That the doctrine of free love, as taught by Bertram Russell for a short time in China, should have caught anu led astray a number of people of the ultra-modern type to be found in the port cities, is not to be wondered at, but that it should extend its tentacles into the conservative society of a remote interior city like this was hardly to be supposed. And the fact that the local papers to-day give a good deal of prominence to a case in point probably is a fair indication that the occurrence is not common.
The young man in question is a barber with a record of theft, the seduction of a servant girl and selling her as a white slave; while the young woman is of quite a different sort, the daughter of an official brought up in a home of wealth and the usual surroundings of a girl of that class. She is 25 and was engaged to be married soon to a well-to-do man.
Enamoured of the young barber ago and the two rented a house she secretly left her home a month
where they have since been living—on her money. Found at last by the anguished father she was brought home and the object of -her (tzu yiu lien ai) free love dragged off to the police station on a further charge of robbery.
Yet not disillusioned by a por-tradal of the past life of the young barber the girl yesterday went to the police court to appeal for his release, declaring that she was willing to marry him if in the opinion of her elders the old-fashioned customs of society must till be complied with.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.