Neutral Chinese, of experience and common sense, are not greatly alarmed, however. They feet sure that Tsao Kun in his maturity and comfort is much too cautions to countenance any such performance as an officially engineered mutiny, They say that he is area aghast at the opprobrium which his aver-zealous and unscrupulous friends have brought upon him. Those who know the workings of Feng Yii-hsiang's mind say that he has had enough of a kind of criticism to which he is unused ans will do nothing that will put the remnants of his tattered reputation in ris One official who professes to know what Feng—is thinking indicated a length of about three inches on a Chinese pen, while in conversation with the writer, and said: "That is about how big Feng feels just now."' Wang Huai-ching controls the remnants of the 9th and 13th divisions, as well as the Gendarmerie and the police. The latter bodies ave local men, mostly ex-Bannermem, with families and friends in every quarter of the city and its environs. There is not one of them who has not relatives by the score deriving a meagre living from small shops, pedlars carts and the like, and anything like a staged mutiny would tovrh these "peopl? first while the big shops and_ banks, with their official capital involve ed, would be exempt by strict order from above. While the gendarmes and police might not put up an effective resistance to a mutiny that was officially directed, it is past belief, therefore, that they would join it.
The 9th and 13th Divisions are mere skeletons of military units and are probably underpaid and only too ready to recoup in any way authorized: but numbers, equipment and discipline they are far inferior to Feng Yihsiang's 5,000 men and world never dream of taking liberties with Peking, except on the impossible supposition that Feng was either supporting the scheme or prepared to stand aloof.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.