The last 10 days have seen a most remarkable drop in the prices of corn and other grains. Food costs had risen to heights undreamt ed of even in the worst famine years and many efforts were made to induce the foreign members of the community to testify te the statement that a famine' was raging. The latter were ready to testify to the exorbitant rates for grain, but could not be made to see that there was any actual famine resulting therefrom. It is true that the crops last year had been scanty, but they had brought fine prices and everybody agreed that it was the export of grain that had forced prices up. The foreigners took the ground that if there was enough grain to export, famine relief was not justified for there is bound to be a quid pro quo. Money was never more plentiful and labour is harder than ever to get. Members of the Presbyterian Mission have offered work to every teller of a hard-luck story and not one offer has been taken up!
We lately enjoyed two excellent rains at made-to-order intervals. Fear of high water caused the opening of the dams on the Salt canal, which promptly ran dry and cut off the export of grain to the south. Finally there arrived several new cargoes of Manchurian corn and our "famine" collapsed utterly before these circumstances.
Your editorial a few days since called attention to the finding of "faithful friends of Wu Pei-fu" in the north. Yesterday I was chiding a prominent Chinese near-official on his own speedy change of heart and he remarked deliciously, "We have a saying, 'The victor iis a-king, the loser is a thief.'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.