6
THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH, FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1939.
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BIRTH
PRICE. On August 31, 1939, at the War Memorial Nursing Home, to Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Price, a daughter.
The
Hongkong Telegraph.
Wyndham St., Hongkong 'Phone 26615 September 1, 1939
War Propheteering
THE
11
E sands of August, the month in which the world Was plunged into disaster a quarter of out. century ago, have run Forecasters announced that the eighth month of the year would world another see the start of
Was war. The third of August one of several days which fore- easters chose as the fateful day. Some star-Kazers fixed the mix- teenth day of the month and other dealers in the occult put it down for the nineteenth.
ago
some
About three years Spiritualists who claimed to have contact with "the other side". declared that war would come and that it would be short and sharp, but there was no mention of the date or the result of the conflict. With recent months others who believe they have received authoritative and definite informa- tion from the spirit world said that some time this year world condi-
such tions would be
that war
would seem certain. Everything would be ready for the onslaught, and at the last moment war would be
That, however, might have been said of any month
►** | during the past year.
called off.
pro-
Yet another forecast made by reputed recipients of news from the other world that what will look as the climax of the longed erisis will come next year. Again no date is specified, but the assurance is given that there will not be war.
In this medley of guesses the only certain thing is that we shall continue to be subjected during the early days of the month that commences to-day to alternating waves of optimism and pessimism. The people have become inured to these nerve tests. In the last war, when there was much talk of optimism and pessimism, Lord Kitchener sent out a brief message to the effect that he was neither optimist nor pessimist; he looked only to facts. It may fairly be said that that is the attitude of people to-day. Already the situa- tion in Europe, critical as it undoubtedly le, begins to lose
Q
JUST A GOOD
PLAIN QUEEN
by One of Her Subjects
UEEN WILHELMINA of Holland yesterday celebrated her birthday. Her subjects, both in Holland and also scattered across the third- largest colonial empire in the world, have already been joining in the celebra- tions with husty vigour.
From this you can judge that Wilhel- mina is well grounded in the hearts of her peoples; for the Dutch would neither afford nor enjoy festivities unless they held the object of them good and worthy.
Of course, when you think of Wilhelmina you You cannot help thinking of Queen Victoria. detect in both careers the same moral earnest. ness, the same taste for plain living surrounded by stiff Court etiquette, the same disapproving, eye turned on everything unconventional or not utterly respectable.
Wilhelmina is a more Intelligent woman than But, like Victoria, she was brought Victoria wIA up conscious every minute that she was to be Queen. It was a grim process.
Her father, old King William III, died when she was ten, in 1800. The quiet little girl with long flaxen hair had her mother, Queen Emma, for Regent, during the eight years of her legal minority.
Queen Emma, a German princess, was always smiling. Not a gay smile, perhaps, but one whie' reflected her serenity of mind and flxity of purpose. She was going 10 school Wilhelmina to be a good and wise queen. According to her lights she magnificently succeeded.
Her chief assistant in the process was Miss E. Saxton-Winter, an English governess of the most accomplished and tremendous sort. While the gravest professors taught the little girl her lessons, governess and mother formed her mind and character.
S
HE was never allowed to be alone, She only met children of her
own age for a few hours ench week. The rest of her playtime was spent with her dolls, her chickens (which she fed herselt each day) and with Grisette, her little grey donkey to which she was devoted.
Bo ale grew up grave beyond her years. She was deep in high- politics when other girls thinking of their first grown-up dance frock.
Are
Of course she had to marry, She must provide an heir, or the flius- trious house of Orange-Nassau from which our own King William III sprang, would become extinct. They chose Prince Henry Mecklenburg - Schwerin as her bridegroom.
He was a dashing young lieuten- ant from the Prussian Guard very gay and debonair. She fell in love with him at once, just as her daughter Jullana did with Prince Bernhard. They married in Febru- ary, 1901.
She continued to love him unt!! e died in 1934. After his funeral she was prostrated by a nervous breakdown. Yet, in many ways. they were an ill-matched couple,
P
RINCE
HENRY wa convivial and unconven- tional. He loved to mix Incognito with sea captains, with artists, with men and women who dki the things he could never de because he was Prince Consort.
ite could not share Wilhelmina's Her intense high acriousness.
not were religious convictions echoed by his easy-going nature. He was never quite at home at the formal court at which he found himself playing second fiddle for thirty years.
Sometimes he escaped for a few days, attended only by a gentle- man-in-waiting. Whenever he returned from one of those little jaunts he was not received very cordially.
And so, Wilhelmina has been a somewhat lonely figure at the head of the Dutch State. Once she be- came Queen, again like Victoria. she did not share her oficial work with her mother. Unlike Victoria, she did not find a perfect col- Jaborator in her husband.
Though she be a model constitu- tional queen, Wilhelmina la no rubber stamp. She pores over State papers, she reads everything which she must sign: she takes her part in the government of her country as seriously and steadily as she rides her bicycle.
She makes all her decisions— Dr. Hendrik Collin, her alone. Prime Minister, may submit his advice in writing. Hor confidential scaretary, Van Tots van Goudriaan, may bring her the document. But the Queen will alt in her study and make up her mind by herself, with out discussion or consultation.
The national bent of her mind is
•
-To-day's Thought
I WOULD not be a queen for
all the world.
---SHAKESPEARE.
Conservative. When oho was crowned Liberalism was at its height in Holland, rather an old- fashioned Liberalism, with which sho got along well enough. Lately. as in other lands. Liberailom has waned, and Socialism is growing.
The present Administration is Conservative,
Wilhelmina faces the possibility of a Labour Government, representing Lhe antithesis of the principles in which she was reared.
but
Nevertheless she maintains the Crown with absolute impartially towards all parties. None could say that she has smiled on the Left at any time.
But Holland knows she would accept a Labour Government na raciously as sho accepts Dr. Colijn, if it was the will of her people expressed at an election.
Wilhelmina has watched her country grow richer, and she has seen its prosperity grow more evenly distributed. At the same 1ime she has seen her own personal fortune wax fat.
Now she is a very rich woman, probably the richest woman in the world-despite gifts to charitable causes of all kinds almost on the Rockefeller scale.
She spends under half of her in- come, much of which comes from the Dutch East Indies.
which
T
HE Royal Family has ahared for hundreds of the wealth yours in Holland draws thence. Through nomineet she has hold- Ings in a dozen great and success- ful undertakings. In a very real and personal way the Queen's fortune is bound up with the pros- perity of her people.
To-day her greatest pleasure is In her granddaughter, and the prospect that Juliana will again" soon become a mother fills her with
thanksgiving. Like all her subjects. she prays for the birth of a Prince to the House of Orange.
She has acquitted herself finely as Queen of the Netherlands, yet her heart is set on a man-child who may one day sit on the throne
of his fathers-William IV, the true successor of his great-grandfather.
Wilhelmina at the age of ten, and below, throo generations of the Dutch Royal Family- Juliana, Queen Wilhelmina and Juliana's baby Beatrix.
A Look Through The "Telegraph”
In the stross of emotions. caused by the international crisis, an anniversary rich in significance for Hongkong passed unnoticed
fast wook.
One hundred years ago, on August 26, 1839, the first land- ing on Hongkong Island ever mado by British people was offacted by rafugaos who fled from Canton, Less than two years later, the island became British torritory and its first city was named Queenstown-Ister Vic- toria.
Here, T. Paul Gregory tells the story of
Refugees 1839, 1939
NE HUNDRED years ago last tury Hungkong was ueling as
host to refugees just në now, but at that me they were British men, women, und children seeking safety under the Union Jack.
They were those who fled to the shelter of ships in Victoria Harbour after being expelled by the Chinese from Canton, and forbidden by the Portuguese to seck sanctuary in Macno.
Their position was in every way infinitely more serious than that of their Chinese counterparts who have flocked to the Colony in their tens of thousands during the present Sino- Japanese hostilities; for they were éxiles far away from Home, In the cra of wooden salling ships, and in the perilous typhoon season.
And the main reason for the exodus of 1830 was the action being taken by the Chinese authorities on the
Opium Question.
PEOPLE then were not very parti-
won
cular as to methods or articles of trade.
Fortunes
lost and were through channels which, according to our present standard of commercial morality, would be termed dubious Indeed.
50 YEARS AGO
Sept. 1, 1889. Mr. Ng Sul-Shang begs to announce Suffice it to say that an energetic that in compliance with a suggestion step was being taken by the Chinese made to him by Mr. Mitchell-Innes, he officials to stomp out the opium has now opened an agency for the up- traffic, which since 1790 had attained ply of chair cooler at 4, Cough Street, such proportions that it was supping 1st Floor, and is prepared to supply the strength of the Chinese nation them on the conditions and at the rates and depleting the silver reserves of
the Empire. mentioned in Mr. Mitchell-Innes circu-
it was probably the latter reason
for, coples of which can be had that led the Imperial Government 10-
application to the agency. He trusts
that the agency may be the means or take a stand against the traffle; for putting an end to the present unsatisfac- the financial aspects of the problem supplying obscured what might be called the tory
by Atate of affaire minsters with good coolies, and at the moral point of view.
The Chinese objection to the im- same time affording the latter regular
of the drug was not 20 portation employment.
a bideous vict of the N. B.-The agency will also he pre-much that it was
gnawing at the very vitals pared to supply inricksha and house nation, but that it had turned the
coolics if deafred.
balance of trade against China, forc- Ing her to pay out her silver, and If that were permitted to continue, It would eventually lead to the im poverishment of the Empire,
25 YEARS AGO
Sept. 1, 1014. Hongkong is not the only place in the Far East where fantastic rumoury] are elreulated regarding the war. Wild
JISTORY proves that oplum has In stories have been brulted about
been known to the Chinese for Peking, and in view of China's neutra. lity the Government there have seen many centuries.. -------
HIST
It is related that there was a com fit to issue a pointed warning to the public. It is observed that while the siderable traffic in the drug by Arab prople may rest avaured that no harm
can come to them in consequence of the merchants at Canton in the eighth great war, it is not unlikely that there century of the Christian era, who may be certain "nd characters," who, supplied it to the Chinese for use in taking advantage of this critical, time, medicine,
When the practice of smoking and are circulating rumours with a view to creating a panic and therely plotting Inhaling it into the lungs began no disturbances. Soldiers and police have, therefore, heen ordered to exercise the one knows, but it is clear that the utmost surveillance over these Indivi- annual import for the hundred years prior to 1700 did not exceed 200 chests.
dunia
10 YEARS AGO
Sept. 1, 1020.
In the latter year, the rate of im- portation had so increased that it reached over 4,000 chests yearly, an An attempt to assassinate Marshal increase which finally attained the second within ngure of over 20,000 chests annually Chiang Kai-shek, the a week, was made in Shanghai yestar-,
by 1836.
"No wonder that the Imperial Gov- Shels were fred at the Marshal crnment was alarmed and determined he stepped off the running: board of his to act, but it must be said that the motor-car to enter his private residence in the French Coneesiion. A bullet missed him by inches only.
Jay.
His bodyguarda selted a man in the vlcinity, and it is believed that this detained on suspicion of having fired the shots.
5 YEARS AGO
Sept. 1, 1934. There are increasing Indications that relations between Germany and Italy are becoming very strained.
trafie could not have flourished as It did were it not for the direct con- nivance of corrupt Chinese officials, one
of whom Lei Hung-pan, the Viceroy of the two Kwang Provinces (Kwangtung and Kwangsi) received 36,000 taels a months as his "cut" for allowing the eplum to pass freely into Whampoa and Macao.
HE foreign merchants who were THE
engaged in the business have
It is rellably stated that Germany is been described by no less a person- planning a three or four days period of age than Captain Charles Elliot the probation, to see whether the Italian man who secured Hongkong as a newspapers are prepared to cease their Colony for England, "as nothing less attacks on Germany,
the riffraf of all nationalities," than
If the tone of Italian press comments who co-operated with Chinese smug- does not improve, the Government con glers and corrupt Imperial oficials template the expulsion of Italian in fostering the shameless traffic.
state that correspondents.
Things reached such The German Prem in the past few by 1838, the number of foreign ships days has revealed increasing annoyance carrying opium from Lintin (an at the Italian attacks and it is under- island at the mouth of the Canton or Pearl river) to Whampoa were stood that they have been instructed to reply sharply and in similar vein.
multiplied, and their crews frequently
For the third sucefnive day, the High came into open conflict with Chinese Council of the Salvation Army at Government vessels, though in many throughout a complete session without cases the latter were also engaged reaching the main object of ther gather-In the conveying of the. opium to Ing, the nomination of a sucessor to Carton. Generel Higgins,
Sightseers Get Peepholes
The Imperial Government, Irritat
ordered its measure, ed beyond
action. officials at Canton to take There were several unpleasant in- cidents between the Canton populace and the European-merchants in the ite at Shap-sam-hong sa "Factory" sitë at the foreign concession was called and the general arrogance of the foreigners culminat- Sidewalk superintendents are well Chinese towards foreig provided for in this city. Commo-ed in the strangulation of a Chinese dious glassed-in peepholes for ali oplum dealer, before the windows of cizes of superintendents have been the Concession.
Toledo, Q.
cut into the construction barricade When it became known that the where crews are excavating for a new Emperor Tao Kwang had appointed main building for the public library,
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