A Nuisance for Which There is No Remedy: A'Chance for the S. M. C, to Act The smoke nuisance on the river indeed must be bad, when in the midst of riots, strikes, boycotts and threats of a new civil war, so many correspondents consider it neces: sary to put their views into writig. Nor have they said too much, fox there is not a waterside city in any civilized country where the authorities would allow a tithe of the amount of smoke with which Shang-hal is smothered every day.
It is not 30 easy to instance the remedy as it is to detail the complaint. In the first case, there is not a law in China's code, old 0. now, under which the Harbour authorities could take action, and beyond that there is the old: trouble that, even if such a law did exist, there is not the numerieat strength in the River Police to enable them effectively to enforce the law. They are unable, because of their Inck of numbers, £0 to regulate the river traffic that there shall be no congestion, or to patrol all sections with the regularity that is necessary to Prevent arms and opium smug cargo pilfering and the discharge oil waste into the river. Obviously, then, they cannot spare much time for chasing smoke fiends, In a search for information, one was buttonholed who put the suggestion:—"As_ you must have Taunches, surely you must have smoke!" Certainly, little smoke, but not as much as we get now. Then again, we have oil-burning ships, with the evitable by-product of oil-waste, but it is not considered that therefore neces we must have oil-waste in the n rund there ix @ law in force mat it, Then why not less smoke?
Yet through the smoke there breaks one tiny ray of hope. Sooner or later, practically all the launches are compelled to make a halt at one or other of the Municipal jetties, and the Municipal Council has an elastic set of by-Jaws designed to suppress all nuis~ ances, also a strong and efficient force of police whose duty it is to secure the punishment of all lawbreakers. The launches certainly are in the river, which comes under the general heading of "sovereign and therefore cannot through a telescope, but the jetties are Municipal property and even if there should prove to be some technical reason why the owner of @ smoking launch at a jetty cannot be prosecuted, surely it would he possible to forbid him further rights of usage of the jetty.
We have no authority to issue an invitation, but we can guarantee that if "a Municipal policeman wishes to obtain evidence, with plenty wf corroborative witness the Yacht Club would be pleased to allow him the run of the Foam fon any racing oveying, for the smoke that comes from' the half-dozen or so launches moored at the Peking Road Jetty is of the black the very limit in regularity and frequency of discharge. good second is the Customs Jetty.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.