marked personal attentions that we were not to be molested, we might have met with violence in a dozen places. The opinions of such experienced men were not to be lightly set aside.

All I can say is that on these suppositions the Chinese are masters of the art of dissimulation, for in all our journeyings through the very heart of the region where the Boxers originated, and where the anti-foreign hatred was said to be bitterest, we saw not a sign of unfriendliness. The typical official received us with the courtesy of a "gentleman of the old school." The vast throngs that quickly assembled at every stopping place, while silent, were respectful. We tried to behave decently ourselves, to speak kindly to every man, to pay fair prices for what we bought; in short, to act just as we would have acted in America. And every man to whom we smiled, smiled in return. Wherever we asked a civil question we got a civil answer. Coolies would stop their barrows, farmers leave their fields to direct us aright. In all our travelling in the interior, amid a population so dense that we constantly marvelled, we never heard a rude word or saw a hostile sign. I naturally find it difficult to believe that those pleasant, obliging people would have killed us if they had not been restrained by their magistrates, and that the officials who exerted themselves to show us all possible honour would have gladly murdered us if they had dared.

And yet less than a year before, the Chinese had angrily destroyed the property and venomously sought the lives of foreigners who were as peaceably disposed as we were, ruthlessly hunting men and women who had never done them wrong, and who had devoted their lives to teaching the young and healing the sick and preaching the gospel of love and good will. Why they did this we shall have occasion to observe in a later chapter.

PART II

The Commercial Force and the Economic

Revolution

VIII

WORLD CONDITIONS THAT ARE AFFECTING CHINA'

EVERAL outside forces have pressed steadily and heav

S&

ily upon the exclusiveness and conservatism of the Chinese, and though they have not yet succeeded in changing the essential character of the nation, they have set in motion vast movements which have already convulsed great sections of the Empire and which are destined to affect stupendous transformations. The first of these forces is foreign

commerce.

To understand the operation of this force, we must consider that its impact has been enormously increased by the extension of facilities for intercommunication. The extent to which these have revolutionized the world is one of the most extraordinary features of our extraordinary age. It is startlingly significant of the change that has taken place that Russia and Japan, nations 7,000 miles apart by land and a still greater distance by water, are able in the opening years of the twentieth century to wage war in a region which one army can reach in four weeks and the other in four days, and that all the rest of the world can receive daily information as to the progress of the conflict. A half century ago, Russia could no more have sent a large army to Manchuria than to the moon, while down to the opening of her ports by Commodore Perry in 1854, the few wooden vessels that made the long journey to Japan found an unprogressive and bitterly anti-foreign heathen nation with an edict issued in 1638 still on its statute books declaring―" So long as the sun shall continue to warm the earth, let no Christian be so bold as to come to Japan; and let all know that the King of Spain himself, or the Christian's God, or the great God

Part of this chapter appeared as an article in the American Monthly Review of Reviews, October, 1904.

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of all, if He dare violate this command, shall pay for it with his head."

Nor were other far-eastern peoples any more hospitable. China, save for a few port cities, was as impenetrable as when in 1552 the dying Xavier had cried-"O Rock, Rock, when wilt thou open!" Siam excluded all foreigners until the century's first quarter had passed, and Laos saw no white man till 1868. A handful of British traders were so greedily determined to keep all India as a private commercial preserve that, forgetting their own indebtedness to Christianity, they sneered at the proposal to send missionaries to India as "the maddest, most expensive, most unwarranted project ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast," while as late as 1857, a director of the East India Company declared that "he would rather see a band of devils in India than a band of missionaries." Korea was rightly called "the hermit nation" until 1882; and as for Africa, it was not till 1873 that the world learned of that part of it in which the heroic Livingstone died on his knees, not till 1877 that Stanley staggered into a West Coast settlement after a desperate journey of 999 days from Zanzibar through Central Africa, not till 1884 that the Berlin Conference formed the International Association of the Congo guaranteeing that which has not yet been realized "liberty of conscience" and "the free and public exercise of every creed."

Even in America within the memory of men still living, the lumbering, white-topped "prairie schooner" was the only conveyance for the tedious overland journey to California. Hardy frontiersmen were fighting Indians in the Mississippi Valley, and the bold Whitman was "half a year" in bearing a message from Oregon to Washington.

The Hon. John W. Foster tells us in his "Century of American Diplomacy" that "General Lane, the first territorial governor of Oregon, left his home in Indiana, August 27, 1848, and desiring to reach his destination as soon as possible, travelling overland to San Francisco and thence by ship, reached his