We print to-day a letter from Mr. Duncan McNeill in which sharp exception is taken to. our publication yesterday of Dr. Ku Hung-ming's protest againt the revolutionary broadsheets which are being distributed daily in the streets of Shanghai. If we interpret Mr. McNeill aright, his contention is that Dr. Ka's warning against the probable consequences of allowing revolutionary literature unrestrained vent is a deliberate attempt to incite the starving millions of the. Yangtze to make a raid upon. Shanghai, [n other words, the warning is actually a threat to the foreign officials of Shanghai, and a threat disregarded on the one, side isan incentive to the other. Of Dr. Kun Hung-ming's private, motives we have no knowledge, and it shoald not be necessary to say that, had we read his letter in ttributed to it by Mr.
would never have seen the light in these columns, But even now we must confess inability to read into the letter any meaning, but the ostensible one, namely, a warning that certain actions or inactions may be attended by certain results. The violence of language, in which the prediction is couched is surely extraneous to the main contention and merely incidental to the writer's feelings aa a solfproclaimed loyalist. To tara from Mr. MeNoill to Dr. Ku Hung-ming,, what the latter would appear to have failed to grasp is, as rightly emphasized by another writer to-. day, that it would be wholly in~ consistent with that attitude of strict neutrality on which the Powers have determined in the present crisis, for the foreign a thorities of Shanghai to interfere in the slightest degree with the local native Press. On general questions of principle the Ta Ching dynasty is no more to the outside. world than the starving millions of the Yangtze Valley. In matters of sentiment we are entitled to our own opinions, and were' © these allowed free play, the Ta Ching dynasty might conceivably be in a worse predicament than it is in actually. But the world has decided to stand aside from "the: quarrel, and the side taken by the Press is no business of the onlooker.
But as touching this question of. neutrality, Mr. McNeill assails us at another point when he speake of our sympathy for the Imperialist
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.