The accounts of the German "colony" at Kiao-chow are almost
comic in their revelations of incompetence. The authorities there think that the ideal is to reproduce Berlin. and the colonists are placed under the most rigid police control. Not only are the prices fixed in the hotels, but the hotel-keeper is compelled to report in what manner he cleans his wine-glasses. All Europeans must report the arrival of strangers, and all strangers must present themselves to the police with their papers. The doings of all Europeans— there are only fifty not in Government service—are regularly reported, no trading is possible without official permission, and a merchant who wrote to a paper in Hamburg was for- bidden to write unfavourably of the colony under penalty of expulsion. Captain Rosendahl, who inaugurated this system, has just been superseded by the Emperor, but the next man being also a naval officer, will do just the same. It is the. German idea of the function of government which is to blame, the officials meaning nothing but what is right. And them Germans complain that emigrants seek homes for themselvea anywhere but in "their own colony." "Sir," said recently a German colonist in Brazil, "if this colony were declared German we should emigrate."
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