June 26.
At times in the past the Shanghai Volunteer Corps has! [suffered from periods of a lack of enthusiasm such as it at present may be said to be experiencing. One of these times was just under ten years ago, and the circumstances are of interest to-day. Possibly it would be wrong to say that all units were then reduced in strength and efficiency, but at any rate the matter Was serious enough call for much hard thinking. The reason for that state of affairs }was easy enough to understand, as it ame in the way of a It used to be said that the one religion the Chinese really believed in was the worship of ancestors. This is one of the most primitive forms of faith andiis held by some philosophers to be the ultimate origin of all religion, As practised in China it had much to commend it. The classical writings hold that filial piety is the root of all virtue and ancestor worship is but_an extension of the natural affection. of children towards thei parents, It had inherent in it certain superstitions against which the Christian. church warred and its ban against the practice was severely criticized bby pious Chinese who saw nothing but what was good. and admirable in the observance.
The worship that is tered at the atin of Ds. sun natural reaction from the war years, when people not altogether unreasonably felt that they could take life somewhat less strenuously. During the war those left in Shanghai had carried out their duty creditably land loyally by the Volunteers, {doing their best to make up the depleted strength of units which had sent many men to the front, and when the Armistice came the older people felt in many leases that they could retire. At the same time the men who were at that juncture arriving in Shanghai had practically all been at the front, and, feeling that they had done their bit, were in the first place disinclined to get into uniform again, even though only for the comparatively brief training periods called for under the constitution
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.