Dec. 13.
THE information we published yesterday that the prisoners of the Honan bandits have at last been released will have been received with deep and general relief. It is true that in the main they appear to have been treated as kindly by their captors as circumstances allowed: the motive in capturing them was not antiforeignism but to bring pressure to bear on the Government. We know this from the outlaws' own statements to Mr. and Mrs. Led-gard. But durance among Chinese bandits, moving rapidly hither and thither about the country, does not admit of much pleasure in life from a European point of view, not to mention the horrors of looting and burning of which the captives were made involuntary witnesses and the ceaseless uncertainty as to their own ultimate fate. And it is just upon these experiences and the daily possibility of their occurrence, which is now the normal lot of missionaries in China, that we would dwell for a moment. There is an impression among some easily thoughtless and personally care-free people, we believe, that a missionary's life is a pretty comfortable one. It would be interesting to see how such persons would enjoy the same degree of ''comfort,'' and that not in the remote interior, but even in the big towns of Kiangsu and Chekiang where bandits are unknown.
Our readers will remember the name of Mrs. Soderstrom, English by birth but married to a Swede. She was captured at a place called Shenkiu in Honan by the brigands, who burned the town to the ground. They carted her about the country for some days and eventually attacked Yingchowfu in Anhui, which they pillaged and burned for three days, Mrs. Soderstrom being obliged to remain with them and watch these dreadful doings. When the bandits decamped, they let Mrs. Soderstrom go on the outskirts of the town and she
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.