Apr. 9. hoped that suc will be. made henceforth to issue both Budget and Report simultaneously as in previous years. income has risen mand w half million ist year to well evi twelve millions, Indeed when we add on the recorded deficit of Tis, 569,620, no doubt due to last year's defence needs, ordinary income is well on the way millions. The The British army recently held a field day to practise cer tain manquvres intended to demonstrate the advantages of a mechanized force. An army that would not only move as a machine but would also be composed of machine units instead of foot and horse as in former days, This is beyond doubt the age of machinery. We live and move and have our being in and through the operation of iron and steel apparatus. Professor Beblen in America and a but it will be very bad luck if "YD this is not recouped, to raise the total of municipal revenue stil higher. Provision is made for fifty additional foreign police and 186 Chinese, and this proposal should meet with general approval. Chinese and foreign community alike have cause to be grateful to the splendid police force of Shanghai. Even 20, however, it must plainly be said that our resources are not adequate for the repression of kidnappers and armed robbers, nor, it may safely be added, will any'force suffice until the' Provisional Court la effectively equipped to deal with miscreants, This point may be pi ed upon the notice of the new Chinese Councillors, who know far better than any foreigner does what extortions Chinese of Shanghai are enduring. The account of proposed extraordinary expenditure should allay the quite unfounded excitement of certain Chinese agitators over the Council's imaginary scheming to construct more roads outside the Settlement. Extraordinary projects are modest, as is the amount of the Joan foreshadowed. Repayment of the Short Term Loan of 1918 is included with the constructional and other works to be met by extraordinary revenue. Which raises the question: Since when has it been the Council's practice to pay off old loans by contracting new ones?
One bf our readers asked a few days ago whether and when the 'Mynieipal Economy Com-rittes's report fs to. be publish td, Reference to the good influence jof that Committee appears in connexion with the Health Department's estimates which Have been cut down by Tie, 127390, but nowhere else that we' can see, although the Committee's hand may have been omori iavistniy, Bit the point crmphnsize fs" tnat the pub ite writer named R. M. Fox in England—a man who has himself passed through the workshop—have written books to prove that the men who tend machines be-some like them; they are ives mechanized. Kapek's play, R.U.R. was produced in London to emphasize the and it has added the word "Robot" to the English language. In that play the actors are automata; they no longer speak and act Mike rational beings but moved by an impulse given a master hand pressing a button.
The books we are a protest age dation of manhood involved in the mechanizing process. © They. assert that a machine is an ugly, ruthless, monster and that the man who controls it is, in turn, controlled and demoralized by it, It is quite true that the industrial age has imposed hardship on the workers. There have been, and still are, shops where the employees are mercilessly sweated and live from day to day on the ragged edge of want, But such things existed before the advent of machinery. Some of Barrie's earlier books give us glimpses of the life of weavers, in Scottish villages, who worked at hand-looms in their own houses. No men in these days work from daylight to dark as did those wage slaves. They were bowed with stooping over their task and earned in a weer wages which a workman of today would not reckon high if received for one day's labour.
'The writer has seen women spinning cotton in a Chinese village and heard the hum of the spinning wheel when the cock had already voiced the com-' ing of dawn. These women tolled at night because then the children were asleep and they' could be uninterrupted at their task, They were so far "mechanized" that they extinguished the tiny lamp, the only illumination the house boasted, and spun
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.