May 2
The announcement of Japan's determination to land a substantial defence force at Tsingtao will come as a genuine relief to all the foreign communities in the north. Just before the raid on the Soviet Embassy, when the news of the Nanking horror was still fresh in all minds, the threatened collapse of the Northern armies, combined with feverish and expensive Red efforts throughout the Northern provinces to work up anti-foreign demonstrations, threw Peking and Tientsin, Tsingtao and Tsinanfu, into a state of mind that was almost a panic. The vigorous suppress ion of the Reds, coinciding with Chiang Kai-shek's rebellion! against the Hankow regime, restored confidence temporarily, but the order still stands that if the Southerners take Hsuchow fu on the Tsin-Pu Railway] or Chengchow on the Peking-Hankow line, the time will have come for a general evacuation, lor for heavily reinforced de. fences.
The thought of such an evacnation, entailing great dis. comfort and enormous losses before the advance of, a horde of ruffians whose pretence to real military organization or efficiency isan impertinence, is much more irritating than terrifying. Tt has been hoped against hope, therefore, throughout the North that before the emergency arose, some one of the Powers would reshape its policy on more virile lines and prepare to give residents of the communities that have not yet been swamped by the anti-foreign movement the protection that they have always assumed would be forthcoming fu such an emergency. The commercial and missionary pioneers who have invested their lifelong energies, as well as their capital, in Chinese ports and interior cities have never been led to believe that if a repetition of the Boxer movement threatened them, they would be invited to step out empty-handed and watch, from the shelter of some obscure lodging house in Shanghai, or Dairen, or Kobe, their politicians demonstrating their sympathetie understanding of the legitim-jate aspirations of rampant 'The men and women' who have dweltered and steamed in an abominable climate to make
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.