Profiteering is still going on in Hongkong, and no suggestions of a practical nature to combat it have yet come to light. Eggs, for instance, have jumped in the past week from 90 cents a dozen to $1.80 a dozen.
A number of foreign firms. here, local agents for home producers of such things as jams and jellies, have notified the public that their wholesale prices are unchanged and that no increase in the retail prices of their products is justifiable. Nevertheless, the compradore shops have steadily increased their prices by a few cents here and a few more cents there, and merely smile blandly when the discrepancy is pointed out, About the only shops to -show substantial reductions in prices are the few Japanese shops which are still open (under the watchful eye of strong patrols of police). The proprietors of these shops are preparing to evacuate to Japan, and while their more expensive products have been placed in Japanese-owned godowns, their cheaper articles are either perishables or else are not worth the expense and trouble of storing away. There have been no more cases of molestation of Japanese, about the only people to suffer from mob anger being Chinese who have returned from abroad or have come to safety from ports further up the coast—as they are obviously not Cantonese, the mobs assume they are Japanese.' Fortunately, no major incidents have yet occurred.
A local magistrate sounded the right note recently when he severely reprimanded a member of the mob which attempted, fruitlessly, to create a disturbance in the Japanese shopping district in Wanchai. The magistrate seid that the Chinese were as much guests of the Colony as the Japanese, and if they did not remem: ber that and behave themselves they could expect trouble
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.