assacres of European missionaries have told them. Years
ago one almost expected this sort of thing; but at the present day, when
China is popularly supposed to be working honestly to gain for herself
an honorable place among the nations, it is surely not to be expected in
the ordinary run of things in days of peace.

But we know that such visions are common to every European in Inland
China, and even at the coast men talk continually of and believe that
riots are going to happen in the near future. Merchant, missionary,
traveler and official all agree that there is yet more trouble ahead
before the West will be won into the confidence of China and _vice
versa_. The people who are studying the Reform Movement of the Young
China, however, and who stolidly refuse to study with it the general
attitude of the common people, laugh and dismiss with contempt the
subject of the possibility of further outbreaks of Boxerism in the
outlying parts of the Empire. But they should not laugh. The European
cannot afford to laugh, and, if he be a sensible fellow, knows that he
cannot afford to treat with contempt the opinions of the people who
know. The more we understand the vast interior of China and the
conservatism and peculiarities of character of the people of that
interior, the less disposed shall we be to jest, the less disposed to
ridicule, what I would characterize as the strongest and most deadly of
the hidden menaces of the Celestial Empire.

One does not wish to be pessimistic, but it is foolish to close one's
eyes to bare fact.

At the moment I am writing, in the middle of China, I know that I am
safe enough here, but I do not disguise from myself that the wildest
reports are still current within a quarter of a mile from me about me
and my own kind in this peaceful city of Tong-ch'uan-fu. And it takes
very little to light the fuse and to cause a terrible explosion here, in
common with other places in this province. A man might be quite safe one
day and lose his head the next if he did not, at times when the
rebellious element is apparent, conform strictly to the general wishes
and accepted customs of the people among whom he is living.

No, we cannot afford to laugh. We must seek the opinion of those people
who were confined within the walls of Chao-t'ong city--the silence of
their own homes broken up by the distant uproar of a frantic chorus of
yells and angry disputations, sounding, as it were, their very
death-knell,