turer and the adventuress, of the gambler, the beach-comber,
and the long-chance promoter. Midway of the China Coast, at the mouth of
the mighty Yangtse River, it is the principal port of entrance into China.
From England, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, the United States, and
Canada comes an endless column of steamships to Shanghai. To Hongkong,
Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Chefoo, Tientsin, and the uppermost ports of
the Yangtse, 1,250 miles inland, go endless columns of steamships from
Shanghai. And of the travellers on these ships nearly all have, or expect
to have, or have had, business or pleasure at Shanghai.

It is the most truly cosmopolitan city in the world; for Paris, after all,
is mainly French; London, after all, is mainly English; New York, after
all, is mainly American. Shanghai has its French hotels, its imposing
German Club, its English Country Club, its race-track, its Russian Bank,
its Japanese mercantile houses, its American post-office. It is ruled by a
council of Englishmen, Germans, and Americans. It is policed by English
bobbies, Irishmen, Sikhs from India, and Chinamen. On the Bubbling Well
Road, of a sunny spring afternoon, where the latest thing in motor cars
weaves through the line of smart carriages, you may see Spaniard elbowing
Filipino, Portuguese jostling Parsee, Austrian chatting with Bavarian; and
they all talk, gamble, drink, and buy in pidgin English.

This settlement of fifteen thousand Europeans, living apart from that
public opinion which compells the maintenance of a social standard in
every European country, and indifferent to that local public opinion which
keeps up a certain curious standard among the Chinese themselves, seems to
have practically no standard at all. The problem of every decent American
or Englishman who finds himself established in business is whether he
dare bring his wife and family and introduce them into circles so degraded
that families disintegrate and children grow up under disheartening
influences. The heavy drinking of the China Coast ports is proverbial, yet
the drinking seems little more than an incident in a city where the social
atmosphere is tainted and altogether unwholesome.

I stood one night in the barroom of one of the big hotels. It was one
o'clock in the morning, and nearly every one of the dozen white men in the
room was more or less drunk. They were roaring out maudlin songs, and
shouting incoherent cries. Two men, well-dressed gentle