Peking, Sept. 21.
Foreign travellers, returning from the Suiyuan district, report that banditry in the vicinity of Paotou and Kueihuacheng are on the increase. The native Chinese are disappointed in Ma Fu-hsiang, who came: from Kansu_ with a glowing record behind him. Formerly a very active and public-spirited man, he seemp to have given up hope of controlling the situation on his section of the Mongol border anti to have shut himself up in his yamen and resigned the arduous work of bandit hunting, which has never been easy along the skirts of the Ta Ch'ing Shan, to his sons.
It is explained that he had a very discouraging start when he accepted the post of Tutung of Suiyuan. He was unable to bring move than a few ying of his own men from Kansu and when arrived in Kueihuacheng he found that he had fallen heir to the command of a horde of his predecessor's unpaid and undisciplined O0ps. The numbers of these™ were swollen by hundreds of soldier refugees from Urga after the Ungern campaign. Expeditions against the bandits who are coming from the south and are fairly flooding the district, serve rather to discredit than to do honour to Ma's reputation, because the soldiery behave with more licence than the bandits. On a recent expedition west of Paotou, into the vicinity of Wuyuanbsien, the troops got completely out of hand and outbid the bandits in their outrages upon the pioneer settlements in this thinly settled district.
Mr. Jud Madsen has returned to Shanghai after a stay of over four months in the Capital. During Mr. Madsen's stay in the north he was commissioned to sketch and paint a number of portraits, among whom were six of tha leading foreign ministers, Sir Francis Aglen, Mr. Sidney Barton, 0.M.G., and several Chinese ministers and notabilities.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.