To the Ed itorof the Norta-Cmixa Darcy News."
Sr,—You will perhaps correct me if I am mistaken in the assertion that up to date, no notice has been taken by the local press either in your city, or in North, of late achievement of His Excellency Wu Ting-fang.
Every one whose sensibilities ha been either scarified or blunted by residence in China, surrounded by all the horrors that one is compelled to take cognizance of, cannot help but feel a debt of gratitude to this good man, who, his own initiative, and impelled solely by humanity and a pure loyalty, has laboured to remove from his country one of its darkest stigmas. I have learned that he has boon at this affair for some time and had difficulty in securing the help of th necessary coadjutors before he was able to lay the memorial before the Empress-All honour to him. If one ina's ralers had his kindness of heart, gentleness of spirit, and broad progressive mind, such occurrences as the late bar-barons performance ssid to have been enacted under the auspices of Viceroy at Kueilin would be as obsolete in China as they are in England or any other civilised part of the world. The conditions of life in China, the morale of its inhabitants, and their insonsi nervous organisations are such that unhappily a more severe code of punishment is necessary here for the maintenance of order than in more fortunate parts of the world, but it is said to be the intention of Mr. Wu, as time ripens, todo all possible to lift his country up to the standard of other lands, morally
Perhaps it is only Empress-well wx politically.
Dowager who would feel complacent at i have been great, and we therefore hereby capitation to strangulation, but so sentence from deis amoured thatit will be "summary strangulation, s per rescript, it is perhaps all one can hope for until the dawn of that millennium which abolishes all legal murder. What a concession the judged rescript is to mercy, however, may be from the fact that when the Kueilin affair was exclaimed at in horror, certain foreign official, himself, the Kindest of men, remarked, " Why, it io only the Lingohi'h. You can seo that any day in the Chinese City." If member of one of the oldest foreign civilisations in the world can be brought by habit, to look upon it thus placidly and to tacitly it that its horror was mitigated by ite frequency, it is not surprising that Wu Ting-fang had some difficulty in impressing its i his associates and their The foreign Press should in the very highest possible torma the apredation which every human being who 8 of this reform must feel for Wu Excellency will live in the pages of history to its latest chapter as the man who has done the greatest and noblest deed of our time, and certainly a people from whose life this hideous shadow has been removed will venerate his name for twice ten thousand years.
Thanking you for your valuable space, Tam, etc., Peking, 4th May.
The Imperial Decree referred to was translated in our columns on the IMPERIAL DECREES,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.