1939-07-12 — Page 18

THE HONGKONg Telegraph, WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 1939.

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DEATH

Mrs. Sum Fung Sie Kwan, aged 90 years, (nother of Sum Pak Ming and Sum Chung Hing), at her residence "Ulam Hall", 41, Con- duit Rond, July 11. Funeral will take place on Friday, the 14th July, cortege will leave the residence at 10 a.m. for the Chinese Cemetry, Aberdeen.

The

Hongkong Telegraph.

Wyndham St., Hongkong 'Phone 26615 July 12, 1939

| Crisis Arising?

Russ

"YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE ONE THAT GOT

When

there is trouble about..

THENEVER there is trouble

Wabout we are urged to pray.

And we do pray, even those who never do so at other times.

Yet some of us find the whole thing difficult and unreal, rather like talking down the telephone when you are not sure any one is there.

Some cannot see the sense of pray- ing anyway.

AN N OBVIOUSLY grave situation is steadily coming to head in the Far East. It has been created, firstly, by the Japanese action in

Will God take notice of us, aller ali Tientsin, secondly, by the illegal blockade of Chineas porta. and, is arrangements for us? Docs He thirdly, by the Japanese-sponsored need us to tell Him what to do?

You will probably nut bother about anti-British movement in the Japan-such questions if you really feel like eso occupied areas, culminating in praying. The natural thing to do is to the attacks on British property in pray first, reason afterwards; for | Tsingtao yesterday.

Until recently there has been a

sections disposition in some

of British opinion to believe that the Japanese actions are excusable on the grounds-of-military-necessity, but few people can still hold that belief.

feed

(1

prayer is, somehow, Instinctive.

Men prayed long before any ane asked "Is it any use?" To feel like praying is, in sense, to believe in

prayer.

But you cannot be expected 10 pray, If you think there is nothing in it and have this feeling all the ume you are trying to do it. Nor is, after all, in strict accord with Christian teaching to pray only when you want something.

Many of us prayed last when wo pass an examination at wanted to school. or have a bicycle for our birthday. And that is as for as we ever got,

ensure

and

The incitement of Chinese mobs to attack British persons and pro- perty creating a situation which may have the most serious reper cussions. The Chinese in the Japanese-oceupled areas, unhappily, must rely exclusively on Japanese sources of news, and they are daily It is pointed out that if you seldom being fed with information inimical pray you cannot expect to find prayer

Like satisfying,

art, real and not only to the interests of their music, poetry, you need long and in- country and their countrymen, but ilmate acquaintance with it also to Western Powers. The type full understanding and appreciation.

This seems reasonable enough, of war propaganda Japan has been perhaps explains the "talking to feeding the Chinese in the occupled nothing" feeling some of us get area is similar in many respects to To retur the other difficulties: the type they are attempting to Even the fervent believer will admit that prayer is something mysterious, regarding the border

beyond his understanding. Yet he operations at Outer Mongolia. This can point out that it helps him in the type of propaganda is comparatively troubles of life, enables him to be innocuous in its effect, since the happy, strong and unafraid.

And not only he himself, but most time must come when even the of the big figures in history, the most illiterate person must wonder people who have really achieved great at repeated "victory" claims. Since ihlags, have found this too.

An alternative to prayer seems to the beginning of the Tientain

be a belief in blind fate. This in blockade, however, a new type of tum will very likely lead you to propaganda, which first made its superstitions, charms, and restless saves us from this appearance at Tientsin, has spread fear, Prayer

nightmare, and on the face of it over North China. It is propaganda seems less futile and fantastic. openly directed against Great Brl-

Probably we make the mistake of tain, who is blamed as the country worrying overmuch about the un- responsible for the prolungation of known. instead of dealing with the hostilities, as the Power for evil known. We know that prayer worka our end, so to speak; how it operates responsible, for the hardships those at the other is, surely, of secondary Chinese the occupled areas importance.

The religious man cannot possibly auffer. Constant repetition of this

to censes know, and he most often theme, especially when there are no

He just prays. menns of contradiction or of making The

puzzled theologians have known the truth, may lead to in themselves all down the centuries and have their theorics. But the cldents of a type which may make man who tecla impelled to pray can- Tsingtao. a minor affair. Many nut wolt for theories.

in

care.

..!

AWAY!"

Making the silk-worm turn

T

HERE ought to be an empty chair marked "The Lady of Sl-ling" at the dinner of the Rayon and Silk Association

It would be a nice geature to one. who, for three thousand years, has been the patroness of the silk industry and who has now been deposed.

For the Association, Incorporated to-day, is the formal admission that silk must take second place to rayon, the so-called artificial

silk," which has supplanted it, and that the chemist has beaten the alik-worm at its own Jab. It follows the reorganisation of the 52-year- old Silk Association to which rayon was merely a step-child,

-by. RITCHIE

CALDER

Derbyshire

$12k

manufacturer,

Lombe, went to Lombardy dis- guised as a workman. He obtained work in one of the silk factories. He studied the devices. He made drawings of them and then bolted for home.

The Italians discovered the trick. They sent warships to pursue kim on his voyage home. He escaped. And, in Derbyshire, be recoñ- structed the plant. Legend goCS farther. It says he was myste-

Queen Mary takes the place of The Lady of Si-ling, wife of the Chinese emperor Huang-ti, by be- coming-the-patroness of the new-riously poisoned-by-Italians who

Association.

Q

UBEN MARY will not be expected to tend with her own hands the machines which make rayon, as the Empress once nursed the worms which made silk, or gather fir-trees, as Bl-ling gathered mul- berry leaves, or invent, as she did. the loom which gave woven silk to the world.

Queen Mary can leave all that to the scientists and the engineers and to the 100,000 workers who are now employed through the rayon Industry in this country.

Thus has a revolution taken place in one of the world's oldest textile

industries.

In A.D. 500 the Roman Emperor Justinian introduced the Industry to Europe. He did it by bribing priests who had gone on a pilgrim- age to the East to smuggle silk- worms out of China, where they were ns jealously guarded as The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God. For the Chinese wero deter- mined to maintain their monopoly of the silk-market. The silk-worms were brought to the West hidden in the hollow bamboo of the pll- grims' staffs,

T

HE gulle was repeated by an Englishman, in the 18th Century. Britain's silk industry had been the started by refugees from Netherlands, who fled, during the reign of Henry VI, from the porse- cutions of the Spaniards. It hnd grown through the Influx of an- ather flood of refugees, the Huguenots, fleeing from the Mas- sacre of St. Bartholomew'a 'Eve.

Dut at the beginning of the 18th Century. the Italians still controlled the secrets of one of the most dificult processes. Sa a

.

came to England to avenge the theft of their sceret.

*ArtiBcial silk" had equally romantic origins. It is linked with Pasteur and with the invention of the electric lamp.

W4.9

Pastour was called in to investi-

the plague gate

which destroying the French silk-worms. His discovery of the germ-origin of disease was

ras responsible for sav ing the French all industry. But, working with him, was a young assistant, Count de Chardonnet, who was more interested in the living-mechanism by which the worms manufactured silk than In the death-mechanism of the discase,

Han

E began to experiment and to try to reproduce the process artifcially. He tried to make silk by pulping the mulberry leaves on which the worms fed.

At this time, Joseph Swan, the English rival of Edison in the race to produce an electric lamp, was trying to find a flament which would become incandescent inside the bulb.

He hit upon the device of producing, by squirting cellu- lose acetate through fets, an arti- ficial fibre. which when burned would become a carbon alament.

He made hia filament, but he did not realise that he had found a new textile thread as well. Char- donnet jumped in and patented the making of acti@cial threads in 1884. A year later, Swan's wife, as an afterthought, exhibited fab- rica which she had crocheted from her husband'a filaments at the London Inventions Exhibition.

TORKING with Swan

W

were three men. Cross, Bevan and Topham. They saw that "the Old Man was on to something" in his artificial fibre.

Chinese in the occupied area must Certainly, prayer seems like ask- Indeed believe that Chinese resisting God to change His mind, or not the Delly are probably Inadequate.

Cross and Bevan left Swan and mark. But they arc ance has collapsed; that Chiang to forget us, or to let us off lightly wide of the

began to experiment. They pro Kai-shek has been reduced to when we have done wrong. Some

duced the first viscose, which now You could as well explain away

accounts for nearly 90 per cent, of banditry, since this is the type of times it even appears as if we were natural to us; they are our own.

your own existence as explain away

the world's production, of rayon. nowa that has been constantly dis- telling Him what to do.

But thene eruditles, it is answer this Instinct to pray. seminated by the Japanese for theed, are only signs of your weakness. We pray because we cannot help They were still thinking in terma of electric flaments. But Court- past twelve months. From that be:They merely prove how little we praying. lief it is but a step to the belief knpw and how helpless we are,

That is what we nearly all feel auids, in, the alik trade since 1798 when we come to the point. And and famous for their mourning that the appressors now are not the

that is why. In these worrying times, crepe, popularised by Queen Vic- The Widow of Windsor," aaw other possibllition.

Japanero.

Britalu is being provoked now to

It appears inevitable to think of we turn to prayer as the one thing torin as a moro dangerous extent than here- God In human terms-as a Father, at will calm us, help us. toforo. If it continues, it is un-1 Ustening to His children. No doubt, likely that the British Government with oven the best of us, our prayers will content itself with protests, are feeble, poor things. Our idens cfi

Cecil Clark

They bought the rights of the process.

Meanwhile, the results of trying

to make weavable threads had been. But Swan's other discouraging. assistant, Topham, the glass- blower who helped him with his bulbs, had been experimenting. He invented the spinning-box," which is the key to the spinning process. His árat a

Espinning-box was made out of a blacklead tin.

Early years were full of dis.. appointments, It looked as if rayon was going to be useful only for making artinetal flowers and hat ornaments, although it used for golf-jackets.

WAS:

Then about 1908 it began to prove a commercial possiblity and... up to the war, grew modestly.

Da

URING the war cellulose- facelate, on which the brothers Dreyfus had concentrated, was produced as.

dope for aeroplane wings,TM

After the war they turned their- attention to producing a textile yarn, and the result was British. Celanese.

Blace the war rayon has worked: miracles. In our mothera" - day- "allks" were Sunday best. They. were dear and had to inst a long, time. Fashions could not change. They had to be enduring and ser- viceable.

Now silks," in the form of: rayon, are the ever-changing fancy of the women. It has given us. "glamour-girls." It has given. every work-girl the right to elegant slik stockings and fashions which: alter with the seasons or with their whims. The silk of Society has: become the dress of the millions,

The world produces a thousand million lb. of rayon a year, of which Britain accounts for a tenth. Foresta melt into a shimmering sea of "Blik."

Except that nowadays "alik" is a misnomer, Rayon is no longer merely artificial silk." Indeed, In France and America it is illegal. to call it so.

N

FOR is it just a substitute- for slik. In the form of "staple fibre," which is rayon in shor

lengths instead of continuous threads, it is spun In combination with cotton and. wool. In Germany, searching for self-sumciency, they are trying to replace, completely, natural iex- flies by "staple Obre."

Even in this country, men's suits, oiton contain a large proportion of rayon.

And now, made from coal, air* and water, a new product, "Nylon," which is said to be as strong as steel and aner than slik, has been

discovered. Du Ponts, the big American chemical combine, are building a £2,000,000 plant to pro- duce it, Imperial Chemical Indus- tries and Courtaulds are combin ing to create a firm to manufacture it for the whole textile Industry

here. It will come under the œegis. of the new Rayon and Silk Associ- ation.

From the trees of the forest, from: the coal in the bowels of the earth,. women and men are being: clothed in elegance.

And the time-honoured silk- worm, farmed now on mass-pro-- duction lines, carries on Nature's! competition with the chemist