Saturday's telegram stating that the first real piece of business in years transacted between Russia and the United States has been in furs recalls unsuccessful attempts made from Siberia to market such articles in Shanghai. At various times within the past three years Russian merchants have reached here with' samples of hides and furs for sale, and apparently whole warehouses somewhere in Siberia were full of them. The trouble was that they had been in storage so long that they were no longer of commercial value; if not moth-eaten they were otherwise perished, and business worth speaking of was impossible. The reason of this was the prevailing ignorance of the Bolsheviks about trade of any sort, their sheer lack of knowledge that articles of commerce could go to rack and ruin while in storage. They refused to release these Cargoes until they were spoiled, and so lost a very considerable amount of money, a good deal of which could no doubt have gone into their own pockets, At length they seem to have found it advisable to give business experts some sort of free hand and, if so, the business in furs with America may prove satisfactory, although one would not care. to rely too much on mere samples.
More or Less The story of the death of Mr. Farnham, of Hankow, killed in a motor accident between Siangtan and Changsha, is a vivid instance of the truth of Kipling's well known verses about "all along of doing things rather more or less" and. the consequences in Asia. A Renault seven-seater car was hired for the journey: first of all it would not start; when it did, it had to stop twice in a few miles with engine trouble. The travellers were 80 much delayed that darkness came on, when it was found that the lamps were not in working order. Mark the sequel when the crash came Had it been daylight (as it might have been if the engine had been running properly) or had the head hight of the motor been in working order, there would have been no difficulty' in negotiating the bend but as it was the chauffeur failed to swerve in time and the car mounted the roadside and turned over into a deep ditch.
The whole story reeks of culpable tut unhappily typical carelessness. There is not jo Chinese ferry heat running on inland waters ~vhich is not habitually and criminally overloaded. There is not a steam-launch that has been for more than a few months under Chinese management whose continued running is not a miracle. As for motor-cars we see often enough in Shanghai what they come to when left to uncontrolled Chinese management—highly costly cars, obviously almost new, but making a noise like a threshing machine. Where life is so prolific as in China it is held cheap and accidents attract little attention. But the utter slackness that will not devote a few moments' daily care to keeping valuable machinery in decent erder is at the root of far more calamities in China today than a tew motor smashes, "Tariff of Abominations"
Nobody is likely to have believed that the new American. Tariff would be popular in any country outside the United States, but it might have been presumed that no great measure of unpopularity would attend upon it in its country of origin. As a matter of fact, however, news is filtering through to show that even there at is not regarded universally as a blessed thing. One or two recent messages in fact appearing in Japanese papers suggest that it is even disliked, and, by Mr. Lamont's criticisms to-day, with reason. Still when a New York firm of stockbrokers describe it as the "Tariff of Abomination" in their weekly publication entitled the "Financial Review" we may be more than a little surprised. In the article dealing with the tariff they state
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.