Peking, July 29. Every little while the Chinese press comes out with a new story of a new secret society which 1s supposed to be either an off-shoot of the old Boxer organization or something new with similar doctrines and policies. Bhe "Hsun Tien Shih Pao" had a Tung Shan Society story to tell a day or so ago. The 'T'ung Shan Society is by no means unknown. It is a semi-religious organization with headquarters in Peking, almost next door to the Peking Union Medical College. Its members, who have Buddhist leanings, practice meditation and suspension of such natural functions as breathing with the idea of separate ing their spiritual from their physical selves and of going off on astral tours. The various units of this organization are usually pronounced harmless by the authorities but they sometimes enlist such an influential following that they develop political tendencies.
The "Hsun Tien Shih Pao" is moved to: comment upon the doings of the T'ung Shan Society by the following story:
'A certain Mrs. Ch'ien, in the town of Chehsik'ou, Yunghsunfu, Hunan, recently gave birth to a child after having been 24 months pregnant. Needless to say she was a member of the T'ung Shan Society in good standing and far advanced in the lore of the cult. The newly arrived was thoroughly abnormal, having neither ears nor eyes; but shortly after his birth he began to speak. He recited 76 sentences from the Buddhist holy books, made various prophesies and~then expired. Among other* things that were forewarned was a grand national feud in which, during the next two years, half the people would perish. The faithful would put wands bt their doors to ward off the catastrophe. Two years hence peace would he restored throughout the -land.
The above is a summary and not a translation of the Chinese press report.
The "Hsun Tien Shih Pao" takes this story as the text for a sermon against such secret societies, pointing out that superstitions of this sort lead eventually to such movements as the Boxer movement.
Actually such movements and such superstitions are not as a rule dangerous. They exist and have always existed in every community in China Unless they are given official recognition and official encouragement such as the Boxers were given by the Manchu authorities, they rarely amount to anything. Even under official patronage they never make great headway unless they are turned against the outsider. To these rules the Taiping rebellion is of course a conspicuous exception, but even in that movement the anti-Manchu inspiration carried the movement much further than mere fanaticism alone could ever have taken it. The Ko Lao Hui was always held together by anti-Manchu and anti-foreign proepaganda. It boiled over and exhausted its strength during the revolution, expending its energy upon the unfortunate Manchus in Shensi, Hupeh and elsewhere, but lost all character when the biggest leaders.-threw themselves into a modernist movement which was frankly imitative of the foreigner and therefore conciliatory.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.