June 21.
It is to be feared that those whom our Weihaiwei correspondent described in his article yesterday as prophets of smooth things' will find no lack of arguments out of his own mouth against the railway out of Port Edward which he urges the British Government to insist upon "as a guarantee of good faith on China's part and in order to save a small group of British subjects from ruinous losses.'' In passing, it would hardly be possible for the British Government, having voluntarily announced its intention to restore the Territory to China, to tack on to its promise any stipulation of the kind. Especially in view of the very slender prospects which such a railway, running not via Chefoo or another port but direct to Weihaiwei, offers either of paying for itself or making Weihaiwei pay. For, as our correspondent himself says, the situation of Weihaiwei '"'at the extreme end of the Shantung Promontory, remote from the populous producing centres of the interior is geographically most unfavourable.'' The hin-treland is mountainous and unproductive. The trade "of the port has been largely artificial, the outcome of its customs-free existence. Had the- suggested railway been built twenty years ago, as it might easily have been, before the breakwater at Chefoo now actually constructed had brought the Weihsien' railway within range of practical possibility, it is just imaginable that Weihaiwei might have. collared the trade of the northern port and even caused the silk industry to move house. But these visions if they ever existed were shattered by Earl, then Mr. Balfour's unsolicited promise to Germany that Great Britain would not attempt to build a railway out of Weihaiwei. With Tsingtao and Chefoo south and north we do not see that any future awaits Weihaiwei- as a Customs port except to relapse into what it was when Sir Frank Swettenham visited it twenty-two years ago. Year, by year its fifty miles of excellent roads will sink into a state indistinguishable from the mountain ravines which they adjoin. Even more rapidly will the young plantations with which Sir Stewart Lockhart was - beginning to clothe the barren hills be torn up' and burnt, Cinderella, no more of the Empire, and stripped of her foreign adorning, will sink back in rags among the ashes of her erstwhile prosperity.
We see no use whatever ~in shutting our eyes to the practical certainty of this picture, or in encouraging the British residents to waste their time and energy on projects, the realization of which depends upon the Chinese Government's _willingness_ - to spend money in bolstering up Weihaiwei with a railway and to forgo the money that it expects to get from the Weihaiwei Customs. But this does not mean that we do not think the British at Weihaiwei have a very good case for compensation. The trade returns of the port, which have' risen, under the British flag, from an estimated value © of $500,000 to nearly eleven millions in 1921, show emphatically that they have. Without forgetting the advantages of Weihaiwei's being a free port, this result is principally due to British mercantile energy, and not all of those concerned in it can start anew elsewhere. Besides there are professional interests in Weihaiwei as well as commercial;
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.