fused to obey. A similar inference may be drawn from the
summary execution of four ministers of state for remonstrating against
throwing in the fortunes of the empire with the Boxer party. China
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should be made to do penance on her knees for those shocking displays
of barbarism. At Taiyuan-fu, forty-five missionaries were murdered
by the governor, and sixteen at Paoting-fu. Such atrocities are
only possible among a _half-civilised people_.

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CHAPTER XXVIII

THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

_Russia's Schemes for Conquest--Conflicting Interests in
Korea--Hostilities Begin--The First Battles--The Blockade--Dispersion
of the Russian Fleet--Battle of Liao-yang--Fall of Port Arthur--Battle
of Mukden--The Armada--Battle of Tsushima--The Peace of Portsmouth--The
Effect on China_

To the Chinese the retrospect of these five wars left little room
for those pompous pretensions which appeared to be their vital
breath.

Beaten by Western powers and by the new power of the East, their
capital taken a second time after forty years' opportunity to fortify
it, and their fugitive court recalled a second time to reign on
sufferance or during good behaviour, what had they left to boast
of except the antiquity of their country and the number of their
people? Dazed and paralysed, most of them gave way to a sullen
resignation that differed little from despair.

There were, indeed, a few who, before things came to the worst,
saw that China's misfortunes were due to folly, not fate. Ignorant
conservatism had made her weak; vigorous reform might make her
strong. But another war was required to turn the feeling of the
few into a conviction of the many. This change was
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accomplished by a war waged within their borders but to which they
were not a party--a war which was not an act in their national
drama, but a spectacle for which they furnished the stage. That
spectacle calls for notice in the present work on account of its
influence on the destinies of China.

For the springs of action it will be necessary to go back three
centuries, to the time when Yermak crossed the Ural Mountains and
made Russia an Asiatic power. The conquest of Siberia was not to
end in Siberia. Russia saw in it a chance to enrich herself at
the expense of weaker neighbours. What but that motive led her, in
1858, to demand the Manchurian seacoast as the price of neutrality?
What but that led her to construct the longest railway in the