The necessities of China's railways, their debts, the loans raised on' their account and squandered no one knows ho the ruin to which years of civil war have brought them, the unchecked meddling and' annexation of revenues by the military—all this was well set out in the comprehensive report of July 24 by Mr. Wang Po-chun, Minister of Communications, to which we referred yesterday. In the following month the National Communications Conference sat in Nanking for a week and attacked the evils of the situation with great Vigor. Ag too often, how-could produce w which even then were vei from being ideal.
Obviously the first step is to put the existing railways li thorough working repo pure conjecture, mei mentioned in passing, it might almost be worth while to write off the waggons, or at least large proportion of them, the military have annexed tracks. It is unlike that they will be returned; it is more unlikely that the majority of them would be worth the cost of repair if they were. There is the further consideration that railway restoration is not block ed by the lack of funds which is the perennial obstacle to so many schemes of reform in China, Money is actually in ments' in 1945. The last re-n, however, is open to amendment, for it seems clear that if the railways can be put in order, the Canton-Hankow line completed and all efficiently run, the railways themselves should easily be able to bear the cost of educational grants. Since the Delegation got back to England at the close of 1926, circumstances in China have made impossible to put their recommendations into effect. But the time has surely come to consider whether it is not now feasible to act upon them.
It stands to reason that there must be a very clear, hard-and-fast understanding as to the control of expenditure. We are ware that we touch on a sore point; but under present condi-tien the Government is still in to extend and consolidate rity, few Chinese we: that of the millions of dollars going into the remote interior, none too much would actually reach the railways. An incident from the past suggests the solution. When the Nanking city railway, which runs from Heiakuan to the Tartar city, was being built. in the years 1909-10, the then Viceroy Tuan. Fang engaged a foreign engineer and made him solely responsible under himself for the work.
The engineer was accountable to the Viceroy personally: whatever he wished to purchase or whatever he required done he referred to the Viceroy and nobody else was permitted to inter-fore. Much the same system is actually in force in the Salt Gabelle, in which foreign inspectors are directly responsible to the Minister of Finance for collection of the revenue, So engineers retained to railways in order be amenable to the Minister of Communications and to nobody else, Their engagements might Lo for a given number of years, during which the requisite num-Ler of Chinese experts could be trained to take their places, Tt is no dis compliment to say that the latter hardly exist at the present time. Conditions have been all against them. But there is not the slightest doubt that, given time and a fair chance, they could be produced, There remains the all-import~ ant question of how to safeguard the railways and their ment a outside ence, since it is obvious that, unless this can be guaranteed, it ix merely waste of bre talk of rehabilitating the rail-and running them on a business footing. Here. again, solution suggests itself from Everybody elled by train in China is familiar with the file of soldiers on platforms to greet every train as it arrives, To appearances they do nothing. else, but there is no. sufficient reason why they might not made to do 4 great deal. The appeal now ix to com who have a name and rey before all the world, Chiang Kai Peng Yuchsiang, Yen Hsi= khan, Li Chi-sen and Lu Change lin, Cannot they choose a rim= ber of their best men, have them properly trained and armed, see that they are well paid, fed, housed and clothed, and appoint them as railway guards, not merely to parade on platforms, Wut to protect the railway star interference and to make occasional excursions up and down the line warning to outlaws?—The expense at the outset might be somewhat heavy in time, the railways could meet the cost of such guards and hardly know they were paying for them, so greatly must" revenue increase, Moreover, above, there already are the funds, which might so easily be trade available, It is a question only of dealing with facts in a practical spirit.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.