Roads and Relief The Dean of Canterbury's account, in The
Times of Tuesday and Wednesday, of his tour of Western China to inspect famine relief works shows how urgently China needs new roads. Travel in Shensi and Kansu, up to the Tibetan border, was incredibly toilsome, though the Dean was escorted by the chief engineer of the Relief Commission in his motor-lorry. For hundreds of miles the old tracks were almost impassable. It is not surprising that Western China in its isolation should remain poor and bandit-ridden, and that when the crops fail the peasants die in tens of thousands. In Kansu the Commis- sion has financed a great irrigation scheme, to do over again what bygone dynasties did for a fertile area. Money expended on such works and on roads and railways would be of permanent value to the Chinese, and foreign help of this kind would surely improve the relations between China and Europe. It is noteworthy that the Dean found that " the American name is known everywhere," because of the untiring efforts of philanthropic America to help China, whereas when he said he was British " there was no hostility but the word meant nothing."
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