Epitaph for a Plutocracy

The Municipal Council of the International Settlement of Shanghai was a government as close to a plutocracy as the world has ever seen. For 96 years the Council ran the big city on the Whangpoo mud flats for the especial benefit of a tiny group of the city's biggest Occidental taxpayers, the taipans. heads of the biggest business houses in the Settlement. Last week, after staving off the determined Japanese since 1932, the International Settlement was under Japanese rule.

For 92 of its years, beginning with opium and ending with oil, Shanghai was a boom town of quick, fabulous profits and easy spending. The Municipal Council reflected the spirit of the town. From its huge budget it paid huge salaries, bothered little about amenities of health or policing.

For the careless Occidental plutocracy of Shanghai the Japanese invasion was the beginning of the end. When in 1937 the Japanese took over a large section of the city, the bottom dropped out of the Chinese dollar, in which Shanghai collected its taxes. For three years the Settlement Government staggered along as best it could, went into a decline last summer when its British garrison left for Singapore.

In April a taxpayers' meeting voted in a new Provisional Council dominated by the Japanese. Its 16-seat membership: three Japanese, four representatives of the puppet Nanking Government, one German, three Britons, three Americans, one Swiss, one Hollander. The old order which the Japanese hammered to break for years: five Chinese, five Britons, two Americans, two Japanese.

As Cordell Hull last week promised the Government of Free China that there would be no more extraterritoriality in China, from Shanghai came the perfect epitaph for Shanghai's plutocracy. It was not the work of a taipan but of brilliant, crotchety British Lawyer Ranald McDonald, an ornament of Shanghai's bar and bars. At the Council's April meeting he had shrilled a speech that might have been drafted either by Mr. Pickwick or an early Shanghai missionary.

"This resolution [turning the Shanghai Council over to Japanese domination] ... is one of the most monstrous abortions ever conceived by the mind of man, regardless of race or creed. It is damnable --it is a sanguinary resolution.

"Those of us who may prefer prehistoric affinity to swine are asked to cut their own throats from ear to ear. Those of us ... who have a predilection for consanguinity with sheep are asked to make only a small slit in our throats.

"All that this resolution offers your corpses, not you, is 16 Rehoboams. . . ."*

* Rehoboam: last king of the old kingdom of Israel, who said (I Kings 12:11): "And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."

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