The student body, whose intervention in political affairs meets with a good deal of adverse criticism, will, however, receive plenty of sympathy in respect of Wi the two disgraceful affairs at Anking and Peking described in our columns to-day, in which several students, professors and the Vice-Minister of Education were wounded It is of course, only an allegation that educational funds in Anking have been sequestered for the soldiers, but on general grounds there appears no reason to doubt the charge. In Peking, we know, education has been starved for months in the general impecuniosity of the Government, which merely means the malversation of public money into private pockets. Cognately to all this a Reuter telegram quotes a foreign official report from Changsha to -the effect that "the authorities of Hunan wish to impose an additional surtax on telegrams for three months, the amount being the same as that of the existing surtax." Exactly. We all remember the furious resistance of Kiangsu Chinese merchants to these famine surtaxes on the well justified ground that once a surtax is instituted it is mever repealed. And our Sianfu_ correspondent's letter to-day concludes with the observation that bad as are the professional bandits, they are nothing to the unprofessional robbers of the official class. Tha foreign observer wonders mildly how long the Chinese people will continue to endure the crushing taxation and misgovernment which Republicanism has brought them. It is easy to criticize the students: yet with all others so quiescent, so hopelessly passive to oppression, one can hardly wonder if hot-blooded youth conceives itself divinely commissioned to save the country. Were an effective organizer to come forward, the ingredients are all present for another revolution. Only—to what end?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.