IN Tuesday's issue we referred! to the questi in. of increasing the Customs 'a demand for which is certain to be heard from. Peking before long, even if no such suggestion comes from other quarters: and two main reasons were i for regarding this project with very great reserve. In the first place, it is not at all certain that the Anfu Government now sitting in Peking will endure: there are great forees in opposition to i how great we can only guess," but sufficiently visible to make a renewed -outbreak of civil war extremely: probable.
In the second place, while it is quite true that no government in recent years has been able to establish itself in' Peking for want of money, the obvious answer is that it had no money because it had not, either, the confidence of the country} years it has merely become one}
hamper trade. It is not unlikely that the Special Conference} would obtain the abolition of! likin without great difficulty, but} it would only be the name that would. go. Provincial officials would compensate themselves either by inventing some new] tax, or by increasing others. If) the intention is to improve the conditions of internal trade, then all these irregular impositions must go. A further consideration. In the "British Chamber of Commerce Journal" for December last, a contributor pointed out that "Native Customs duty' (which of course is collected by the Inspector-General of Customs) only differs from likin in that one is a Central Government: tax and the other a Provincial levy. And he goes on to quote] this glaring anomaly:
The Native Custom House at Wuhu, y virtue of the Protocol of 1907, controlled by the foreign Commissioner of Maritime Customs,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.