When the late President Warren Gamaliel Harding coined his famous phrase "Back to normalcy" in his inaugural address to the United States Congress he gave official recognition to a condition of things which had always existed as a form of recuperation from past difficulies but nobody had just quite phrased it as he did. Purists might quarrel with him over the use of the word "normalcy' when two other words exist in the English tongue which convey the same meaning, but he imposed an emphasis on this process which gives it an additional significance, He never meant that a country or a people could return to the same basis to back-fire. This proges start-which existed before the difficulty occurred, He really meant that the country or the people should return to a basis of stability not quite the same as that which existed before but modified by the new conditions which the difficulty had created. It was merely an expression of accommodation which this amazing human race, of which Shanghai people have recently found themselves to be somewhat harassed members, is able to adapt itself at any given moment, This process of "Back to normalcy" finds Shanghai people still gasping for breath. Any resident of Shanghai for the past eight years or so remembers many emergencies when Chinese armies chose to start their little disagreements on the city's doorstep, but with that unconcern' which has marked Shanghai's hectic existence there has been permitted no serious interference with the normal conduct of every day True, trading statis-registered a gloomy reaction which disturbs those people who usurp the doctor's function and study the thermometer of ce; mercial activity, but Shanghai has continued to exist and thrive on the principle that such troubles are merely sent to try us. They might have been worse, but there has been change in common standards, The present trouble happily nearly at an end, ha: proved, however, to be something different "from anything this community expected. Seven weeks of curfew, fierce and intensive warfare' not so far from anybody's home, daily gunfire and bombing along a line which amazingly respected the Settlement's borders, and nightly bombardments which, horrible as they were at the beginning, developed into await ed lullabies in the end, changed the general outlook at' the end of the trouble. People who zealously objected to such an interference with the liberty of the subject as the curfew portended are now regretting that it should be lifted. The very people who stoutly supported the city's reputation for night life are now the people who boast that it gets them to bed earlier at night and they enjoy the beneficial change. The "boom, boom" of the guns which took such a toll of human life were something to which the children grew accustomed and the mock playing at war which finds metal figures of the world's best-known regiments in every nursery must hold very little appeal nowadays. Tt is not real enough, and though it is a tragic thing to say, the children of today are realists just as they were in Dickens' days when they played at funerals.
The greatest change made must undoubtedly be that in Shanghai's standards. A fire is a terrible and, at the same time, fascinating thing, to behold. There is nothing like a fire to Jattruct a crowd for the spectacle df destruction holds a potent spell om the imagination. But no future destruction, however abhorred, will come up to the standard' already established. Decades from now there will be people who will say: "What, ithe fire in-such-and-such road? Why T remember in 1932 when the Chinese and the Japanese were ut each other I went down Ito Hongkew and looked at the Hires in Chapei, Good gracious, they were so big" and so on. Even the historic fires do not seem now to exercise the awe on imagination which they did on first reading. The great fire of London formed an interesting background for Harrison Ains~ worth's "Old St. Paul's" but people who read that book in their youth will remain more impressed by what they saw in Chapei three centuries later. It is not " question of degree but rather circumstance which decides these things. These are random observations on a great calamity but they are the per-which historians of the future will have to examine and pass judgment. The human element. is a factor which counts as muc as text books and diplomatic portfolios, This "Back to normalcy business must depend largely on the personal factor for memories fave too vivid to overlook. In the history of England there was the "War of Jenkins' Ear." One observer could travesty the drama, from his own observa tion, by calling it the "War of Mrs. His Earring." For such it was to him, that is the worst part of the war from an observer's point of view amount led to this. Frivolity should not be introduced into such serious discussions but it is permissible in this case. A trip was under~ taken to the Kiangwan front Where Japanese howitzers sent shell after shell screeching overhead into the Chinese lines There was a motor ear load of men and women, armed with war pondent's passes, and war [was witnessed in deadly earnest after the Japanese aerodrome near the Point had been passed.
sing through the 8 i be Tine reaps flung across the watchful not only of the Chinese lines ahead but snipers hidden among the grave-mounds behind, the car started led at a convenient point, just near the Japanese artillery lines. Immediately the countryside was alive with khaki-clad men and rifles pointed menacingly in the direction of the car, which suddenly decided to stop functioning entirely. The persuasion of a Japanese officer to the thoroughly-disturbed occupants lof the car proved more efficacious than any tinkering with ithe engine. The car simply had to continue and stop back-firing. It did, with eminent success Cautiously travelling along a road to, Kiangwan racecourse the occupants decided that they were as far as they should' go. They "left the ear and re-Jeonnoitred carefully in the vicinity of several shell craters where a Japanese armoured car had got bogged. This perfect target drew a hail of fire from clump of houses in the distance where the flames were just beginning to lick up. the fences. With the uncomfortable whizzing of shots all around Mrs, B. suddenly found out she had' lost one of, her valuable jade earrings. The—proximity of war was immediately ignored. It boted down to a gentlemanly fact on the part of every man present to search the roadway for the earring. There were probably more ocular gymnasies that day than any oculist could imagine for it is one thing {to look around the -road for an earring and a different thing to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.