Aug. 4.
Ir is of a piece with the Chinese sense of fitness that they should have called it the Great, or famous, River, about which we begin to-day publication of a series of articles by our special correspondent. Here we cannot see the Yangtze. At sixty miles from the sea he has already become so vast that the mind can no longer conceive of him as a viver. But go only a little way inland, say to Nanking. and see him there, immensely wide, immeasurably long and—indeseribably majestic. Tonger rivers there way be in the world—- although even this, by the latest theory, is in doubt, it seems—but none more deserving to be alled wreat. Egyptians "worship the Nile. Chinese may well worship the Yangtze.—Sometimes be overwhelms them, and every day he demands his toll of human life, a thousand w year, it is reckoned, from one end to ihe other. But the wealth he brings them in. compensation, stil more that that he might bring them, is beyond all counting.
To-day also the Yangtze has a political significance as, perhaps. never before in his ancient life, As a natural division be-, tween north and south his posi-lion is plain for all to see. But we are rather thinking of bim, not. as a barrier, but as a potential link to bind China. together. A confederation of the Yangtze Valles, with common purpose and mutual confidence, could dictate to Peking and Canton alike and bring those incompatibles into and it may be that the solution of China's troubles will yet be found on the Yangtze, with ber capital once again situate beside his tawny waters. Tt is, perhaps. the half-realized—perception of this possibility that makes of the Valley a sort of no man's land, across which rival forces and political intriguers surge and contend in futile rivalry, leaving behind them nothing but a scum of outlaws and unpaid soldiery prey upon the Chinese traders, who, with an instinct as invincible as that of the Yangtze himeelf, still go about their business in spite of flood and storm, soldier and politics 'The thermometer touslied 100.1% shade' temperature on Wednesday in Shanghai.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.