Only last September in modern Shanghai, a man was slowly starved to death whilst exhibited in a wooden cage outside the gates of the city, but only one English newspaper in the settlement thought the affair called for mention. And Shanghai is the model settlement possessing a municipal council which recently thought “shocking” an application to permit newspapers to be sold in the streets! A woman employed at one of the mills stole a small quantity of cotton which she said she wrapped round her body in order to keep herself warm; she was sentenced to 100 blows for this offence at the Mixed Court, when the American assessor was on the bench with the Chinese magistrate. The case is reported, without comment, in the _North China Daily News_, January 20, 1904. This is a punishment which would not be inflicted in England, and British mill owners in China ought to work with conditions similar to those made in this country. In another case, a British boy, name not published, was prosecuted in the Consular Court for a long series of petty thefts from his employers. In order not to spoil his future career he was ordered one day’s imprisonment and immediately set free. There are different punishments for an identical offence, the variation being due to the nationality of the culprit. The penalty inflicted upon a Chinese offender also varies in accordance with the nationality of the accuser, or the assessor. The purpose of a European assessor sitting conjointly with a Chinese magistrate is that a guilty person shall not escape sentence, but the magistrate is not influenced by Chinese law or the gravity of the offence so much as the consideration of the penalty which will satisfy the foreigner. A convict may get 100, 200, or 500 blows, the number depending upon whether the assessor is British, French, or German. Generations of foreign intercourse, and the establishment of great foreign settlements at her ports do not seem to have affected in the least the essentially barbaric legal customs of China, or to have ameliorated appreciably the condition of her people. Missionary effort has not been much more successful. The very afternoon that I sat with the Rev. John Ross in his beautiful home at Mukden, outside the west gate of the city a woman of twenty-two was being cruelly hacked into a thousand pieces before the eyes of an indifferent concourse of idlers. For thirty years Mr. Ross has laboured valiantly in Manchuria, but the customs, the laws and the barbarity of the people continue as of old. And Mr. Ross is only one of some 4,000 missionaries in China, men who strive and work on year after year, and hope, but see no marked change in the masses, or prospect of changes to be inaugurated by their rulers.