And here is Mrs. Protheroe's account of her experience in the interval.—

"After I was separated from Mrs. Boden a perfect stranger took me to where he said the other foreigners were, namely, to the Makowsze, when I was refused admittance. I got in and was turned out. The mob got me back in front of our premises, which were now on fire, and told me they were going to kill me, and tried to pull the baby out of my arms. They pulled my hair and slapped my face, and asked me where the men (the missionaries) were. I told them at Hankow and Ki-chiao. One man said, 'Don't kill her;' the others said, 'If we don't kill her we will beat her.' Then they dragged me through the street. A soldier in plain clothes, under pretence of robbing me of my ring, got me gradually to the Fu's Yamên. I was a long time before I was let in. While waiting was being beaten; but the man who had dragged me through the street to the Yamên then told the mob to desist from beating me. Fân, meanwhile, was being badly beaten, and somehow lost the baby, which the Amah found with a native woman, who gave it to her."

But, if one official disgraced himself by driving away the women and children from his door, another, the Lung Pingsze, did his utmost with the means at his command to check the riot. It was he who tried to dissuade the mob from their purpose at the outset. He appealed vainly to the Prefect for help when they persisted, and was badly hurt in trying to save the lives of those who were killed. There is something pathetic in his message to the British Consul at Hankow that "he did his best, but that he is only a smal! Mandarin, and has but a few men; that he had urged the Prefect twice to send men to quell the riot, but the latter refused." Yet this man was removed from office; and, though he is said to have been since reinstated through the intervention of the foreign Ministers, the action cannot but create a most unfavorable impression. Still worse was the case at Ichang where Hunan braves are said to have been actual rioters, and the officials stood by powerless or unwilling to interfere.

More than enough has now been said to show the general character of the riots. The stories vary in detail; but the variation is chiefly in the behavior of the magistrates and in the violence shown by the mobs. Two questions will probably suggest themselves after a perusal of this retrospect. Can the Chinese believe the

accusations by which the excitement is wrought up? Is it true, as has been alleged, that insurrectionary motives are at the bottom of the trouble, and that political secret societies are promoting the turmoil in the hope of facilitating their own designs?

66

As regards the first, we must conquer a tendency, in which Englishmen are not singular, to consider everything from our present standpoint. Absurd as those charges sound to us, no foreigner in China seems to suspect that they are too outDr. Daly, who rageous for the Chinese. is surgeon in a mission hospital at Ningpo, affirms that it is a popular belief all over China that foreigners extract the eyes and other organs from the dead, to make medicine of. He has been himself accused of it; and " 'for months the belief was prevalent, over a large district, that he had extracted the liver and other organs from a patient who had died in hospital, healing up the flesh with miraculous medicine so as to leave no marks of the incision." Besides, are we ourselves so very far removed from a similar stage of folly? A glance at Mr. Lecky's chapter on magic and witchcraft will convince us that it is not so long since beliefs equally absurd ranked as religious tenets, to question which was heresy and was denounced as "infidelity," in Western Europe. Even in the spacious times of great Elizabeth, Bishop Jewell, preaching before the Queen, could seriously affirm that "witches and sorcerers within these few years are marvellously increased within your Grace's realın. Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto the death; their color fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft." To believe that people could be done to death by sticking pins into a wax figure, and that old women could ride up chimneys on broomsticks, was surely as absurd as to believe that medicine can be made of children's eyes, or that certain powders could weaken men's intellects, or that paper men were cutting off the queues of the Emperor's lieges.*

It must be remembered, too, that kidnapping children is, to the Chinese, a

* These rumors were propagated at Soochow in 1876, and drove the people wild with terror. They were attributed to a secret society called Pah-sien-chiao," and were ascribed to a wish to create political turmoil,

66

populace it is difficult to limit the results that may be worked out. When," writes a Chinaman,* who has come forward lately in the Shanghai press as an exponent of the opinion of his class, "when the educated Chinese sees a mass of impenetrable darkness being thrust upon the people, with all the arrogant and aggressive pretentiousness of the missionaries on the one hand, and by the threat of gunboats on the part of foreign governments on the other, it makes him hate the foreigners with a hatred which only those can feel who see that all they hold as the highest and most sacred as belonging to them as a race and a nation —their light, their culture and their literary refinement are in danger of being irreparably defaced and destroyed. The more conservative resent with horror the attacks on Confucianism and the Worship of Ancestors; while the more enlightened resent being lectured on the folly of pandering to popular belief that eclipses are caused by a celestial dog eating the moon, in the same breath that they are asked to believe that the sun stood still at the bidding of Joshua. However, the hatred, like the credulity, seems to be collective rather than personal, and to be directed against the system rather than against the individual. The missionaries themselves are often respected and liked by the Chinese, officials as well as people, with whom they come into contact; and a tablet has even in recognition of their good deeds during a recent famine been set up in Shantung. Perhaps if we attempt to picture the reception that Buddhist or Mohammedan missionaries would have met with under the Commonwealth, in England, and the degree of credit that would have attached to any absurd accusations that might have been brought against them, in a society of which Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Thomas Brownet were representatives, we may be

* A letter headed "Defensio Populi ad Populos," published in the North-China Herald of July 24, which has attracted much attention and controversy.

Two women were hanged in Suffolk in 1664 for witchcraft, by sentence of Sir Matthew Hale, who declared that the reality of witchcraft was unquestionable; and Sir Thomas Browne, who was a great physician, as well as a great writer, swore at the trial that he was of opinion that the persons in NEW SERIES-VOL, LIV., No. 6,

able to realize, in some degree, the feeling with which European missionaries are regarded by Chinese.

Still to admit that the hatred exists is

different from admitting that it is universal and ever-active; to admit that the accusations are believed is different from admitting that the people would formulate them if left alone. Flax will not burn unless fire be applied. The riots would not have occurred without instigation; and, when we come to ask whence the instigation came, there is abundant evidence of political intrigue.

In an interview with the Taotai of Hankow, shortly after the Wusüeh outrage, H.B. M. Consul (Mr. Gardner) asked point-blank whether there was any truth in the reports that these riots were caused by a Secret Society whose object is not so much hostility to Europeans as hostility to the Imperial Government, which it wished to embroil with foreign powers. The Mandarins admitted that "there is a great deal of truth in it; but the actual rioters are generally local people, who are stirred up by these" agitators. Similarly, the present Chinese Minister in London, during a recent interview with Sir Philip Currie, said that "there had not for Jears been such an anti foreign outbreak; that he did not attribute it to any widespread feeling against foreigners, but to the machination of Secret Societies existing among the disbanded soldiery, the object of which was to stir up trouble against the Government." The Viceroy of Nanking has lately memorialized the Throne in the same sense, and asked for increased powers to punish the culprits.

It is literally true that China is honeycombed by Secret Societies. They vary alike in their objects and their origins; but they are all viewed askance, because their organization is prone at any moment to be directed against the governing pow

ers.

A few words of explanation may perhaps afford a key to the nature of the forces at work. First and foremost in all machinations against foreigners must be noted the literati. It is one of the evils of the Chinese system that every educated man aspires to take a degree, but that no career except the Government service exists for him after he has taken it. We

question had been bewitched.-Lecky's Hislory of Rationalism, vol. i., chap. i. 51

find, therefore, instantly accounted for, a great army of men, saturated with prej udice and conceit engendered by the study of the native classics in which they must be proficient, embarrassed often, discontented while waiting for the office that may never come, and prone to the mischief which is ever ready to the idle hand. The threads of the present outbreak seem to concentre in Hunan, a great and prosperous province lying south of the Yangtze, nearly opposite the treaty port of Hankow, which is comprised within the same viceroyalty. The people of the Central Provinces, the purest descendants of the old dominant race, have the reputation of being among the bravest as well as the most bigoted in China. It is largely from this region that the soldiery were drawn who gained for the reigning dynasty the ascendency over Taeping, Nienfei,land Mohammedan rebellions which shook it to its foundations during the decade immediately subsequent to the treaty of Tientsin. The Franco-Chinese war in Tongking followed, and it was Hunan again which supplied a great portion of the fighting men. Tseng Kwo-fan, the greatest Chinaman of his day, the father of the Marquis Tseng, was a Hunan man; his brother Tseng Kwo-chüan has just died in office as Viceroy of Nanking: Tso Tsung-tang, who conducted the campaign in the North-west, and won back Turkestan for the Emperor, was a Hunanese, as was Liu Chin-tang, his most distinguished lieutenant. But Tso is dead and the three Tsengs are dead, and tens of thousands of their soldiers have been disbanded. Some went home; some were retained as provincial garrisons at various places throughout the empire; many took to loafing and discontent; but all, or nearly all, are said to belong to a Society called "Kolaohwuy," which is alleged to be the mainspring of the present agitation. The late Viceroy of Nanking disbursed, it is said, a large annual sum, partly in payment of superfluous troops, but indirectly as a bribe to this Society to refrain from troubling the peace. The new Viceroy, Liu Kun-yi, also is a Hunan man-the fact that he was recalled from a long retirement may show the feeling that it was necessary to put a Hunanese who could be relied on at the post ;-but he accepted office on a policy of retrenchment, and declined to continue the blackinail.

Now, Hunan, as we have seen, is the

traditional centre of anti-missionary literature; but it is reactionary and conservative in politics as well as in religion. Ita hatred of innovation extends to foreigners and all their ways, and it has signalized itself quite recently by repelling a party of workmen who were trying to set up a line of telegraph poles across the province. It was in vain they pleaded Imperial orders Over 1,000 poles were burned before their eyes, while the wire was put into an open boat and sent adrift upon the river. It is not incredible that a certain spirit of hostility to a dynasty which is introducing these foreign appliances may be mixed up with dislike to the stranger who brings them. Even the great Tseng family, of which the Hunanese were so justly proud, is said to have been treated with some coolness when, in the person of the Marquis Tseng, it was supposed to have imbibed progressive ideas; and the first Envoy to England, Kwo Sung tao, who also was a Hunanese, met a decidedly cool reception on his return.

But there are other elements in the problem which we have set ourselves to consider, considerations which help to explain the seeming reluctance of the Imperial Government to employ more force in repressing the disorders that have created for it such grave diplomatic embarrassment. Not in its armaments any more than in other respects is China like European nations. There were the beginnings of a standing army in England in the days of Charles II. It was not the royal troops, however, but Somerset and Devon militia, according to Mr. Blackmore, that were employed in attacking the Doones,

with the result, too, even in their case, that Somerset and Devon began shooting at one another over the heads of the comInon enemy. There are, in a certain sense, Imperial forces in China. There are numerous troops at Peking-who would, however, be as little likely to go South as Charles the Second's Guards were likely to be sent to Devon. Then, there is the large and comparatively welldisciplined body of men, under Li Hungchang, who are encamped around Tientsin. But Li Hung-chang is an Anhwei man, and these troops are Anhwei men; and to send them up the Yangtze would be to array Anhwei against Hunan, and not impossibly to provoke civil war

And so with the navy. The very con

siderable fleet of modern warships which China has acquired is gathered in the North, and is practically under the control of Li Hung-chang; but it is manned and officered in a great measure by Fokhienese, and it is questionable whether provincial sensitiveness might not, for both reasons, resent its presence at the Yangtze ports. For the provinces still form, in China, so many administrative units within which Governors and Governors-General are practically supreme. The army of China has been said to consist of over a million of men; but the million is made up of provincial militia, one-half of whom exist only on paper. And so with the fleet. Besides the ironclads which are kept anchored in the North, there is a socalled Southern squadron, several ships of which are at the especial disposal of the Nanking Viceroy. It was one of these which the Taotai of Shanghai dispatched, with praiseworthy promptitude, immediately on hearing from H.M. Consul-General of the riot at Wuhu. It was three of these which we have seen arrive there accidentally, in the nick of time to stop the further progress of the riot. And upon these, and upon the local militia, the Imperial Government seems disposed to rely, from sheer dread of making matters worse; though the majority of the militia are probably members of the very Society which is said to be the chief agent

in the turmoil.

No two Chinese officials, probably, would agree in assessing the exact value to be attached to all those different considerations, or the precise extent to which they influence the policy of the Central Government. But it must be admitted that they form constituent elements of the problem; and it will readily be inferred that the Government finds itself in a difficult position, between the menacing attitude of Europe on one hand and apprehension of its unruly subjects on the other. Its public utterances, in the mean time, have been creditable and explicit. Early in June, at the instance of the Foreign Ministers, the Emperor's advisers persuaded him to issue the following edict :

"The Tsung-li Yamên has memorialized us on the disturbances occurring in the various provinces against (foreign) religious orders, and requested us to order the Governor-General and Governors to take immediate measures for their suppression [etc.]. The memorialists stated that in the fourth moon the

churches in Wuhu, in the province of Anhui, were burned down by evil-disposed persons, and the churches in Tanyang (Kiangsu) and in Wusüeh (Hupeh) were successively destroyed, and it was urged that the leaders should be discovered and captured, and stringent preventive means should be taken [etc.]. That the several nations are at lib erty to promulgate their religions (in China) is set forth in the treaties, and Imperial Decrees have been granted instructing the various provinces to give protection at all times. Many years have passed by, and the Chinese and foreigners have lived on friendly terms. How is it that lately churches have been burned and destroyed almost simultaneously? It is certainly strange and astounding. It is only too obvious that there must be among the evil-doers some notoriously desperate characters who secretly plan, dupe, spread rumors, and mislead the minds of the people with the expectation that an opportunity may occur for plunder. Even the peaceful and good people have been misguided by and forced to join these rogues to aid in creating more momentous results. Unless severe measures are devised to punish and suppress [these malefactors], how are the laws to be upheld, and how is the country to enjoy quiet? Let the Governors-General and GovAnhui, and Hupeh at once command the civil ernors of Liang-kiang, Hukuang, Kiangsu, and military officials to discover, capture, try, convict, and execute the leaders of the riots as a warning to others for the future. The religion of the Western countries simply ad

monishes people to become virtuous, and the

The

native converts are Chinese subjects under the jurisdiction of the local officials. religions and peoples ought to exist peaceably orders] no doubt took origin from the disconside by side. The risings [against religious tented class, who fabricate groundless rumors and create disturbance under false pretexts. Such cunning people are to be found in every place. Let the Tartar. Generals, GovernorsGeneral and Governors proclaim and notify the people never to listen lightly to floating rumors and recklessly cause troubles. Any writers of anonymous placards manufacturing rumors to mislead the people are to be appreThe local hended and severely punished.

officials must at all times devise measures for

the protection of the lives and properties of the merchants and missionaries of the several nations, and must not permit criminals to harass and injure them. In case their pre

cautions are not effectual and disturbances occur, let the high authorities report the exact state of the case and have such officials cashiered. Let the various cases [of riot against foreign churches] in the different provinces still pending settlement be promptly arranged by the Tartar-Generals, Governors-General, and Governors, who are not to allow the subordinate officials to delay and procrastinate through fear of difficulties. Let this Decree be known to all. Respect this!"''

That the proclamation itself and its