One cannot blame the Elec~ tricity Department for sending out a warning letter to bulk supply power consumers, to the effect that, although' the service has been maintained up to the present to the amount required, it cannot be expected that it Will continue uninterrupted for an indefinite period if the existing circumstances remain. One's compl int would be that it does not go far enough.
The plain facts are that, when the Electricity Department's Chinese staff—some erced, some bribed, some misguided—went out on str most the moment a spanner or an oilcan, was laid down it was picked up. by a. foreign volunteer worker, and from that day to the present, equally with the water supply and other -publio utility services, electricity has been available for all purposes without interruption, That has restore her integrity been possible because of the strenuous—and voluntary: work of a number of foreigners, very many of whom never would claim ever previously to have had any real engineering experience.
In our awn office we know something of what this extra strike work means. Every man and woman has continued with the job he or she had before and in addition has lent a hand with linotypes and other machines with which previously all but three or four were totally unacquainted, and they have worked for twelve and more hours at a stretch, without even leaving the office. They will continue to do so until the strike ends. It has been gruel~ 1 work and of course it has been vastly harder the si thermometer has been registering in the neighbourhood of one hundred degrees.
Yet think of the volunteer workers in the electricity works, and, indeed, in any other concerns of a like nature, Out of practice, or unaccustomed to the work, they have toiled on in the sweltering hheat, in conditions regarded as being so unhealthy for the foreigner in the tropics or sub-topies that natives have to be employed in the ordinary cours doing such gruelling work a stoking the furnaces, tending the giant machines' with the overpowering reek of hot oil sickening them, yet doing cheerily because on the maintenance of supplies depended the white man's prestige.
Already the white man has won and these volunteers are deserving of a vest, or at least they should not he asked to do more than ix necessary, 'The white man has won, but the whining agitator now' is preaching a boycott of the foreigner The Chinese are to return to work, but they are to have nothing whatever to do with the foreigner or his goods, 'Thus the Chinexe mills" and shops have reopened—but only to pose the foreigner and to attempt to harm him in every way and they' have called on the Electricity Department for large supplies "of current for power and light. The Department is meeting the demand, and the Volunteers who before had done much now are doing twice us much, four machines running where two ran before. The agio tator will not allow the electricity workmen to return to work because that would be assisting the foreigner: he allows tha Chinese mills to reopen because they are presumed to be dame {Hane the Foreigner, and to keep tne inning the volunteers do running th
Might' not the Electricity Department consider eff power from. the shutting Chinese mills for so long as the Chinese staff remains out?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.