The Outraged Tombs A Kuo Min telegram from king tells us that General Yen shan, in Peking, has recommendes the formation of & special tribunal to try the soldiers arrested for loot jing the Manchu Imperial tombs. General Yen suggests four army commanders and three civil judges, and Nanking agrees. But surely before any trial, there should be ching inquiry into the real an. thors ip of the crime, So far as we are aware there has been none, although the tombs are near enough to Peking to have made investi tion easy, even in the dislocated state of affairs prevailing after the shal Chang Tso-lin's with drawal, In this connection a corres-ponent writes pertinently:
"HI chauid be remarked that the ration of the Imperial tombs has Of regret tonaiot" atory "head the past agents could obtain a warrant to search even " private residence, if they so much as thought that they detected the odour of liquor from outside the premises. Legal licence for such search, which quite recently has been banned, was known as a "smelling" warrant. All this has come to light as the result of the disappearance of more than $100,000 worth of high grade bonded whisky from the Cosmopoli tan Warehouse, in New York. W not propose to advert to the difficulty—if not the utter impossibility—of enforcing such legislation ax the Prohibition Act, but rather to muse upon smells in general, and local ones, particular, and at the same to attempt to conjure up picture of the inevitable nolishment of sections of Shanghai, did the practice obtain locally of Fuiding premises on the strength (in more senses than one) of odours emanating from them. Aroma is an in life in the Far rouved. over the outrage, Murch "circles in' Peking its advantages and In respect of the we would eite the fact that Had the tombs been broken open and the contents scattered as a matter of grave political expediency, in onder to shatter some fetish of popular adoration, we could under~ stand it. But no one suswests that the memory of Manchu yulers continues now to exercise any spell over popular imagination,—There general idea that the tombs were villed by Chu Vu-pu's troops, Dut something more definite surely needed, We think that the Narialist Government would do well to have the whole matter sifted to the bottom, To seize a few cor mon soldiers with loot in their hands is not enough. Tt is the high culprits who should be taken, oF at Joust their names made known, Desecration of graves. is peculiarly abhorrent to Chinese tradition and a few years ago had a chauffeur who never failed to identify the darkest thoroughfare A few experimental hho would smnounee, Just where we were. nice distinctions between Jessfield and Hongkew were child's play to him. As to the dissadvantages, it were superfluous to upon them in a land where, of applying for legal permission to follow up a sivan clue, a gas mask is really required. The antithetic contrast between Eastern and Western modes is once. more emphasized, In Shanghai, there are no warrants, for smells; neither is there any warrant for them, The Gentle Turk it cannot be thought that the outrage on the Manchu tombs has been treated with the energy it deserves.
In a note the other day we mentioned a report from Turkey to the effect that one of the Pashas there
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.