Dec. 9.
"THE history of the Chinese Fostal: Service has ever been record of advancement in face of difficulties, and obstacles successfully overcome." This sentence opens the annual report on the Chinese Post Office for the year 1924. The worst of us may be excused for occasionally blowing a modest fanfare on our own trumpet, and in this case the pride of the Chinese Post Gflice is easy to understand and appreciate, for the quotation is but a plain statement of fact, and, moreover, a fact that has not too many parallels in Chi government services. In such circumstances, the trumpet almost of its own accord goes again to the herald's lips, The success of the Post Office was achieved under the most adverse conditions, for throughout the year hostilities we practically continuous in one part of, the country or another trade was depressed: railway ices were disorganized, neceasitating the re-organization of courier lines in distant places where earlier progress had fostered the belief that the last had been seen of this method of delivery: funds were held up b cause of the embargo on slive and the withdrawal of troops, from districts where they had been stationed to preserve order, gave the bandits a free hand once more, with the resultant robbery of mails and the murder and kidnapping of postal servants, With all these obstacles to surmount, the Post Office nevertheless carried 522,852,095 articles of mail matter, an increase of approximately forty-xina millions in the year. To make one wonder the more, out of a total revenue of $28,267,114, the Department paid all exper and carried forward a working balance of $183,414.
China has an area of approximately four and a quarter million square miles, much of which it extremely difficult territory to traverse on account of geological formation, quite apart from such man-made difficulties as have already been referred to; it has a population estimated at about four hundred millions, and a large proportion of the mail matter—probably greater in respect to the whole in this country than in most other countries—either has to be shipped ous er taken in, thus adding to the work. Yet with all this, the stof of the Post Office appeals to one og numerically rather small, and one's appreciation of their work consequently is the greater. At the close of 1924 the staff con-isted of 121 foreigners and only 25,590 Chinese, these figures including everyone from humble coolies and a solitary multigraph operator up to the Commissioners.
The report notes a continuing and satisfactory decrease in the quantity of native clubbed mails dealt with, testifying to the access of the national Post Office in competition with the long-established but' out-of-date min-chu and hsin-ko, The cbuntry would be the better off if the end of other ancient institutions such as "squeeze," likin and rule by the military, could be reported as approaching aa rapidly and as certainly.
The Director of Posts this year has confined his report to a bald atement of facts, mostly in tables, and in the main leaves the student of them to form his own conclusions as to what they indicate in the progress' of the nation. 'The Peking district was the only one in which there was a-decrease of postal business, iis beth Laid to the lame of the hostilities' ju the' autumn, jut, Wwhatever{he' eauise, it, war, a Very bad" example for the Gapital to set. One of the mose
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.