Until recently there existed a class of licensed petition-writers who charged litigants a small fee for drawing up petitions addressed to the court. After several of these petition-writers had been convicted of bribery and extortion and other malpractices, it was found necessary to withdraw all their licences and abolish the system. At present every litigant who cannot write and has no literary relative who will oblige him by drawing up a petition for him, simply comes into the court when and how he likes and makes his statement by word of mouth. Unlettered peasant-folk are garrulous and inconsequential all the world over, and those of Weihaiwei are not exceptional: so it may be easily understood that the necessity of taking down long rambling statements made in rustic Chinese by deaf old men and noisy and unreasonable women adds no slight burden to the labours of an English magistrate. Unnecessary litigation is indeed becoming so common a feature of daily life that the Government is at present contemplating the introduction of a system of court fees which, while not preventing the people from making just complaints before the magistrates, will tend to discourage them from running to the courts before they have made the least attempt to settle their quarrels in a manner more consistent with the traditional usages of their country. That something of this kind must be done to check the present rush of litigants to the courts is daily becoming more apparent. In the South Division court[65] the proceedings are carried on entirely in the Chinese language. The speech of the people, it may be said, is a form of Mandarin (so called) which after a little practice is easily intelligible to a speaker of Pekingese. Colloquialisms are naturally numerous among so remote and isolated a community as the inhabitants of north-eastern Shantung, and in some respects the dialect approximates to that of Nanking rather than to the soft speech of the northern capital.