Dec. 25.
Ir has been a custom of long standing that on Christmas Day the "North China Daily News" should be relieved from publishing, and its readers from reading, or being asked to read, a leading article of the orthodox kind. For many of the years in which this excellent practice was 1 recognition, the place of the leader was taken bya poem, the product of one who was no less well known than he was widely venerated. The process of time has removed that writer to the Home country, where to-day the! wishes of many friends in China will follow him that the evening of a life so well spent, so arduously devoted to working for others, may bea long and happy one. As yet! no one has ventured to take up that, part of his work which found expression in many felicitous verses for the Christmas season. But in the meanwhile we do not think that any apology is needed for momentary disregard of any or all of the more or less burning questions with' which the leader column is usually filled. For each of us Christmas Day has its own special associations. To attempt to describe'them, even were it possible, would be an impertinence; for the thoughts that spring up so readily to-day in every mind are not the sort that} we care to discuss in public. But there is one feeling to which we may allude as the residuum, the: least common denominator, of all others, namely that for the space of one day there should be, if possible, a truce to all thoughts of business cares and rivalries, of international jealousies and of the veiled amenities of diplomatic conversations. To some extent it is inevitable that even this desire for the obliteration of all that is discordant with the essentially domestic harmony of Christmas should give way to the intense importance of the general situation in China. We cannot close our eyes to the pathetic state to which three months of civil war have reduced so large a number of the population; nor can our anxiety as to the outcome of the past few days' negotiations be relaxed even for aday. But it would serve no good purpose to discuss farther the issues with which China is confronted. The interest of the world at large is still confined to the one' desire that, by what means and under what form we would leave it to China to decide, some stable system of government, some security of lasting peace, may be born of the present controversy. And although
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.