20, 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.''

The virile and resolute Empress-Dowager headed the reaction against the headlong progressiveness of the young Emperor. September 22, 1898, the world was startled by an Imperial Decree which read in part as follows:--

''Her Imperial Majesty the Empress-Dowager, Tze Hsi, since the first years of the reign of the late Emperor Tung Chih down to our present reign, has twice ably filled the regency of the Empire, and never did her Majesty fail in happily bringing to a successful issue even the most difficult problems of government. In all things we have ever placed the interests of our Empire before those of others, and, looking back at her Majesty's successful handiwork, we are now led to beseech, for a third time, for this assistance from her Imperial majesty, so that we may benefit from her wise and kindly advice in all matters of State. Having now obtained her Majesty's gracious consent, we truly consider this to be a great boon both to ourselves as well as to the people of our Empire. Hence we now command that from henceforth, commencing with this morning, the affairs of state shall be transacted in the ordinary Throne Hall, and that to-morrow (23rd) we shall, at the head of the Princes and Nobles and Ministers of our Court, attend in full dress in the Ching-cheng Throne Hall, to pay ceremonial obeisance to her Imperial Majesty the Empress- Dowager. Let the Board of Rites draw up for our perusal the ceremonies to be observed on the above occasion.''[60]

[60] Pott, ''The Outbreak in China,'' pp. 56, 57.

The youthful son of Toanwong was appointed heir to the throne and the ambitious father immediately proceeded to use his enhanced prestige to set the Empire in a blaze.

XVII

THE BOXER UPRISING

THE 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 mediaeval 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[61] concluded after careful inquiry that ''the devastating Boxer cyclone cost the lives of 135 adult Protestant missionaries and fifty-three children and of thirty- five 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.''

[61] ''Rex Christus,'' p. 210.

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.[62] But I cannot for- bear some description of the scenes of massacre that I personally visited. I was unable to go to the remoter province of Shan-si where so many devoted men and women laid down their lives and where many who escaped death endured indescribable hardships. But in the province of Shantung, where the Boxer Uprising originated, I was witness to the ruin that was wrought in many places, though the iron hand of the great Governor, Yuan Shih Kai, prevented much bloodshed.

Then I turned to the northern province of Chih-li where official hands, instead of restraining, actually guided and goaded the maddened rioters.

[62] ''China in Convulsion,'' Arthur H. Smith; ''The Outbreak in China,''

F. L. Hawks Pott; ''The World Crisis in China, 1900,'' Allen S. Will; ''Siege Days,'' A. H. Mateer; ''The Siege of Peking,'' Wm. A. P.

Martin; ''The Providence of God in the Siege of Peking,'' C. H. Fenn; ''The Tragedy of Paoting-fu,'' Isaac C. Ketler; ''The China Martyrs of 1900,'' Robert C. Forsythe; ''China,'' James H. Wilson, ''China's Book of Martyrs,'' Luella Miner; ''Two Heroes of Cathay,'' Luella Miner; ''Through Fire and Sword in Shan-si,'' E. H. Edwards; ''Chinese Heroes,'' I. T. Headland; ''Martyred Missionaries of the C. I. M.,''

Broomhall; ''The Crisis in China,'' G. B. Smith and others.

After a delightful voyage of eighteen hours from Chefoo over a smooth sea, we anchored outside the bar, nine miles from shore, the tide not permitting our steamer to cross with its heavy load. A tug took us off and entering the Pei-ho River, we passed the famous Taku forts to the railway wharf at Tong-ku. It was significant to find foreign flags flying over the Taku forts and also over the mud-walled villages near by.

Scores of merchant steamers, transports and war vessels were lying off Taku as well as hundreds of junks. The river was full of smaller craft among which were several Japanese and American gunboats. The railroad station presented a motley appearance. A regiment of Japanese had just arrived and while we were waiting, three train-loads of British Sikhs and several cars of Austrian marines and British ''Tommy Atkins''

came in. The platform was thronged with officers and soldiers of various nationalities, including a few Russians.

Nothing could be more dreary than the mud flats that the traveller to the imperial city first sees. The greater part of the way from Taku to Peking, the soil is poor and little cultivated.

But as we advanced, kao-liang fields were more frequent, though the growth was far behind that in Shantung at the same season. Small trees were numerous during the latter half of the trip. The soil being too thin for good crops, the people grow more fuel and fruit.

Evidences of the great catastrophe were seen long before reaching the capital. Burned villages and battered buildings lined the route. At Tien-tsin several of the foreign buildings had shell holes. One corrugated iron building near the railway station was pierced like a sieve and thousands of native houses were in ruins. The city wall had been razed to the ground and a highway made where it had stood--an unspeakable humiliation to the proud commercial metropolis. The Japanese soldiers teased the citizens by telling them that ''a city without a wall is like a woman without clothes,'' and the people keenly felt the shame implied in the taunt.

In Peking, the very fact that the railroad train on which we travelled rushed noisily through a ragged chasm in the wall of the Chinese city, and stopped at the entrance of the Temple of Heaven, was suggestive of the consequences of war. The city, as a whole, was not as badly injured as I had expected to find it, but the ravages of war were evident enough. Wrecked shops, crumbled houses, shot-torn walls were on every side, while the most sacred places to a Chinese and a Manchu had been profaned. At other times the Purple Forbidden City, the Winter and Summer Palaces, the Temple of Heaven and kindred imperial enclosures are inaccessible to the foreigner.

But a pass from the military authorities opened to us every door.

We walked freely through the extensive grounds and into all the famous buildings--including the throne rooms which the highest Chinese official can approach only upon his knees and with his face abjectly on the stone pavement--and the private apartments of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager. I was impressed by the vastness of the Palace buildings and grounds, the carvings of stone and wood, and the number of articles of foreign manufacture. But thousands of Americans in moderate circumstances have more spacious and comfortable bedrooms than those of the Emperor and Empress Dowager of China. All the living apartments looked cheerless. The floors were of artificial stone or brick in squares of about 20 x 20 inches and of course everything was covered with dust.

The far-famed Temple of Heaven is the most artistic building in China, a dream of beauty, colour and grace. For a generation before the siege of Peking, no foreigner except General Grant had entered that sacred enclosure, and the Chinese raised a furore because Li Hung Chang admitted even the distinguished American. As I freely walked about the place, photographed the Temple and stood on the circular altar that is supposed to be the centre of the earth and where the Emperor worships alone at the winter solstice, British Sikhs lounged under the trees, army mules munched the luxuriant grass and quartermasters'

wagons stood in long rows near the sacred spot where a Chinese would prostrate himself in reverence and fear.

We rode past innumerable ruined buildings and through motley throngs of Manchus, Chinese, German, French, Italian, British and Japanese soldiers to the Presbyterian compound at Duck Lane, which, though narrow, is not so unimportant a street as its name implies. But where devoted missionaries had so long lived and toiled, we saw only shapeless heaps of broken bricks and a few tottering fragments of walls. At the Second Street compound there was even greater ruin, if that were possible. Silently we stood beside the great hole which had once been the hospital cistern and from which the Japanese soldiers, after the siege, had taken the bodies of a hundred murdered Chinese. Not all had been Christians, for in that carnival of blood, many who were merely suspected of being friendly to foreigners were killed, while foes took advantage of the tumult to pay off old scores of hate.

The first reports that had come to New York were that four- fifths of the Chinese Christians and three-fourths of the boys and girls in the boarding-schools had been killed or had died under the awful hardships of that fatal summer. But as the months passed, first one and then another and another were found.

Husbands searched for wives, parents for children, brothers for sisters, until a considerable number of the missing ones had been found, though the number of the lost was still great.

About two hundred of these surviving Christians and their families were living together in native buildings adjoining the residence in which we were entertained. Their history was one of agony and bereavement. Including those who fell at Paoting-fu, 191 of their fellow Christians had received the crown of martyrdom, so that almost every survivor had lost father or mother, brother or sister or friend. The Chinese are supposed to be a phlegmatic people and not given to emotion.

But never have I met a congregation more swiftly responsive than this one in Peking as I bore to them kindly messages from many friends in other lands.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral was immortalized by Bishop Favier's defense during the memorable siege. The mission buildings occupy a spacious and strongly-walled compound in the Manchu city. Hundreds of bullet and shell holes in the roofs and walls were suggestive evidences of the fury of the Boxer attack, while great pits marked the spots where mines had been exploded.

I called on the famous Bishop. He was, for he has since died, a burly, heavily-bearded Frenchman of about sixty-five apparently. He received us most cordially and readily talked of the siege. He said that of the eighty Europeans and 3,400 Christians with him in the siege, 2,700 were women and children.

Four hundred were buried, of whom forty were killed by bullets, twenty-five by one explosion, eighty-one by another and one by another. Of the rest, some died of disease but the greater part of starvation. Twenty-one children were buried at one time in one grave. Beside these 400 who were killed or who died, many more were blown to pieces in explosions so that nothing could be found to bury. Fifty-one children disappeared in this way and not a fragment remained.

The first month of the siege, the food allowance was half a pound a day. The first half of the second month, it was reduced to four ounces, but for the second half only two ounces could be served and the people had to eat roots, bark and the leaves of trees and shrubs. Eighteen mules were eaten during the siege. The Bishop said that in the diocese outside of Peking, 6,000 Chinese Catholics, including three native priests, were killed by the Boxers. Only four European priests were killed, one in Peking and three outside. ''Not one foreign priest left the diocese during the troubles,'' a statement that is equally true of the Presbyterian missionaries and, so far as I know, of those of other churches.

Clouds lowered as we left Peking, July 6th, on the Peking and Hankow Railway for Paoting-fu, that city of sacred and painful interest to every American Christian. Soon rain began to fall, and it steadily continued while we rode over the vast level plain, through unending fields of kao-liang, interspersed with plots of beans, peanuts, melons and cucumbers, and mud and brick-walled villages whose squalid wretchedness was hidden by the abundant foliage of the trees, which are the only beauty of Chinese cities. At almost every railway station, roofless buildings, crumbling walls and broken water tanks bore painful witness to the rage of the Boxers. At Liang-hsiang-hsien the first foreign property was destroyed, and all along the line outrages were perpetrated on the inoffensive native Christians.

Nowhere else in China was the hatred of the foreigner more violent, for here hereditary pride and bigoted conservatism, unusually intense even for China, were reinforced by Boxer chiefs from the neighbouring province of Shantung, and were particularly irritated by the aggressiveness of Roman Catholic priests and by the construction of the railroad. It is only 110 miles from Peking to Paoting-fu. But the schedule was slow and the stops long, so that we were six hours in making the journey. Arriving at the large, well-built brick station, we bumped and splashed in a Chinese cart through narrow, muddy streets to the residence of a wealthy Chinese family that had deemed a hasty departure expedient when the French and British forces entered the city, and whose house had been assigned by the magistrate as temporary quarters for the Presbyterian missionaries.

Protestant mission work at Paoting-fu was begun only about thirty years ago by the American Board. The station was never a large one, the total nominal force of missionaries up to the Boxer outbreak being two ordained married men, Ewing and Pitkin, one physician, Dr. Noble, and two single women, the Misses Morrill and Gould. In the whole station field including the out-stations, there were not more than 300 Christians and those were south of a line drawn through the centre of the city of Paoting-fu. There were two boarding-schools, one for boys and one for girls, both small, and a general hospital.

The China Inland Mission had no mission work at Paoting-fu, but as the city is at the head of navigation of the Paoting-fu River from Tien-tsin and was also at that time the terminus of the Peking and Hankow Railway, the Mission made it a point of trans-shipment and of formation of cart and shendza trains for its extensive work in the Shan-si and Shen-si provinces, and kept a forwarding agent there, Mr. Benjamin Bagnall.

The Presbyterian station was not opened till 1893, and the force at the time of the outbreak consisted of three ordained men, the Revs. J. Walter Lowrie, J. A. Miller, and F. E.

Simcox, two medical men, George Yardley Taylor and C. V. R.

Hodge, and one single woman, Dr. Maud A. Mackay. All of the men except Lowrie and Taylor were married, and the former had his mother, Mrs. Amelia P. Lowrie, with him.

With the exception of a dispensary and street chapel in rented quarters in the city, the station plant was at the compound where, on a level tract 660 feet in length by 210 feet in width, there were four residences and a hospital and chapel combined, with, of course, the usual smaller outbuildings. The only educational work, beside one out-station day-school, was a small boarding-school for girls recently started and occupying a little building originally intended for a stable.