In publishing the article on the Coltman murder which appears on another page, traversing Mr. Rodney Gilbert's recent account of his investigations, we take no responsibility for the opinions expressed and print it on the principle of a bearing for both sides of the argument. There was, however, one point in Mr. Gilbert's article to which we should have drawn attention earlier, In commenting on the case on December 18 we quoted from a Kalgan letter to the "Peking Tientsin Times," the writer of which spoke with great severity of the normal misbehaviour of the soldiers in Kalgan whom he described as "uniformed ruffians'" habitually ubjecting ithe people of Kalgan to tertian and oppression of every kind. Mr. Gilbert says on the contrary:
Tnere was no evidence whatever to show that the—civilian population was anti-foreign or that the soldiers were badly behaved. It would. appear, on the other hand, that the men of the 4th Mixed Brigade are consistently paid, are well behaved and are on the whole a particularly wholesome, decent lot of fellows. The Chinese in all walks of life' testify that they are a great improvement over their Fengtien predeces-sore, Chinese soldiers are so often ar-reigned for il] conduct that anything in their favour deserves to be noted, especially in a controversy of this kind.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.