Feb 23.
Year by year it is our pleasant duty to take note of the annual meetings of the Chefoo International Committee. To watch history in the making is an interesting task; memoirs of the early municipal life of Shanghai always find plenty of readers; and what was being done fifty years ago in Shanghai is now being done in Chefoo, only under greases difficulties. Here, at least, we had the rights of constituted authority, to enforce taxation, building regulations and rules of public health. Chefoo has nothing to rely on but moral suasion. Taxation is only a courtesy name for voluntary contributions; and the abolition of
appeals to the offender's con-abuses can only be secured science. Yet so far has the corporate spirit been developed that, at the meeting held on January 21 last, we find the residents of the eastern section of Chefoo voluntarily suggesting that henceforward they shall pay as much in taxes as those of the western, and the proposal carried unanimously. Against this, we regret to see that the owners of silk filatures have again refused to do anything to prevent the drainage of their works from making the Chefoo creek that rank offence which it has been from time immemorial. The filature people will only promise ''to bear the matter in mind.'' Had others been so unpatriotic, how many present conveniences the filature owners, in common with all Chefoo, would have had to do without?
The Committee's report for the past year has been summarized in our columns and needs little further reference. It tells the usual tale of indefatigable effort loyally and ungrudgingly given by members of the Committee, and a large showing of good result, in roads made and named, electric lighting and laundries visited and' (again moral suasion alone) cleansed. At the annual meeting a good deal of time was devoted to the question of Sunday labour on the part of the Committee's coolies. Could it be abolished? Was not the expense of 100 coolies for six days a week the same as that of more coolies for seven? And if the coolies were all dismissed on the Saturday evening, might they not havel found a new job by. Monday, morning? The crux of the question is whether the Committee shall employ its own coolies directly and engage them by the month, or get them through a coolie contractor by the day; and in the end the matter was left to the deliberation of the in-coming Committee. It is to be hoped that their decision may be against Sunday labour. Apart from religious considerations which it is not our place to dia-cuss, the principle of one day's rest in seven means a great deal to the country which practises it. The difficulty in China has, of course, always been that the masses are too poor for such a luxury, and will continue so, one fears, until the classes renounce their selfish and idiotic propensity for revolutions.
One small but far-reaching resolution deserves to be underlined: that henceforward the annual report is to be translated into Chinese. A great part of the interest of Chefoo's municipal life consists in the hearty cooperation between foreigners and Chinese. To say that the International Committee could never have done what it has, if it had not been run on these lines, is in no way to detract from the merit of the achievement. And it is on this ground that the existence of the Committee deserves most strongly to! be pressed on the Chinese Gov-! ernment's attention for official recognition and the bestowal of constituted authority. For sixteen or eighteen years Committees have been labouring to make Chefoo clean, comfortable and prosperous. In doing that, they have by now built up a fabric of "'ole custom" which is beginning to attain the weight and dignity of law. But how much more they might have done with authority to back them, there are plenty of examples elsewhere in China to prove. Ts it not time that this mass of tradition was regularized and cemented by legal constitution? There is no question of foreign concession, but only of enabling
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.