June 7.
Tue launch of the good ship Mandarin recorded in our columns of Friday's issue is an event the importance of which merits more than a passing notice. Had someone in the pre-historic days "before the war' suggested that in 1920 China would build and launch a ship of 14,750 tons and that the ship would be built to the order of one of the foremost industrial nations in the world he would have been regarded as crazy. Yet the thing has been done and four hundred guests journeyed up river to see the great freighter glide into the water as gracefully as a wild duck alighting on a stream. Tt was a great thought that emanated from the mind of that official of the American Shipping Board who first suggested that four of the ships needed so badly in those days of submarine warfare should be built here. Those were the days when deeds of unparalleled heroism were being performed daily in the trenches by quite ordinary ""Tommies" and "Dough. boys."' These heroisms: had a reflex action on the minds of men in -other fields and -resulted in spacious conceptions and generous impulses which encouraged the hope that ''after the war' a new and better world would be called into being. We have now sunk back to the old level of international jealousy and little ness and the high hopes of optimists have faded like the iridescence of a summer sunset.
It is no derogation to the good work done by the Kiangnan Dock to point out that this success should be taken merely as a stepping stone to further achievements. Between a ten-knot freighter and an ocean liner there is still a great gulf fixed and the supremacy of the Clyde and the Tyne will not be menaced by the Huangpu for some years to come. Moreover, we do not know how
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.