Saturday last was an important day in the history of the Marine Engineers' Institute, one of the oldest of Shanghai's social insti tutions. Founded more than 50 years ago, chiefly as a place for quiet shore recreation for the engineers} of China Coast ships, the Institute) hag during all the intervening years played its part with conspicuous Success and has come to be recogniz-as the social centre, not only of the engineers of ships, but of practically' all kinds of mechanical engineers and allied professions "in Shanghai But we feel we are betraying no secret in saying that during the las: few years the Institute has been faced with progressively more dificult times; and while there has never been the probability of having to close down, times, during the last three years especially, have been so hard as to give the Committee seriously to consider many remedies to the unsatisfactory state of affairs,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.