Mar, 24.
There never was such a history as that of the connexion between Shanghai as a community and its Council as a deliberative as well as an executive body, the reason being, of course, that there never was such a community living under such conditions. In the early days it was Anglo-American the extent of about nineteen-twentieths both in population and business, but as the British community was the only one with a thoroughly organized Consulate, administrative work tended to that centre as a matter of course. Mr. G. F. Seward, the first American Consul to have anything of an establishment, had no national abiding place of his own, and usually, when Senior Consul, turned up at the annual meeting (always held at the British Consulate) half an hour late so that his junior in rank, Sir Harry Parkes, or Dr. Winchester, might be elected to the chair. On one occasion both British and American Consuls withdrew from the meeting when the ratepayers insisted on passing resolution which the Consuls held to be unconstitutional. But as a rule there was all the har-many compatible with the most perfect freedom of discussion. The Council was barely a yew old, however, before ai official stigmatized it as mate," and hinted at its reduction to the rank of a Committee of Roads and Jetties once more! As early as 1862, when the influx of Chinese refugees was giving much trouble, it was proposed to have a paid Council, but that, fortunately, was only a passing aberration.
Our recent meeting has, probably, for the Inst time seen a report in which officially the Chinese residents had no share. The coming extension of the Settlement has, as one of its constituent provisos, an arrangement under which a Chinese Advisory Body will be able to give the Council the benefit of its personal knowledge of native oninion. and those who entertained doubts on the wisdom of this innovation should have had them distinctly lessened by the reassure ing words of the Chairman of Council when speaking on this topic on Monday. Tt has taken us fifty years to come to the conclusion now reached, for as far
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.