Nov. 30.
Our correspondent, Mr. Rodney Gilbert, gave, in our Saturday's issue, an impression of the political situation in China as seen from Peking. No one is better qualified than Mr. task of this kind but there are necessarily blanks in the story, which it needs a writer, or several writers in other localities to fill in, Reading the sequence of current events in China is like a fortune-teller gazing into a bow! of water in order to foresee the future. In this ease the water is muddy and no clear vision is possible. The Chinese themselves have a phrase which aptly sums up the situation. They say of men embarked on a common enterprise that they are like fellows "tung chuang yi mung" who sleep in the same bed but! each dreams a different dream. The Tuchuns who are now setting China ablaze are allied in different combinations. Each dreams his own dream and the one thing common to them all is that the central figure in each dream is the dreamer himself. Our Correspondent remarked, justly that while formerly the commanders of army divisions were loyal or disloyal to the Government as their own interests prompted, they were usually {faithful to their Master, to Chang, 'Tso-lin or Wu Pei-fu or Feng hsiang. But now this last shred of loyalty is gone and everyone, frankly, fights for his own hand. The soldiers are willing to follow their immediate superior rather! than give allegiance to their' commander in chief. There are two reasons for this. Their lives and fortunes are at the disposal] of the Divisional commander. If! he suspects them of plotting against him he can, and will, shoot them on the spot without reference to the higher command. But if the individual soldier's life is at the disposal of his superior officer, that officer's life is in the hands' of his men. If they are seduced by promises or bribes! from outside sources he will get as short shrift from a mutinous battalion as the units of that battalion would get from him if, in his opinion, the death of that unit would be to his advantage._ If the commanders fight for their! own hands there appears to the soldiers no reason why they should not follow such an excel-
Tent example and sell themselves to the highest bidder in the opposing armies. It is for this reason that there is no perminence in the results achieved by the interminable internecine strife of which we are the wit nesses and the victims.
Every commander of an army) wants a place. He wants a province that he may rule and from the revenues of which he car pay hiis troops. Subordinate commanders want to be in charge of 'a district from which they can secure pickings from illegal taxes or other devious methods well known to the initiated. The nation is regarded as a roast from which one may carve and come again and, all the while, there is an undercurrent of intrigues on the flow of which the under dog hopes to rise to the top. It might appear that the cure for this wold be to devise
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.