The lands administered by the Land Office of the Railway, constitute property purchased on an eighty-years lease for the purpose of constructing the railway, and in actual fact purchased by the promoters of the project for hard There is a slight exception to the yule that-where the line passed through property owned by the Chinese government the latter made free.grants, but this involves a very small proportion of the whole, the remainder having been purchased at the' rates for property then prevailing., From this it will be clear that the Chin—ese Eastern Railway acquired for valuable consideration the property now in dispute, and the documents substantiating such a contention are at present in the custody of the Land office of the Railway. The total amount of land thus secured was some 300,- 000 acres, an arCa quite insignifi-' cant having in view the total area of Northern Manchuria comprising some 200,000,000 acres, Roughly speaking this 360,000 acres consists of a strip of territory one hundred feet wide on either side of the line, with large areas surrounding the various stations designed for the adequate service of the railway, and it is being found at the present time that the areas so obtained ara in a number of cases already insufficient for the purposes for which they were originally set aside. But beforgwe consider the main question if is necessary to point that over 25 per cent. of this 300,000 acres is totally unsuited. for railway work: 85,000 acnes being hilly country and absolutely unusable.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.