Mar. 3.
Genera relief will be felt-that the Amoy boycott has been withdrawn. Not only did it inflict keveré loss on a perfectly innocent British firm, but it mnecessarily -embittered British and Chinese relations ina way that would be undesirable at any time and especially so after the ready acknowledgement made by the Chinese Government of the brilliant services done to China at Washington by Great Britain's delegates. As we showed in our article of February 10, there was never the slightest reason for dispute. Chinese amour propre was thurt by the gates at each end of the British Concession and there was a misunderstanding as to the rights over a portion of the fore-ore. The latter could easily have been settled by payment of peppercorn rent; and as for the gates, they really protect nothing. The Concession could be entered anywhere from the Chinese city ut the back if insurgents had a mind to do so; nobody lives in it; and the most valuable property, the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, is outside it. Had the Chinese openly stated their feelings, as they ultimately came to be understood, the matter could have been settled in five minutes. No doubt the advent of a new Consul, unconcerned with all that had gone before, was all that was needed to restore peace where both sides had come to perceive that there was nothing to fight about.
The Amoy boycott will not have been without its uses if it help in the avoidance of like contretemps in future. Questions of sentiment are almost proverbially more liable to make trouble than solidities of right and wrong. We are not alluding specially to Amoy, certainly implying no reflexion on anyone concerned in this affair, when we say that such questions (of sentiment) will have to be watched for with increasing care. Incidents once never heard of five miles from where they occurred now spread like wildfire from one end of China to the other, With all the magnification and distortion that might be expected, and on such the Chinese are, sometimes wrongly sometimes by no means unreasonably, most susceptible. The obvious cure is greater personal-intimacy between foreigners and Chinese, especially Young China, a phrase which, as we have observed before, means a. great deal more than the callow students for which it once seemed to stand. It is also to be remembered that this Young China will presently, be the only China to count and it is the more vital, if we wish to live peacefully, in an agreeable country which is really quite willing to continue to be agreeable to us, that we should try to understand its aspirations and tendernesses. Some'weeks ago an interesting correspondence ran in these columns on the topic of the Chinese mind. The point of interest is not so much whether there be a unique type -of mind called Chinese as what may be in it. For information of that kind such an institution as the Union Club, here in Shanghai, is a material help and one would gladly see more of them wherever foreigners and Chinese are gathered together.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.