Oct. 19, The correspondence in our! columne between Mr. Tong Shao-and the Chief Executive, shal Tuan Chi-jai, may serve to call attention again to the very able article Mr. Tong contributed to our Memorial number of the 10th instant, which was publf ed on the fourteenth annly of the Republic of China. Mr. Tong said, "In rewriting our ceties, in remodelling our courts, in improving. our prisons, our point of view should not be to satisfy any commissions appointed under the Washington Treaties but to benefit the Chin-eve people. As a matter of fact, no system can be suitable for the Chinese people which {s not '004 enough for the foreigner living in China." This is a re-freeing statement of the real foundation on which any reforms advocated in China should be paved. We have stated in these columns more than once that we would never support any measure no matter, who put it forward, that did not have the good of, the Chinese people in view. And we have reiterated, to the point of being tedious, the conviction that any benefit received by the Chinese people—would also accrue, in some measure, to the foreigner resident in thi country, This is a very different principle than that contained in the sloppy sentimentality voiced by certain would-be friends of China who are accustomed to say, "If the Chinese have to live under bad laws, foreigners who come to their country ought to be willing to accept the same conditions." If this had been the viewpoint of the pioneers of our intercourse with China it would have incalculably retarded the progress of the Chinese towards liberty. Suppose that the men who framed the so-called "unequal treaties" had not in-fisted on extraterritorial rights for their nationals but had allowed them to be subject to Chinese Jaw. Then all our predecessors in this country and we ourselves should have had to grovel and kowtow when we camer into the presence of a Chinese magistrate. They, and we, should have been lable to be cangued, bastinadoed or sentenced to death by the "slicing process." Apart from the reluctance any government, would rightly feel to subjecting its subjects to such barbarities, our acquiescence and submission would have confirmed the Chinese Government in {ts opinion that these were fit and proper punishments to inflict on those who had transgressed its laws, Our refusal to bow ourselves under this intolerable yoke was the greatest service our diplomas ever rendered to China, It spurred the people to demand and, secure their deliverance from the liability to be subjected to these tortures. Had we taken 4 different course the people of China would still be suffering these atrocities. the present moment tariff revision is about to take place and the Chinese press is filled with demands that China should have complete tariff autonomy. Chinese writers argue that, asjberlain showed, is due China. is a sovereign state, should have liberty to levy wh ever tariff seems good to her without being required to submit to. any condition such as the abolition of likin. It fs forgotten that when foreign trade first became important China had no tariff laws." The official at the port of call levied as large sum as he could possibly get, from the foreign trader. It was not so much a tariff as a system of blackmail. No two officials claimed the same sum and the same official did not make the same demand on a second oceasion. It was to remedy this chaotic condition of things that the treaties stipulated the amount of duty to be paid on foreign imports. It was not an iniquitous condition imposed on China by force of arms, but a reasonable regulation such as existed in every other land but had not, up till that time, been enacted in China, Time and change comes to all things and the amount of duty to be levied is now a question to be discussed and hence the need for a tariff revision] conference.
Supposing that at this conference the treaty nations were mad enough to concede China's request for liberty to handle the Maritime Customs unhamper-fed by foreign control, what would happen? To answer this question we must take notice of what does happen in the collection of likin. This is an inland tax. Originally it was one-tenth of one per cent. but, as at present levied, it is what: ever the official in charge of the {customs barrier can squeeze out of the unfortunate merchant. It lis one of the most iniquitous imposts ever levied on a suffer-ving people but is a chief perquisite of the militarists and, if report speaks true, its proposed {abolition is one cause of the war threatened by Sun Chuanfang. If the Tariff Conference were to renounce the control of the Customs and hand that institution, unreservedly, unto the hands of the present government, in an incredibly short space of time its revenues would follow likin and the land tax into the insatiable maw of the Tupans, and the Chinese people would' find that their little fingers were thicker than the foreigners' loins. On the principle enunciated by Mr. Tong Shao-yi, that, whatever changes take place, the good of the Chinese people must tu the first consideration, we should say the greatest disservice the Treaty Powers could do to China to-day would be to grant the quest for complete tari autonomy.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.