The Chinese Pross never lets more than a comparatively short time between publishing: accounts, generally vague as regards details fof some ultra-ambitious scheme nother which has been formulated in the brain of an official or student or somebody else. The trouble is that very few of them ever get be-the paper stage. A few years:
no end of attention was given the local Press to projects for ug the Huangpe, and running light railway to the sea wall, The light railway would certainly prove a boon to thousands of Chinese who work in Shanghai and have their homes inthe villages along the coast, for it would mean that they would be able to visit their native haunts oftener than they: can now, when they have to travel Linking up such a proposal with the very expensive one of constructing a bridge over the Huangpu has, however, been suficient to prevent it materializing, and so a useful minor project een shut out. A recollection of; this scheme is brought up by a report in the Chinese papers just now that a Chibli official has given his approval to a proposal to run long-distance "bus service between Tientsin and Hankow. As the crow] flies the distance is over 600 mile: and the Peking-Hankow Railway coarse about whi als enterprise amounts to is by far and away the longest "ous service in the world. but as China is situated to-day: there is no chance of its materializing. Just as well, for the lesson has been learned in countries which have in recent years adopted the principle of motor transport that this latter should properly be regarded mainly as a feeder to railway trunk lines. It seems likely to be many a year before over long distances motor traffic will be able to compete with the railway, and one would hardly' con-equanimity the prosect of embarking on an 800 mile Journey in a bus, The expense of the road would, of course, be enormous—all road authorities have already found that out since the enormous increase' in motor traffic of the past few years—but thi ike this do not seem to worry the visionaries in this country, It is always easy to give an academic approval to anything like this which somebody with spare time on his hands happens to think about, and the matter can always rest there.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.