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Hereby complications are cleared up and vast calamity removed.
This success is humbly ascribed to the awful notice of the Court together with the whole-hearted support of the Council, the auxiliary scheme of the gentry and people of the three Provinces, while the Minister Liang Ch'ong, whose ability and experience are alike excellent, loyally devised for the state and suited his arguments to his opportunities.
This was how this affair was accomplished.
It has now been decided that the funds for constructing the line shall be provided by the combined efforts of the officials and gentry of the three Provinces, foreign loans being barred.
But as the funds are to be collected through the gentry and people of each province, each will be concerned with its own finance and railway construction. There will have to be a general uniformity, but identity of system will be impossible.
It will be quite dissimilar from the starting of railways elsewhere with borrowed money.
On the principle that enterprises on the part of gentry and people are entirely dependent on the aid of the local authorities, I submit to Your Majesty that it seems needful to charge the high provincial authorities concerned to instruct their subordinates, high and low, together with the gentry, scholars, traders, and people, in accordance with local conditions, to devise means to provide for undertaking so that there be no want.
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