inhabitants adjourned thither to put his invulnerability to the test. The daily train came puffing along, as the Boxer, waving his sword, stood right in its path. The driver was a European, and seeing some one on the line, pulled up his train to avoid running over him. The Boxer pointed to the train triumphantly, and the astonished villagers became Boxers. There was, however, a sceptic who refused to believe, so next day they repaired again to the line, and the Boxer again made his passes and uttered his charms. Alas for him! this time the driver was a Chinaman, and he was not going to stop his master's train because a coolie fellow got in the way, so he put on full steam and cut him to pieces, and the village deserted the Boxer faith to a man.

With the relief of Peking, the Boxer Society fell; but the popular view was not that Boxer teaching was false, but that the spirits behind Western religion were stronger than those behind Boxerdom. So one of the immediate results of the fall of the Boxers was to establish the spiritual prestige of Christianity; the second result was to inspire the Chinese with a respect for the military power of the foreigner. The Boxers had failed, the foreign powers had taken Peking, the Son of Heaven had become a fugitive; all this was gall and wormwood to the Chinaman. The sack of Peking was especially felt, both because of the wanton destruction that was committed—one informant told me he saw a vase worth £200 smashed into a thousand atoms by a drunken soldier—and because the enlightened Chinese knew very well that no civilised city is sacked at the present time, and that they were being treated as no other race is now treated.

Yet the old spirit of pride prevented them learning completely the full truth. The thinking Chinaman was still disposed to attribute the victory of the West to the superior fighting powers of Western men. A Chinese gentleman, explaining the fear his people have of Europeans, said, "They regard you as tigers." The troops who sacked Peking were to the thinking Chinaman but another example of the well-known truth, that those nearer the savage state fight better than civilised men, and really, considering the behaviour of some of the European troops, no surprise can be felt at this conclusion; it needed another lesson to make them finally and thoroughly realise the superiority of our civilisation.

The bitterness of their next humiliation made them ready to learn as they had never been before in the whole of their history, and events provided them with teachers who taught them that the cause of this humiliation was their refusal to accept Western ideas, and that if they would maintain their independence they must learn the art of war from their conquerors.

After the siege of Peking came the Russo-Japanese war. The Russians had long been known and feared by the Chinese; they were to the Chinese mind the embodiment of the warlike and blood-thirsty spirit of the West; they were hated for their cruelty and feared for their prowess. The awful story of the massacre of Blagovestchensk in 1900 was still present to the popular mind. The story was this. The Amur divides China from Siberia. When the Boxer movement broke out the Russians required all the Chinese to go to their side of the river; but with sinister intent, they removed all the boats, so that no one could cross. The Chinese pointed this out, and the respectable merchants of the town presented a petition saying they were ready to obey the Russian Government in everything, but without the boats they could not do so; but the Russians insisted that boats or no boats, they must cross the Amur; they protested, but in vain; a half-circle was formed round them by the soldiery, and the whole Chinese population of the city was driven into the river at the point of the bayonet.

The Japanese were also well known to the Chinese; they had been till lately, when the Western movement had altered everything in Japan, their pupils in civilisation. The Japanese believed in Confucius, used Chinese characters, worshipped in Buddhist temples, sacrificed to ancestors, in fact were in Chinese estimation a civilised race, though inferior of course to themselves.

When these two antagonists met in Manchuria, the war could not fail to make a deep impression on China. To begin with, it was an insult surpassing that of the sack of Peking to the Chinese amour propre, to have the war carried on in Manchuria. Russia and Japan were disputing over Korea, and both nations were at peace with China. Russia might have invaded Japan; Japan might have invaded Russia, or both might have met in Korea, but what they did was to select a province of a neutral State and decide that there should be the scene of conflict. What made this more striking was that they agreed to respect the neutrality of the rest of China; in fact they selected their battle-ground with the same equanimity as if China and her national rights did not exist.

But the deepest impression made on the Chinese was by the victory of the Eastern over the Western. The Japanese demonstrated that there was no essential inferiority of the East to the West, and that when an Eastern race adopted Western military methods it proved itself superior to the most powerful of the Western races. This was the lesson the battle of Mukden taught the Chinese, and which convinced the anti-foreign party in China, that however much they might hate the foreigner, they must adopt Western methods if they would retain their independence. The result was that the progressive and anti-foreign parties found themselves at one. Both agreed that Western ideas were necessary. The first, because they believed in Western progress; the second, because they felt that the only way to preserve China from the hated foreigner was to learn the secret of his military power. The first thing to be done was to study Western education, and then they could hope to hold their own against the Western races, as Japan had more than held her own against the Russians.

I believe the battle of Mukden will prove one of the turning points in the history of the world. Few of us have any conception of the bitterness of the humiliation of China. People speak of Russia as having been humiliated, but my experience is that the Russians looked at the whole question as a colonial war in which a bungling Government embroiled their country—a war which, if it demonstrated the incapacity of their officers, proved the courage of their soldiers. But the humiliation of China was intense. When one remembers the position that the Emperor occupies in China; when one also remembers the reverential feeling that exists towards ancestors, one realises what it must have meant to the Chinaman that the site of the tombs of their Emperors should have been the scene of that titanic struggle between the East and the West. But the result of that humiliation was to burn in the lesson that Japan had taken the right course, and that, however hateful were Western ways, they were a necessity, and that every lover of China must do his best to introduce them into the Empire.

Of course there are many Chinamen—nay, I should think a vast majority—who intend to preserve to China the essential points of the Confucian civilisation; they mean to accept Western ideas only in so far as they are necessary to struggle against the West. Some, no doubt, definitely admire the West, but most are anxious for a compromise; they want to preserve China with its customs, with its essential thought, but to strengthen it by foreign knowledge and a foreign military system. The exact degree of what should be preserved in China and what should be destroyed and replaced by Western innovations, differs according to the age and the temperament of the thinkers, but the principle is most