A very long time will elapse before the Shensi outrage fades from the memory of the public. Mr. Stevens, the victim, has told in our columns something of what he had to endure in the hands of those military brigands who found it convenient to hold him as a hostage, but it will readily be allowed that words are inadequate to reveal the true horror of the situation. In the grip of a thoroughly barbarous crew whose sole thought of a foreign life was that it would cost Tls. 50,000, Mr. Stevens appears to have displayed an un-S.) faltering courage, and we may be permitted to pay our tribute to a very brave man. The story has an importance further than the purely personal experience of Mr. Stevens. and he calls attention to it in referring to this sum of Tls. 50,000—the price of a foreigner. That would have been a mere trifle to an official of the type of Wang Chan-yuan, had such a tragedy been added to the Wuchang and Ichang outrages, and it assuredly would not have come out of his pocket. The very mention of this matter makes it all the more a pity that bluejackets did not occupy his yamen and compel him to disgorge-Things will go from bad to worse until all these reckless ideas about money and human life are knocked on the head, and if Peking cannot do it somebody else will have to.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.