"Once again one is to ask, How long will Nationalist officials continue to allow the boycott pickets to plunder their fellow-countrymen and enrich themselves by open theft under a hypocritical mask of patriotism? New iniquities are reported this week by our Swatow correspondent: the Kuangtung pickets, he tells us, are trying to compel Chinese landlords to evict Japanese tenants and force coal-dealers to stop selling Japanese coal. The usual registration fee exacted of those who cannot turn out their tenants and must, for want of any other, sell Japanese coal, shows clearly enough what the pickets are after. Round Shanghai the Anti-Japanese Association con tinues to seize Japanese cargo daily: in one case, recorded in last' month's police report, a Chinese merchant had to pay $95,000 to recover his goods. It is licensed brigandage pure and simple, and a more profitable iniquity was never invented by. the scum of China, For a brigand, if caught, is usually shot, But a member of the Anti-
Japanese Association may steal ud fill his pockets heart's content, and he is extolled asa patriot and smiled upon by officials.
The fact of the negotiations with Japan having come to a deadlock will no doubt be seized on as a pretext for even more ardent depredations by the pickets, while officials will con tinue to excuse their indifference by pretending that they cannot interfere with a popular movement.
So far as Japan is con-cor ed, she could presumably stop the boycott if she wished to do so and her losses are her affair, But have the Nationalist officials ever reflected on the serious harm that they do to China by thus encouraging the pickets? First, there is the damage to China's prestige abroad: circumstances have changed in the past eighteen months and people abroad have a much more correct idea of conditions in China than th had. The boycott is a very black mark againat the nev: regime.
Secondly. there 's the harm done to Chinese, trade and the increased costs of living for dinary people who, deprived of necessaries cheaply supplied by Jap: pay more ILM, the King from a portrait by E. 0. Hoppo. wants in other But possibly worst of all, the officials are breeding up deliberate lawlessness. and encouraging a large class of men to look to crime—theré is " no other word for it—as a leg timate livelihood. And this has been going on for over three and a half years, beginning with the Doycott of 1925. These people change their character as they are boycott pickets,.tomorrow strike leaders, the: day after communists, Whatever offers the best prospects. of plunder under official patronage, that is their business. Sooner or later they may turn upon the officials themselves, That would probably be consolation to many of their victims to-day, But it would not help China much., It is impossible to allow a large class of professional wrongdoers like the boycott societies to fatten itself on the community, without serious results for the whole State.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.