To-pay's telegrams leave _no doubt whatever that Marshal Wo Pei-fu is defeated~and a fugitive.
On Monday evening telegrams had been received from him by high Chinese circles in Shanghai which were entirely at variance with the agency messages describing his defeat; and it is enough to recall the amazingly inaccurate nature of news of all kinds from northern China during the war, to show that considerable reserve was necessary. -But the statement to-day of General Feng Yuhsiang's cavalry being actually in Tientsin is something about which there can be no dispute. It is Wa Pei-fu's first defeat and, without question of the rightness or wrongness of his adventure, it impossible to withhold sympathy. For he has borne himself throughout as a gallant man, a terrific worker, straightforward and sincere. "The chances as between himself and General Feng were unequal. While the latter, the prudence which frequently makes for success in this wor had kept his army' in supplies of _arimuni pleted throughout the war, Marshal Wu's vet with ment Shanhaikuan and coi hardly have been too flush of cartridges, They we re also, it appears, in the minority. such odds their great personality could not avail.
Where is Marshal Wu going to' turn up? One refuses to believe that he will tamely accept defeat. He has lost Loyang, but he has a firm friond—at least there is reason as yet to suppose oth wise—in Hyino Yao-nan of Th peh, and since General Feng's coup in Peking both Marshal C and General Sun Chuan-fang. of Kinga and Chok: ly, have declared they port him.
Reuters Tientsin correspondent sayx that Marshal Tugn Chi-jui has telegraphee the "Yangtze chieftain them not to receive the fugitive.
The old Antu lewder enjoys " high prestige in China, but we do not quite se men like Marshel Chi, who has passed his word to Wa Pei-fu, and General I nan, whose patron Wu i turning their bucks on him. Chi Shanghai have a report that Ma shal Wu is making: for Wuchany, there {0 take up the struggle afresh, There ix nothing nlikely in it. If it proves true, the tendency is to split China' into three main warring elements, the Yangtze, Peking with Feng. Yuhsiang in command of it, and Marshal Chang Tso-lin. Tt, ho, ready been made clear that the latter is in no sense in alliance with General Feng, whose stccess, from the Makden point of view, raises new and incalculable factors. Tndeed, unless Feng can get Marshal Tuan to espouse his cause, the position is as if by some freak'a fourth form schoolboy had got himself into a stron position and invited the sixth form to cone and listen to his terms. For face sake, Inspectors General of whole groups of provinees do not come to confer at the bidding of € om manders, especially if the Intter have pushed themselves into prominence by methods which outrage all Chinese feeling.
The position from the P standpoint is, to put it delicate. Whom will the io. matic Body recognize now? President Tsao Kun—whom Legation Quarter accepted, shutting i eyes and hoping that after all the irregularities of his election might be condoned by enough people in China ta give a post dated justification to its feeble surrender,—has finally resigned. The Cabinet has gone.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.