Ang. 16.
Every one must have noticed a marked increase in the number of indigent foreigners to be seen on our streets these days. The poor we have always with us but, except for the Siberian refugees, they were not thrust so insistently on our attention during the period of the war as has been the case for the past few weeks, Moreover, those who came to us from the North were victims of the hard hazard of war; many of them had been well to do before the tide of Bolshevism flowed over eastern Asia and submerged them beneath its waves. Their poverty was not their fault but their misfortune, and they deserved the generous help and sympathy which Shanghai extended to them in their distress, Those who are now appearing before our courts! answering charges of vagrancy are of a totally different type. They have not had vagrancy thrust upon them, but have achieved it with some difficulty but with entire success. Were they willing to be other than they are the way is open to them, but it is easier to drift from one port to another getting a meal and a drink as casually as the sparrows, than to summon the energy and perseverance that would make them independent.
A typical case came to our notice a few days ago. He was an old soldier. He had fought through the Boer War and had four medals; at least he had four clasps. He was now a ship's cook and was looking for a berth. A man with a record like this deserves well of his country, and we listened to what he had to say but were disappointed to find that his only ambition was to get as "cushy" a time as possible while in Shanghai. He wanted a list of the societies that would help distressed seamen. He opined that Consuls in these ports were entrusted with large sums of money for eleemosynary purposes, but they were a hardhearted tribe and difficult to cajole into liberal disbursements. 'How was a poor man to get on if no one would reach him a helping hand?' How indeed? Now, this shows that the problem of poverty, while it embraces Socialism and Bolshevism and all the other isms that tax modern statesmanship to the breaking
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.