Generally understood, a false prophet is one who prophesies that which we hope will not happen, but which we fear might come to pass. When the crystalegazer reads for us a fair fortune we say little about her falseness, but if she forscos disaster we recall that forecasters have not invariably told the truth as it, worked out.
Small means, however, can _causo a lot of distress to people in Shang-hal who, up to the present time, have always been able to live decently and happily despite enforced economy. A case in point arises out of the sub-lotting of low-rented but Good houses of the terrace type which have always been occupied by foreigners. Now, in many terraces of this type @ few houses in each are let out to hordes of Chinese of the lower classes.
In every national crisis someone digs out the prognostications of a clover seer of many generations ago who had foretold all. Tt was so in the Great War;'when this was fairly under way somebody found out that had "all been prophesied years ago, Tt was only after peace had been declared that we were told what the prophecies concerning' results would be, and, strangely enough, they coincided ' with fact. 'Now, with the European crisis pending,' someone has pointed out that it was all foretold sons ago.
Every period has had its quaint prophecies. In London in the sixties there was a famous divine, a Dr. Cumming, minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Crown Court. He: enjoyed an immense reputation among his congregation, and was a most eloquent and logical speaker. He was specially noted for prophesy-ug the imminent end of the world. He had been unfortunate (for his reputation as a prophet), since the dates he had predicted for the final cataclysm had all slipped by uneventfully, put he finally fixed a date in 1887'as the exact date of the Great Catastrophe. His influence with his lock rather diminished when it was earned that Dr. Cumming had renewed the Iease on his Mouse for 21
Houses which formerly held not} more than four or five foreigners now have fifty or sixty Chinese tenants.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.