Feb, 20.
We voice the feelings of all foreign readers in offering to Chinese our sincerest wishes for a happy New Year. If the Republic has led to abuses which all deplore, it has also brought changes on which one may dwell with real satisfaction, Chief among these are the new sympathy and association existing between the average Chinese and the average foreigner. Not only by such excellent institutions as the Union Club of China but in many directions, we foreigners are brought into continual touch with our Chinese neighbours as we never were even two or three years ago; and the more official eccentricities (not to use a harsher word on this auspicious day) call for adverse criticism, the more sharply is the distinction drawn between them and the Chinese people, with the greater sympathy and goodwill towards the latter. Such feelings cannot but be productive of - good results. In all classes to-day there is a general belief that great changes are impending, changes for the better. The foundation of that view may be vague.and even apparently illogical, with new agents of unrest in the shape of Bolshevism now knocking at the door. Yet, as all history shows, feelings of the kind described have a habit, as they spread from mind to mind, of transforming themselves into a motive force. From believing that a certain thing is going to happen, men come unconsciously to work for its happening, and the old, false gods are, in some mysterious way, overthrown by the mere pressure of the new faith. We do not expect the millennium in five minutes or five years. That was the mistake made by the Chinese revolutionists in 1911, as in every revolution that has ever happened. But, incredulous as some may be, there are forces at work in China, both among foreigners and Chinese, forces hitherto non-existent, which only need the combination that will surely come to restore this ancient race to a glory greater than it has ever known.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.