Excerpt from Letters From a Chinese Magistrate: Reprinted From the Peking and Tientsin Times, March, 1920 During the now defunct Ching re gime I hated more than anything the corrupt and! Money-loving officials who never had any regard for the welfare of the country and the people. The superior officials of that time consid ered an official good, and gave him promotions or recommendations, only when he knew how to pull the wires, to please his superiors, to flatter and blindly to obey. As to the officials who were really honest in their work and untainted in character, they never cared to give them any notice, For this reason the distress of the people seldom reached the higher eu thorities. Therefore I determined not to enter ofiicialdom as long as the Ching dynasty still existed. Upon the inauguration of the irepublic, how ever, I thought the condifrons must be better than formerly, and so I ac cepted a post of Magistrate. Al though the conditions I shall nowdescribe are only actual facts regard ing one district, as far as I can learn the conditions of other districts are very much the same. I can, of course, only single out some more im portant facts for your information. I hope your valuable paper will be a means to draw the attention of the high officials so as to lift the people from their sufferings. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.