To the Editor of the "Mobrh-Cuwg Dany News"
Sm—In a letter which you kindly published in your journal of May 3 I invited the attention of our recently appointed councillors to the plague spot in our midst which. despite my reiterated remonstrances, still exists at No. 346 Avenue Haig. in flagrant contravention of the law of the land and in open defiance of the newly established Special Police Force of the Western Area whose duty it now is to suppress it.
From your issue of yesterday I learned that the members of the General Committee of the British Residents Association have drawn the attention of their Association to the continuance of gambling dens in the Western District which. instead of being suppressed, appear to be increasing in number. An influential! committee such ak this is could ronger an inestimable service to the community by taking action for the suppression of these haunts. and I venture to suggest that they should address a formal protest to the Council against their intolerable apathy in the matter.
In the meantime I must take up my pen in the now almost forlorn hope of injecting, through the medium of your columns, some grains of decency into the con-Sciences of our mew councillors. Their predecessors sheltered themselves behind the fatuous excuse that the place. although on a Municipal road of which the police of the Settlement had control. was situated outside it, but that excuse is no longer available to the present council.
Our municipal police have recently been fully occupied with raids on dens of very minor calibre in the Settlement itself, but the Special Police Force of the Western Area has so far shown no inclination to imitate their example by a raid upon the much larger establishment on Avenue Haig, the pernicious influence of which far exceeds that of all the others put together. What is the significance of this extraordinary display of reluctance on their pant?
The new Council surely owes it to the community in general and in particular to those of it who are actually afflicted by this appalling nuisance, to offer some reasonable explanation of their apparently complacent indifference to what can only be regarded as an outrage and an insult to that community.
Asnx.
Shanghai, May 23.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.