The more one ponders over this ook the more one realises the ap: Blcabilty of a erticism "Mr. Ransome recites of Wilde in his "Lie "in the ext. sear he wae martin shared Wilde' own enjoyment Seo "hel not" choose Tul'stradk the Soe Substitute Moscow for Anderson, Soviet understood. He has enmeshed the Chinese Natlonalist movement in a web of Soviet texture, and witnessing the Chinese attempts to adjust the fabric to its own body and give it a semblance of a garment, he vainly imagines that by training the lines of the vesture he is solving the Chinese Puzzle. There are two elements in China" which Ransome does not begin even to understand, One is the Chinese themaelves—the book proof of this. The moment he sees 2 real Chinese his eyes grow dim, his touch becomes awkward, and he ropes about in critical darkness, The others the normal Britisher domiciled in China. The chapter entitled "The Shanghai Mind" is amusing, but probably less than partly true. Call it "Some Shanehai Minds" and it might pass. Diehards there are in every countts ut had the average Briton Shanghai been the supl imaginative, pompous fool he pillory Jes Ransome would never have come out to China' for the "Manchester Guardian." Without Laneashite there would have been "Guardian" and the Manchester cotton merchant knows how much he is indebted to Shanghai, The Usual Spoon-feeding There.is no space to deal with the amazing misreading of the Hankow and Kiukiang situations. Suffice to say that Ransome was not fan eyewitness of the gellling times there places went through. He was dependent on more than secondary sources for his information, It is a matter of speculation whether Mr, Ransome ever knew that before hho reached China, his visit and its object was known to the Nationalist leaders and their Russian advisers. His visit was prepared for. The very treatment to be shown to him way settled before he reached Hankow. No hissing and spitting at him when he walked in the Hankow streets. That form of srentle recreation was confined to other ilk than that of the one who would be prepared to enter and to champion the cause he came out to investigate. Recent events have more than shown the inadequacy of our author's estimate of the situation out here. The Nationalist movement has probably come to in China. The earlier leaders, joxieated with a quick success they never dream tot, and faseinatseemed to different light than when Ransome 18 among them. The Chinese Nationalist themselves are shedding the Soviet accretions as the have ridded their house of their Bolshevik: mentors. The reaction against them in' the provinces is acute and thorough and was expressed in Canton by wholesale massacre. The split in the Kuomintang is far more radical than is indicated in Mr.
Ransome's chapter. Tt is a revolution within a revolution and the fact that so many of the leaders in the new government in Nanking have served in responsible, some of them ministerial, positions in Peking is surely of import relative to the altered political views of the Kuomintang. The fact is, and Mr. Ransome in his uncritical enthusiasm for the now extinct Nationalists as he knew them has never quite realized it. that the purpose of the Nationalists in using Soviet Advisers was as much to take advantage of their methods, not for the new structure of Chinese society, as to learn how to invent and use slogans which might possibly provide rallying points for anti-foreign agitation. Failing any, adequate prineiplee of abstract loyalty to which appeal could be made, the bid was "on the ground of the two most powerful motives in human nature—fear, Imperialism, self interest, an immediate economic kingdom of heaven, from the' legations, ete, sees the child receive money from a charity able singing girl and refers to p coarse st terms. Still the Ai can fostermather elects to adopt unknown dumb white child. The
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.