Iris a great pleasure to all residents in the treaty ports in China, and in Hongkong, to read the list of, those present at the annual banquet in London of the China Association. To the new-comer it is mainly a source of wonder; hero he finds names a few of which are possibly familiar to him—he has seen them attached to the new roads that are being opened in all directions, or he has heard of them in connection with some story of the past told by a garrulous old-timer..To the old resident they bring back a flood of memories of the " good old times," and he wishes he too had been there to shake hands and recall old comradeship with staunch friends of the past, many of whom he doubts if he shall ever see 3 again. The-gathering on the 3lst_of October last seems to have been one of the best-attended and most successful of a long series. Mr. RS. Gundry, C. for. many years Editor of this paper, was in the Chair, and the thorough Knowledge of things Chinese which he acquired in Shanghai he has kept up to date since he has been at home, while the prosperity of the Association. is greatly due to his long and energetic service as Secretary.
After. the usual loyal toasts, ssg|Gundry rose to propose the annual toast, "Prosperity to the China Associa-
U.S. Secretary of State, and then went on to congratulate Japan on the success. ful conclusion of the late war, and Lord Lansdowne on the conclusion of a new treaty with Japan. Reverting to. Lord Salisbur}'s crucial mistake of ordering the two British men-of-war from Port Arthur at the request of Russia, he showed what momentous consequences had followed, and. this led him to express the hope that we should not give up Weihaiwei until Germany gives up Kiaochou, With a passing glance at the destruction of Mr. Reynolds's telegraph forty years ago by the then Taotai of Shanghai, Ting Jih-chang, and the acquisition and removal of the first Woosung railway by the Viceroy Shen Pao-chen, he remarked on the thousands of miles of telegraphs and hundreds of miles of railway now operating in China, and of the Chinese desire at the moment to build all their railways themselves; pointing out that the borrowing by, the Viceroy at Canton from the Government of Hongkong of a sum of £1,100,000, to enable him to buy back the Canton-Hankow line, did not look as though the money required to build railways would come readily from Chinese sources. He vindicated the China Association in Lon don from the charge that they had not pushed vigorously enough the case of the Kowloon-Canton railway, and while he mentioned the discontent that has been growing in Shanghai with the London committee, he was perhaps a little too optimistic in referring to ibas 2 " perfectly amicable controversy."
In his dealing with the future, it does not seem that. Mr. Gundry has entirely grasped the present peculiar conditions. The division of China into a progressive
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.