Ort. 5.
YESTERDAY we received from our Kaifeng correspondent the' first authentic report of the sack by bandits of Chowkiakow, when ithe Rev. C. F. Davi off and Mrs, Dav Poppins, the onl: aries in the tow other mission-although not .|kidnapped, remain, as our ce respondent says, "marooned in a ese house." unable to with insufficient food clothing, their only companion a Chinese pastor "who has severely handled by the brigands ud tortured with red hot "no doubt for his his foreign friends, All the property of the China {Inland Mission at Chowkiakow dectraved and all the Helen not yet, got back from their summer holidays were taken. Mr. Davis, of course, is still in the bandits' hands and there, so far jas the chance of outside assi: ance goes under present con tions in Honan, it is to be feared Butsit is not about the sufferings of foreigners in the interior that we wish to write for the moment, deeply as we sympathize with them. It is about the far, far greater sufferings of the Chinese which form the background often too little thought about. One has never forgotten that when the foreigners captured at Lincheng were caivied off to the brigands' fastness of Paotzeku, they found there Chinese who had been so long in captivity and who had so utterly lost all hope of ever being freed, that they had gone melancholy mad. For every foreigner captured or despoiled by brigands and soldiers, it is probably no exaggeration to say that there are thousands of Chinese who suffer even worse things, Yet while the news of the foreigners? fate is flashed across the world, the miseries of the native population do not even begin to be realized Wy "those abroad who form their ideas of China from ithe glib misrepresentations of suave foreign-trained diplomats sent abroad by Peking, as it would seem, expressly to mislead the West about China, Our Kaifeng correspondent tells us that Chowkiakow was taken by the bandits on September 17 and held by them till the 23rd. It is the most important business centre in eastern Honan and there was plenty of plunder collect, no doubt. Our corres pondent continues:—The terrors of those fey days can better be imagined than described. The whole town was thoroughly looted, and property ruthlessly burnt. and destroyed. When the bandits evacuated the city on September 25 Mr. Davis was also taken away in company with a great number of cap It is said that the bandits cleaned the city of women and children and members of better class homies, and that the numbers they took with them were 80 great that it was impossible to feed them control them. The result was that hundreds dropped out by the wayside, and the letters give harrow= accounts of the refugees who, ave filtering back to the ruins of their homes, and of the dead who Fave succumbed and ave still lying unburied around the city, The horror of the scene depicted in those few sentences cannot. be imagined. Yet there is nothing new in the story, In 1922 the important market town of Liuanchow in Anhui was similarly sacked and burnt by brigands, luring five or six days, at which time, it will be remembered, Mrs. Soderstrim, of the C. I. M., was a captive of the brigands and obliged to watch their horrible doings; and Mr. Matthews and his family, of the same Mission, escaped by night in what they stood up in, all their belongings being stolen. Also we can only dimly gwess at what have been the sufferings of the Chinese in and round Sianfu, the siege of which has lasted now for several months. The case here is, per haps, the more revolting, " because both the besieging army and the defenders would pretend that China's welfare and the freedom of her people are their especial preserve.
We are sure it is not too much to that if the present suiferof Mr. and Mrs. Davis and Miss Poppins served indi to bring some ssu such woes to the Eh they would endure them gladii lor that the same might be for other foreign been similarly tried, they? Only three day gentleman, lately Hunan, told us that it was' impossible for foreigners in the treaty. ports to form an idea of what Chinese in the interior have to put up with from day 4 dds." How mich, then, jg.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.