Ir is an old saying here that Shanghai is a very good place to work in, but very bad place to have nothing to do in. It may be added to that, that Shanghai is not a place to find work la. For the man who has lost all self-respect and become a beachcomber pure and simple, Shanghai, until the weather feoomane too cold to make, the sleeping-places in the Ina of the Silver Moon comfortable, is a dise. Did not one of them tell the magistrate in Hongkong the other day that he had been six months on the beach in Shanghai and never missed a good meal? Our Settlement here spend al day looking for work and is' happy land for the men who
praying to God they won's find it; but, to the respectable young man who has a trade, the journeyman tailor or plumber or joiner who turns up here with empty pockets and no friends, who honestly wants work and does: nob want to get his living by beg-tap land. The position that he ing, Shanghai is anything but a wah like to get is already filled by Chinaman, who is a good workman, sober, reliable, and can live comfortably at much less cost than a white man. The fate that the respectable young man out of work meets with here is graphically described in the letter which we published yesterday from Mr. H. E. Halpin under the heading, "A Hard Case."
Here is a young man, knowing a good trade, of good address, sober, with good recommendations, who is really anxious for employment, but who finds every door, every opening filled by Oninese, a state of jings of which he has no possible ughd to complain. Of course, he ought never to have come here, and his letter merely state the facts of his position; be has absolutely no ground on which to blame Shanghai. Mr. Halpin is only one of a number of unemployed who are on their beam ends in Shanghai. The first question one aske them is, "How did you here?" They come from San francisco, from British Columbia from Manila, from the Cape of! Good Hope. even from the Fij Islands. They are told that Shanghai is a booming place, that slips from the Indian pagoda-tree have been planted and are flourishing on the Bund, and that if they can scrape together dollars enough to pay their passage here, or pers some oki to allow them to work it, they will soon find employment and get on here. Shanghai is not reible for their disappointment.
ey land here with a few dollars which are soon spent. Then they go to the Consulate of the country they claim to belong to. The first question they are asked, of course, is: "What proof have you that you are a Baratarian citizen?" In too and Tche Consulate not bane a many cases they have no papers,
charitable institution under any circumstances, the Consul can do nothing for them. Then they begin to apply to private individuals. Some are too busy to attend to them; some hear a bit of their story and send them on to some one else; some give them a dollar, which keeps them fora day, to get rid of them; some, who know what the temptation of the Hongkew hops is toa man already depressed but with an eleemosynary dollar in his pocket, give the man an order ox the Thomas Hanbury Coffee House for a day's board and lodging. This keeps him for a day, and the next day he is in just as bad a plight again.
What is Shanghai to do about it? Shanghai has, it must be clearly laid down, no responsibility in the matter at all. Wede nothing to invite these men here. We go along with our own work and mind our own business, look out for ourselves for the labour we want, and do not willingly offer any inducement to men to come here seeking. The pity of it is that Shanghai is almost too liberal, generous, and charitable, so that it gets known all over the Enst, which is fall of seekers, more or less pensive, that ifa man can only get ere, he is sure of a living at the public expense, "Then comes up the ifficuls question to answer: " What isto bedene?" Ifareal beachcomber is directed to a police station, where he will ta meal and a shakedown in cell, he refuses to go, on the most plausible pretext he can invent while the self-respecting unemployed has a natural fear that it may be said of him afterwards, "Oh! he knows the inside of a police station." If the Municipal Council were to start a casual ward with a labour tes the beachcomber would keep rel viously away from it; his disgusted reply would be: "Why, I asked em for employment, and they asked me to work!" while to the man who has learnt a handicraft and is really anxious for employment, the labour test that is usually given at a casual ward is apt to be actually injurious and to unfit him for his proper trade, while it occupies the time in which he might be looking for work. The main advantage of it would be that it would distribute over the whole community the cost of the relief which is now undertaken by a few who have not the obduracy te turn an applicant away empty-handed. At the same time, it must be distinctly understood that the community of Shanghai is under no obligation whatever to save from the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.