Tap Pall Mall Gazette should bea little more careful before committing itself to a line of policy it may, before long, see reason to regret. Most residents in China will remember the naive manner in which it allowed itself to be made an exponent of the Burlingame Mission, and proclaimed to the World as truths the promises of reform and amendment then put forward. Since then, it has had the opportunity of judging how far those promises have been consistent with the facts of the case, and how much material progress has really been made by China during the five years which have since elapsed. Lately, the Pall Mall has confined its Chinese notes to quotations from the Cologne Gazette and other German papers, and as these extracts have generally taken a somewhat different view of Chinese matters from that to which we have been accustomed, they have, though not always reliable, been generally interesting. The Pall Mall has deservedly made a name for itself, and it cannot be denied "that its influence has been increasing; it is therefore the more regrettable that on a sublet of such importance as the conservation of the harbours of China open to, foreign trade, it should have accepted, without due consideration, arguments so subversive of all progress as those which we to-day quote from its issue of August 7th. It is one of the unfortunate circumstances connected with the Treaty of Tientsin that its authors seem to have searched the English language for the most indefinite phrases to express their meaning. Lord Elgin, or his secretaries, seems to have had a strange horror of plain English; and of the 56 clauses which make upthatdocument, therein scarcely one but can bear several different interpretations. The quibble about the right of inland residence, expressed in the extraordinary phrase the "open ports or other places," explained by Earl Russell to mean the same places, is probably the most glaring instance of this infelicity of express sion, to use the mildestterm. The Pall Mall, however, discovers another almost, equally remarkable, and without stopping to weigh the circumstances of the case, at once adopts the rendering proposed to it by some one evidently aw courant with the party of retrogression in China. The Treaty of Tientsin in clauses 27-31 provides the amount of tonnage dues to be levied on British vessels; and at once proceeds, in $2, to state that the Superintendents of Customs at the open ports shall consult with the Consuls regarding the erection of lights, &c. That this was intended to bs the disposition of the tonnage dues, no reasonable man ever doubted. Possibly the framers of the treaty thought their words so plain, and the juxtaposition of the clauses so evident, that no conjunction was needed between the two clauses. Atall events, the officials of both sides were to consult, as often "as occasion may demand and as we presume that the consultation was to lead to performance, we may predicate that the affairs consulted about were to be put into execution, -Trae, the dredging of bars was not inserted
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.