The Commissioner of Police commented in last week's Municipal Gazette on the regrettable decline of the Street Unions, from the promising aims with which they started two years ago to mere interference and petulant obstruction, culminating in an extraordinary outburst of hysteria over the shooting by Peters, the Cingalese, of twa Chinese in North Szechuen Road, with demands that he be hanged, drawn and quartered before ever he had been brought to trial. Had any foreigner behaved like this, he would, of course, immediately have been committed for contempt. That the Street Unions were hardly considered worth' taking so seriously has emboldened them to write to the Chinese Commissioner for Foreign Affairs to request the Senior Consul to have Peters executed forthwith. Now this is really outrageous. Peters has been sentenced and that sentence will be carried out at due date and the attempted interference of the Street Unions is a piece of impertinence which calls for a sharp rebuke. It is to be observed that nothing but the security and even-handed justice of life in Shanghai makes their agitations possible. We do not find Street Unions in Ichang and Wuchang, for instance, agitating even for such things as would naturally be a union's concern—still less calling peremptorily on the Tuchun: to execute all who looted those cities, A month or two's life*under their own officials would do these busybodies a great deal of good.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.