But the real Chapei! This district is now open, and can be inspected at any time, though it is no pleasure trip. One can drive round an area which seems as large as that occupied by the city of Birmingham, among frightful devastation! It is indeed a ghost-city, but a horrid wraith, whose substance has been pitilessly torn and devoured by módern war-machines and flame: the skeleton of a city that, dying, was twisted in agony. Decay we have all seen, and decayed cities, and these always present an element Of sadness, but there is a world of difference between the gentle disintegration which Time imposes, and which Nature kindly clothes with moss and leaf to veil the mournful rot, and this stark, monstrous ghost of a one-time prosperous district. Even the rats seem to have deserted it now, certainly has every other living thing. Only at intervals stands a sentry, guarding—what?
It is a waste of the most distressing order, for the barrenness is emphasized by grim relicts of what were once prosperous shops, dye-works, print-mills, silk filatures, and cotton factories, while the thousands of homes, wrecked and deserted, tell of times which once were comfortable through the gleanings from thriving industry.
In the now devastated Civic Centre some beauty in modern development was formerly showing, also a good deal of initiative. Here, in shattered beauty, we have the direct example to date of "man's inhumanity to man," and thinking people are wondering how the world ever deserves to progress when warlike genius can devise such hellish treatment for some of the most intelligent works of man.
We have been amazed at the numbers of refugees who have poured into our midst, and some have wondered where the many thousands came from but the trip suggested will explain numbers, and give some reason for the haggard looks of the driven.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.