Those residents of Shanghai who anticipated being able to take advantage of the revised telegraphic rates within the British Empire by sending their messages to Hongkong and then retiling them have had their hopes dashed to the ground. Under the Telegraph Regulations annexed to the International Telecommunication Convention, arrived at in Madrid in 1932, there is complete power to stop messages filed in any method calculated to defeat the charges arrived at by the convention. Thus under Article 51, Paragraphs 3 and 4 provide:
Paragraph 3. The office of delivery must stop telegrams addressed to a telegraphic reform warding agency well known to be organized with the object of enabling the correspondence of third parties to evade the full payment of the charges due for transmission, without intermediate reforwarding, between the office of origin and the office of ultimate destination. The office stopping the telegram must at once inform the office of origin.
Paragraph 4. (1) Administrations and private enterprises undertake to stop, at their respective offices, telegrams which these offices receive from abroad by any means whatever (post, telegraph. telephone or otherwise), to be reforwarded by telegraph with the object of enabling these ges to evade the full payment of the charge for the whole distance.
(2) The Administration of the country of origin of the telegrams must be notified of the stoppage This means that the telegraphic agencies in Hongkong, suspecting that a message filed there originated in Shanghai, for example, or elsewhere in China, would have the right to refuse acceptance upon notifying the Administration of the country of origin of such a step. This journal understands that firms despatching tables from Hongkong are now required to declare that their message originated in Hongkong and is not intended to be retiled at destination. That definitely prevents a merchant taking advantage of the revised imperial rate to send a message to London, where it could be relayed, for example, to Paris if the combination of the imperial rate and the London—Paris rate represented a saving on the direct Hongkong-Paris message. The declaration that the telegram originated in Hongkong definitely prevents acceptance of a message from any place in China for relay to an address. within the empire.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.