seem to suggest that the Outside Roads problem has been for the moment linked with and jeopardised by the disagreement over the Factory Inspection issue. It is all the more regretted there. fore that the success of last summer could not be pressed to 8 prompt conclusion, thus clearing the Outside Roads from the files before the intricate Factory Inspection difficulty was added to them. It would be improper—at any rate highly unfair—to attempt to apportion blame for the obstacles presented to the Outside Roads problem. It is unnecessary to suggest that these obstacles were captiously or destructively interposed. Rather is this journal convinced that all parties concerned have been at great pains to reach a settlement of a very delicate problem, bristling as it does with is sense the measure of th good faith in clinging tenaciously to principles which compromise might conceivably endanger, Although Mr. Yui's decision to associate the earlier with the later discussions will not appeal to some minds it will readily be agreed that, in the matter of the Factory Inspection, important issues are involved. 'The Council, on ite side, has gone to the utmost limit' and the Municipality, under the present instructions of the Government at Nanking, has not been able to bridge the narrow space between the two positions. As so large a measure of agreement has been ached over the Outside Roads seems specially unfortunate that that problem should be subjected to the process of merger in a separate and different sort lof dispute. Perhaps recon: tion will assist in dev: out of this entanglement. does not dispose of the urgent need for the Government to give its attention to the Factory Inspection issue in the light of a reasoned appreciation of the extent to which the Council has. been prepared to meet the claims of Chinese sovereignty, while preserving as it emphatically must preserve, the essential bases of its administrative authority.
Actually the breakdown of the discussions on the Outside Roads
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.