Reform Wave Strikes Shanghai, the Cesspool of the Orient With the above headings an american paper gives us this vivid picture of ourselves and pats us on: the back.
Shanghai, long known to globe trotters as the "Sink of Iniquity" and the ''Paris of the East," according as their inclinations lay, is going in for purification. with unique variations. The goddess of chance, herself no puritan, is lending her auspices to the rite.
For many years Shanghai has been one of the '"'wide open" spots of the earth. On an edge between two civilizations, with the restraints of neither, everything went. Humid almost to saturation the climate, humid beyond saturation the social atmosphere. Church services only were unaccompanied by the whiskey and soda. Even at meetings the glasses i And one could ket on anything from the market price of silk to the number of bubbles the next g) Nothing forbidden to man was left untasted.
Of recent years there has been a conspicuous taming of the wild old ways. Shanghai is now less a dropping-off place for the adventurers of all the world and more a gathering point for orders for salesmen from all the world. And there has been the natural reform wave.
But while this has been true of the foreign population, there has been a directly opposite tendency among the C Shocked at first by the white man's loosenes they have now relaxed themsel: And, being newly freed from straint, they have possibly gone the white man one better, so much so that the white man has become shocked. Hence the reform wave.
There is to be cleaning up. Thus the Municipal Council, an international body elected by residents of all nationalities in the Settlement, has ordered. It will begin with commercialized—vice. In the manner beginning lies the point. an ordinance passed some go und approved by the con sular body, all Chinese resorts had to be licensed. Ti has been de mined now to reduce vice gradually by cancelling the licences at stated intervals—first one-fifth, then one-fourth, and so on.
How choose those that are to be reduced? The solution is perhaps a throwback to the old) gambling spirit of the Settlement—anyway, a pique solution in a reform eatnpaign. There will be a _lotter On December 21 there will be a public drawing at the Town Hall. The numbers of the licences heid by the resorts will be put into a huge receptacle, and, one by one, a fifth of them will be shaken out. Those will be the ones to be closed.
That's one way of putting down the lid.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.