July 1, Tue British community in Shanghai will join heartily with their French friends to-day celebrating the Fourteenth, democracy's day and anniversary of an event which helped to change the face of Europe. For long years now, the communion of the French and British peoples in Shanghai has been of the most cordial and helpful character, and both have had the good sense not to allow unhappy pre-war differences among diplomats to endaner a firmly established friendship. Unfortunately, as the latest developments show, the task of justing French and British polices in relation to Germany continues to present grave difficulties, and it {8 to be feared that Mr.
Ramsay MacDonald, dominated by the desire to secure a settle ment which shall satisfy the just claims of France and, 80 far may be, remove cause of future strife, yet finds himself in no less difficult a position than that of his predecessors. He has been prepared to make concessions, but there are points beyond which even a Labour Government, with its traditional dislike of the old diplomacy, cannot go. France has a just debt and peremptorily demands payment. Britain agrees, but, always concerned with. the maintenance of her great foreign markets, cannot afford to see one of them economically crushed. Frankly, it is a matter of self-interest on both sides, and concessions will have to be made, Once a final amicable settlement ig arrived at, Europe will have a chance of settling down and the resumption of normal conditions will be of the utmost benefit to all, Without such settlement, politfeal and economic conditions must continue in their present uncertain and disorganized state, actually harmful and potentially disastrous. There must generous compromise if peace is to become an established reality, and we trust that the British and French leaders will find speedy path to this very desirable cal. tsen's charming article in the supplement, "Back to the Interior," to realize how vast a population there is whose steady character and anefent philosophy remain as they were centuries ago, But more than this discovery, the moral of which may not be altogether palatable to the progressive, there are going on behind the screen of political tribulation enormous changes and a great mass of work is being done which calls urgently for attention, Some time ago a Shaohsing merchant drew the writer's attention to what is being done in education. "When I was young, he said, "nobody thought girls wanted education. Now it is absolutely demanded for them and the number of schools in my home country is astounding." What is even more amazing is the work that Madame Hsiung Hsi-ling describes in this number (the article came too late for the supplement) to bring learning within the reach of all by means of "the 'Thousand Characters.'
In ways such as this, in the cultivation of science and multiplication of hospitals, the influence of modern thought is not confined to' coteries of individuals but is spreading to every part of China.
What will be the outcome of it all, we can but speculate. To many thinkers it appears impossible that republicanism, the merits of which are doubtful even in the West can ever take firm root in so alien a soil as that of the Orient, steeped in traditions of paternal government, alike in state, village and family, through thousands of years. But while we strive to look into the future, at least taking note of the things about us from which the future may be builded, we may bethink' ourselves of the past. In the long, long history of China thirteen or fourteen years are a very! little space of time, even in comparison with other similar periods dividing one form of government lor dynasty from another. Brigandage, too, and difficulties over the treaty rights have occurred again and again even in the comparatively brief time of foreign residence in China, just as virulently as we find them to-day... What-. ever China may yet become, we make too much of the tribulations
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.