Ended after a Month's Struggle Canton, Oct. 16.
The restaurant strike in Canton which started on September 19 as a protest against the proposed meal tax, ended to-day, after nearly a month, in a moral victory for the restaurant-keepers but one which is also favourable to the Government. The tax, as was first. proposed, was to be collected by a syndicate which was offering $220,000 annually to the provisional Bureau of Finance for a term of years. According to the compromise agreed upon between the Civil Governor and the proprietors' and waiters' guilds of the restaurants, the restaurants will independently contribute $220,000 for a year only for the aid of Government education and will hand the proceeds directly to the Bureau of Education. They will stop payment upon the return of Kuangtung to normal conditions, when the Government will be able to look after the educational department without resorting to unusual financial measures.
The Commissioner of Finance is not pleased with the arrangement made by the Civil Governor, who has taken a hand im the matter contrary to the usual procedure and has now referred the whole matter of a settlement with the syndicate to the Chief Executive The fire-cracker factories in Canton: are still suspending work as a protest against the stamp duty on their products. They claim that they have been taxed. enough, when they have had to pay heavily on saltpetre and other ns.—Reuter.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.