(Continued from page 5) property, general intolerance and sordid violence against the local country-people, all combine to defeat the possibility of an early return to the normal. Even if the Japanese should choose to regard the Foreigner as useless, or perhaps even an obsteele in the path of their ambitions, the Chinese are indispensable to their own prosperity, and that does not appear to be realised. The Japanese have been heard to repeat that old Shibboleth about Hankow becoming the Chicago of the East. To the foreign observer it is an enigma how even the mediocre prosperity of recent years can be restored in the face of such action.
The Japanese are imbued with a deep-rooted suspicion that the bulk of goods stored in foreign godowns is the property of the Chinese Government, and in the course of enquiries, usually conducted by very subordinate officials assisted by quite inadequate interpreters, they are subjecting foreign merchants to no little inconvenience and even annoyance. Chinese-owned cargo, when traced and admitted by its owners to be such, can frequently obtain indemnity from molestation by payment of a protection fee, or rather a series of fees, said to aggregate some 12 per cent. This has the semblance of a racket and there is little assurance that the pledge of security will be honoured. It appears to be the Japanese view that Chinese-owned goods are per se liable to confiscation, and, when the authorities have been able to lay their hands on them, confication has been frequent and indeed usually automatic, The newly created local government remains little but a name. It is certainly not functioning noticeably. Its officials are men of no local standing, for the most part unknown, and, where known, assuredly of no high repute,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.