July 12, Very. serious information reaches us to the effect that the! armed robber has begun to turn his attention to foreigners. A case has occurred of an' anonymous letter sent to one hong, threatening that if al considerable sum of money were not forthcoming by a given date, the manager would be shot. It is unnecessary to say that no notice has been taken of the threat. If once foreigners suffered themselves to be intimidated in this fashion, there would be an end of all peace.and security. But the community of Shanghai cannot be contented to leave matters in this stage. Apart from the by no means improbable event, that some foreigner will presently be shot by an armed robber—whose chances of getting away are at least nine to one and who is faced with no penalty in Shanghai for which he cares rap—we' have, all of us, to recognize that these villains' have thrown down a challenge to society which it can no longer ignore. Furthermore we must recognize that the danger has already gone beyond what the ordinary organization of government is capable of controlling.
This was the feeling which prompted the Acting Commissioner of Police to - invite representatives of the Street: Unions to a conference last Tuesday. The meeting was: imbued with the friendliest spirit, But from what has since appeared in the Chinese Press, it is to be feared that the results will not be great—at least not great enough for the need. The unanimous objection to the reintroduction of corporal punishment on the very flimsy pretext that it is contrary to democratic prinetples, notwithstanding that is notoriously in use in practically every yamen in China, can only mean one thing. Any Chinese who writes in support of corporal punishment or puts his name to a petition advocating its reintroduction, has a lively mental picture of himself with a bullet through the small of his back, which effectually silences him. The appeal, therefore, for corporal punishment is to the Consular Jand Diplomatic Bodies, for urgent representations to the Chinese Government that a special emergency act may be passed authorizing the "cat" for armed robbery and un-Jicensed possession of arm: Let it be remembered that any British subject in Shanghai who committed a crime of violence could be sent to the British gaol: and given the "cat." Yet for a Chinese similarly convicted the is, at most, the fear of bein, shot at the Arsenal, which in plain truth he very little fears, or imprisonment in the Mixed Court gaol, which is merely a holiday for him with plenty to eat and nothing to do. Corporal punishment he does fear and we most strongly urge that the Diplomatic Body will use every means in their power to get it authorized, But even if the effort succeed, it must take a long time to: do. 80 and we cannot afford to wait.
We may smile at the escapades: of a Ku Klux Klan but something on those Lines is' what: is needed now. No tribute too high can be paid to the police for what they have done and are daily doing: But it is no more than plain fact to say that the evil is now' beyond their power to cope with unaided, Let us recall what was done by, the Government of the Irish Free State to put down the gunmen after the signing of the treaty with Great Britain; These gentry continued to be as great a menace to Free State officials as they had been to the British Tommy. The Government therefore called in the aid of every able-bodied and athletic young man whom it could get—and the response, we are told, was enormous—it had them trained. to such expert use of the revolver that they became dead shots in almost any position and it turned them loose to shoot the gunmen down wherever they could be found. In a very. few weeks, there were no more gunmen, Precisély the same thing has been done in the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.