the Shanghai force. Mr. Prest is a welcome addition to our Wuchang community and gives us every hope that some of our Western notions of street order and cleanliness will become realised in Wuchang.
The Gathering of Recruits has nob been a dificult matter. The number of applicants has exceeded the number required manyfold. At present some 300 01d men are being brought into ship-shape in a very small set of courts that are attached to the central office. In due course branch offices will be available for the majority. A strong nucleus of ex-soldiers has helped to smooth the difficulty attached to teaching men Go'acill ina space where hardly a' dozen good steps can be taken bya squad of men.
Population.
A friend asked me the other day what I thought was the population of Wuchang. have a remembrane= of a globe trotter writing, after a six weeks' stay in China, that he was convinced from personal observation that the population of China was only three hundre+ millions and not, as he had hitherto thought, four hundred millions. I feel utterly incompetent to estimate how many streets there are in this city, or how many houses in each street, or how many families crowd into each house, or how many "mouths" there are in an average muy. Somebody told me soon after I hed Wuchang that the population was about 200,000. It was therefore a surprise to hear from my friend who questioned me that he had been told that 100,000 would be the outside figure. In a neat little atlas published by Macmillan & Ca., especially for China and the Far East, there is a list of "Towns with 100,000 inhabitants and upwards." The list is pre-eminently one of hearsay, e.g., Siangtan figures as having 200,000 more people than Hankow, whereas the reverse of these figures would not give the proportion of the space respectively occupied by these two cities. In this atlas Hankow is put down for 80,00, Hanyang for 400,000, and Wuchang for 500,000. happened to meet an official connected with a department that was concerned with statistics and asked whether it was known what the population really was. He told me that there were fairly accurate returns made for police use, but that these returns were not counted. When asked to estimate, he held his hand at a certain height to indicate what would be the thickness of the pile of papers containing the statistics. After a little more questioning he hazarded 'a guess that there were 40,000 or, perhaps, 50,000 within the city walls. My thirst for information was whetted. My next informant put the number of houses outside the city as about equal tothe number inside and thought that a fair estimate of the population would be 1,000,000 inside and as many out. For the present Ihave resolved to drop the subject and ask no more questions; if I should, however, get any more light on the subject, I will, with your permission, return to it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.