11. Ordering the Board of War and the Foreign Office to report on the reform of the military examinations.

12. Offering special rewards to inventors and authors.

13. Ordering officials to encourage trade and assist merchants.

14. Ordering the foundation of school boards in every city in the Empire.

15. Establishing a Bureau of Mines and Railroads.

16. Encouraging journalists to write on all political subjects.

17. Establishing naval academies and training ships.

18. Summoning the ministers and provincial authorities to assist the Emperor in his work of reform.

19. Directing that schools be founded in connection with all the Chinese legations in foreign countries for the benefit of the children of Chinese in those countries.

20. Establishing commercial bureaus in Shanghai for the encouragement of trade.

21. Abolishing six useless Boards in Peking.

22. Granting the right to memorialize the Throne by sealed memorials.

23. Dismissing two presidents and four vice presidents of the Board of Rites for disobeying the Emperor's orders that memorials should be presented to him unopened.

24. Abolishing the governorships of Hupeh, Kwang-tung and Yun-nan as a useless expense to the country.

25. Establishing schools for instruction in the preparation of tea and silk.

26. Abolishing the slow courier posts in favour of the Imperial Customs' Post.

27. Approving a system of budgets as in Western countries.

But, alas, it is disastrous to try to "hustle the East." The Chinese are phlegmatic and will endure much, but this was a little too much. Myriads of scholars and officials, who saw their hopes and positions jeopardized by the new tests, protested with all the virulence of the silversmiths of Ephesus, and all the conservatism of China rallied to their support.

Meantime, the Yellow River, aptly named "China's Sorrow," again overflowed its banks, devastating a region 100 miles long and varying from twenty-five to fifty miles wide.

Three hundred villages were swept away and 1,000,000 people made homeless. Famine and pestilence speedily followed, so that the whole catastrophe assumed appalling proportions. Even American communities are apt to become reckless and riotous in time of calamity, and in China this tendency of human nature was intensified by a superstition which led the people to believe that the disaster was due to the baleful influence of the foreigners, or that it was a punishment for their failure to resist them, while in the farther north a drought led to equally superstitious fury against "the foreign devils."

T

XVII

THE BOXER UPRISING

HE now famous Boxers were members of two of the secret societies which have long flourished in China,

To the Chinese they are known as League of United Patriots, Great Sword Society, Righteous Harmony Fists' Association and kindred names. Originally, they were hostile. to the foreign Manchu dynasty. When Germany made the murder of two Roman Catholic missionaries a pretext for pushing her political ambitions, the Boxers naturally arrayed themselves against them. As the champions of the national spirit against the foreigners, the membership rapidly increased. Supernatural power was claimed. Temples were converted into meeting-places, and soon excited men were drilling in every village.

The real ruler of China at this time, as all the world knows, was the Empress Dowager, who has been characterized as "the only man in China." At any rate, she is a woman of extraordinary force of character. She was astute enough to encourage the Boxers, and thus turn one of the most troublesome foes of the Manchu throne against the common enemy, the foreigner. Under her influence, the depredations of the Boxers, which were at first confined to the Shantung Province, spread with the swiftness of a prairie fire, until in the spring of 1900 the most important provinces of the Empire were ablaze and the legations in Peking were closely besieged. In the heat of the conflict and under the agonizing strain of anxiety for imperilled loved ones, many hard things were said and written about the officials who allied themselves with the Boxers. But Sir Robert Hart, who personally knew them and

who suffered as much as any one from their fury, candidly wrote after the siege : "These men were eminent in their own country for their learning and services, were animated by patriotism, were enraged by foreign dictation, and had the courage of their convictions. We must do them the justice of allowing that they were actuated by high motives and love of country," though he adds, "that does not always or necessarily mean political ability or highest wisdom." And so the irrepressible conflict broke out. It had to come, a conflict between conservatism and progress, between race prejudice and brotherhood, between superstition and Christianity, the tremendous conflict of ages which every nation has had to fight, and which in China was not different in kind, but only on a more colossal scale because there it involved half the human race at once. Of course it was impossible for so vast a nation permanently to segregate itself. The river of progress cannot be permanently stayed. It will gather force behind an obstacle until it is able to sweep it away. The Boxer uprising was the breaking up of this fossilized conservatism. It was such a tumultuous upheaval as the crusades caused in breaking up the stagnation of medieval Europe. As France opposed the new ideas, which in England were quietly accepted, only to have them surge over her in the frightful flood of the revolution, so China entered with the violence always inseparable from resistance the transition which Japan welcomed with a more open mind.

Though missionaries were not the real cause of the Boxer uprising, its horrors fell most heavily upon them. This was

partly because many of them were living at exposed points in the interior while most other foreigners were assembled in the treaty ports where they were better protected; partly because the movement developed such hysterical frenzy that it attacked with blind, unreasoning fury every available foreigner, and partly because in most places the actual killing and pillaging were not done by the people who best knew the missionaries

but by mobs from the slums, ruffians from other villages, or, as in Paoting-fu and Shan-si, in obedience to the direct orders of bigoted officials.

And so it came to pass that the innocent suffered more than the guilty. Dr. A. H. Smith concluded after careful inquiry that "the devastating Boxer cyclone cost the lives of 135 adult Protestant missionaries and fifty-three children and of thirtyfive Roman Catholic Fathers and nine Sisters. The Protestants were in connection with ten different missions, one being unconnected. They were murdered in four provinces and in Mongolia, and belonged to Great Britain, the United States and Sweden. No such outbreak against Christianity has been seen in modern times. The destruction of property was on the same continental scale. Generally speaking, all mission stations north of the Yellow River, with all their dwelling-houses, chapels, hospitals, dispensaries, schools, and buildings of every description were totally destroyed, though there were occasional exceptions, of which the village where these pages are written was one. The central and southern portions of the Empire were only partially affected by the anti-foreign madness, not because they were under different conditions, but mainly through the strong repressive measures of four men, Liu Kun Yi and Chang Chih-tung, Governors-General of the four great provinces in the Yang-tse Valley; Yuan Shih Kai in Shantung, and a Manchu, Tuan Fang, in Shen-si. The jurisdiction of this quartette made an impassable barrier across which the movement was unable to project itself in force, but much mischief in an isolated way was wrought in nearly every part of China not rigorously controlled."

So many volumes have been written about the Boxer Uprising that it is not necessary to double the size of this book in order to recount the details. For the full narrative, the reader is referred to the books mentioned below. But I cannot for

"Rex Christus," p. 210.

"China in Convulsion," Arthur H. Smith; "The Outbreak in China,"