Some of Shanghai's lifts must! have been a remarkable innovation in the nineties when they were installed, but they have become dangerous vestiges, like the vermin form appendix, the tonsils and other once necessary but now disastrous reminders of a horrible past. One rides upwards bangingly to the tune of an iritated electrical something or other that reminds the passenger of the kind persons he left at Home whom he may never see again in this world. The fault may not be with the lift and is probably with the operator, as we usually suggest in these parts, but it is just as dangerous and unpleasant either way. Coming down is not more tempting than going up. An occasional bang or two in the wrong place and a general feeling of going down too rapidly or never stopping, when the bottom is reached, overcomes all modernism and awakens a Ionging, for the days when the storeys were few and legs stronger. In few cities do the authorities allow the lifts to move: at all without due inspection and certification of properness, In Shanghai no one ever looks at the Aifts but the lift man and when they go wrong he calls in a friend who once worked in a garage as a car washer and has graduated into the very lucid classification of a "fitter man." The "fitter man" looks at tthe lift and sends his most junior apprentice to make it go. He plays with the thing for a day or two and eventually it Then he gets paid, gives the lift man the necessary cumshaw and the insurance com. panies do the rest. It will probably be said by landlords and others lacking a sense of humour that no reports have appeared of lifts collapsing and that the above suggestions are exaggerated and premature, Nevertheless, they might be true and probably will be before long. A proper inspection of lifts by the Municipal Council with a framed certificate in the lift stating that it was fit for human occupation would add to one's peace of mind and place some check upon the prevarications of the "fitter men,"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.