Around Loyang all villagers are lend its.. The east village loots the west village and the west village returns the compliment, In between hose perennial humourist come the Frasshopper and the locust and the Rival clans unite to loot the suburbs 4 Loyang. The tax collector car-tried the dismal motif throughout the verforinanee. He is the lad who duty the "tin hat" on the situation. Last year's crops were extremely and the winter wheat. promises remething like seven-tenths crop, with fair November rains, but the best that the land can do' will lot niven official exactions, so what's the use? Banditry naturally waxes or wanes in Keeping with taxation, Of the tax collector is unrelenting. In poor district, the bandits are com mwensurably ruthless, killing resisters and burning crops when the village's cannot put up money to. redeem them, Thanks to these purely poli tical conditions thirty per cent. of the Loyang agricultural population on the verge of destitution, true that there has not been a re. epcetable rainfall for the better part of a year but this would not mean s0 much if there had not been military exhaustion of reserves, bandit ex-
ion. hnustion and relentless tax cole In the autumn of 1928 the bandits were particularly merciless. Then} there was bandit suppression, involving a military influx, and" now the military have been much more] systematically exhaustive than the audits. There were big concealed stores in the mountains southwest} of Loyang after the excellent crops! of 1027 which the bandits failed to fax to the limit of endurance, but which the military have systematically uncovered and eaten. A Chin. ese Christinn evangelist reports fully upon heavy taxes, bandit. exactions, military expropriations, Josses because of dificult and expensive transport—all sedate and conservative estimates—but he fuses to report upon prospects, and that for the very joo reason' that] Veing a native he would be a double-dyed traitor if he revealed for} publication what his mountain home-Innd hoped to produce and live upon next year.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.