Nov.
We think our readers will forgive us for returning for a little to the subject of our new Municipal Building which was opened on Thursday and to which we referred in a brief leaderette on Friday morning. It was quite evident from the demeanour of the crowd of residents present at the opening cere-many that the building met with the enthusiastic approval of its owners. Everyone felt, and many expressed the feeling, that Shanghai needed and deserved the handsome erection' in which its Municipal Council conducts the business of the Settlement. We are a business community who have come East for the very prosaic purpose of making a living. Our daily avocations bring us up against hard facts and discourage anything in the nature of sentiment or ostentation. In the admirable speech of the chairman of the Council at the opening ceremony there was nothing that even distantly approached glorification of the men who made, or of those who are now making, Shanghai. Had anything been said that could have been construed as having in it the suggestion of a boast—Ts not this great Babylon which I have built? ''—every one would have felt instinctively that a false note had been struck. As it was, all that was said was in perfect keeping with the occasion and with the habits and characteris-ties of the community for which the chairman spoke. Sentiment was banished and there was nothing more than a just satisfactions that a good work had been worthily achieved. And yet underneath all this prosaic exterior there is a world of romance in the history of this foreign Settlement that will not be forgotten by the historian of the future. Many of those present could remember Shanghai when it was a very insignificant, and somewhat bedraggled. dus. ter of hongs by the bank of the Huangpu. We have all heard the oldest inhabitant recount tales of still earlier days when the bund was a tow-path and the site of the Settlement a mud flat. That it has come to be the very handsome city that it now is proves that the pioneers and their successors built well and truly and points the moral that their successors should continue to walk in the old paths and so continue and develop what has been well begun.
The building is 2 parable.in stone commemorating the past and prophesying of an even better future. Is was designed by the Council's architect and the work of construction entrusted to a Chinese contractor, Mr. Yue Chang-tai. Visitors from other lands will, perhaps, be more lavish of praise for the workmanship displayed than we are who are accustomed to the excellence of Chinese workmen. Co-operation between the East and the West built Shanghai and the same ce-operation produced the new building which fitly symbolizes the progress that has been made. For while we offer a just meed of praise to our countrymen whoggame to Shanghai in the early days and laid the foundation of the Settlement as we know it, we must not forget that without the business acumen and energy of the Chin-}ese merchants whom they found here, the success, which we signalize by the structure just opened, could not have been won. As it was in the past, so it must be in the future. Our interests are bound up with the well-being of the nation in which. we sojourn. If the country is misruled or overrun by bandits, we suffer with those who are harried a thousand miles away, for the trade of Shanghai ramifies from the sea to the borders of Burma.
If the great war has taught one lesson more than another it is
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.