Aug. 22, NaturAULy the failure yesterday of four native banks ws followed by all sorts of wild rumours. In the middle of the afternoon we were assured quite positively that all passenger and freight traffic had been shut off on the. Shanghai-Nanking Railway to give way for the passage of troop trains. There is not one word of truth in the story as any scaremonger might have learnt by ringing up the railway station. As the report we print elsewhere to-day shows, the rumours of a possibility of fighting, such as come up every summer, had an indirect connexion with the bank failures, But they would really appear to have been overdue. There has been an orgy of gambling in Domestit Loans for some time past, here, in Tientsin and in Peking, as our correspondent in the latter city amusingly \described 1 few weeks ago. Some of these so-called Chinese [banks are mere cash shops which live, like the celebrated inhabitantts of the Scilly Isles, by lending each other two dollar and when the houses with real money at command shut off supplies, they went smash. It is a case of good riddance to bad rubbish, the lesson of which it is to be hoped, will not be Jost.
But while war rumours have had little enough to do with the failure and will in all cases, we sincerely trust, be soberly received, it would be idle to pretend that they do not exist. Not quite a fortnight ago we published the first news of the displeasure excited in Marshal Wu Pei-fu by the retreat into Chekiang from Fukien of two generals whom he does not like and of the Chinese expectation that he, Wu Pei-fu, would mobilize Tuchun Chi of Nanking to attack Tuchun Lu of Hangchow. Since then we have no more on the subject, because the less publicity there is of such talk, the less danger of its being realized. Furthermore we feel confident in saying that {neither Marshal Chi Hsieh-yuan nor Marshal Lu Yung-hsiang wishes to fight. What people about them may want, what others at a distance may conspire, is another matter; and the influence of such as these, if only sufficient scare can "be worked up, is not negligible. But, after all, it is the Tuchun who moves troops about and we are sure that the two immediately concerned will realize the danger of giving substance to gossip by "any such movement.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.