o appear bizarre to us;
but they are no more than surface evidences of the difference between his
mind and ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we can be fairly
certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or even a European, will think in certain
deeply human circumstances--in the presence of death, for instance. We
cannot hope to understand the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is too
great a difference in the shape of our heads, as there is in the texture
of our traditions.

But we can see quite clearly that the imperial government of China is,
while it endures, a strong and effective government. It is significant
that the Chinese people rarely indulge in massacres on their own account.
Why not? The hatred of foreigners must be always there, under the placid
surface, for these people rarely fail to turn into slaying demons once the
officials let the word be passed around. There have been thirty-five
serious anti-foreign riots and massacres in China within thirty-five
years, besides the Boxer uprising of 1900; and among these there was
probably not one which the mandarins could not have suppressed had they
wished. The Boxer trouble was worked up by Yue Hsien while he was governor
of Shantung Province. When the foreign powers protested he was transferred
to Shansi, which had scarcely heard of the Boxer Society, and almost at
once there was a "Boxer" outbreak and massacre in Shansi. The Peking
government meanwhile carried on Yue Hsien's horrible work at Peking and
Tientsin. The siege of the legations at Peking was conducted by imperial
soldiers, not by mobs. During all the trouble of that bloody summer, Yuan
Shi K'ai, who succeeded to the governorship in Shantung, seemed to have no
difficulty in keeping that province quiet, though it was the scene of the
original trouble.

Chang Chi Tung, "the great viceroy," subdued the Upper Yangtse provinces
with a firm hand, though the Boxer difficulty there was complicated by the
ever-seething revolution. In a word, the officials in China seem perfectly
able to control their populace and protect foreigners. As Dr. Ferguson, of
Shanghai, put it to me, "No other government in the world can so
effectively enforce a law as the Chinese government--when they want to!"

You soon learn, in China, that you can trust a Chinaman to carry through
anything he agrees to do for you. When I reached T'ai Yuan-fu I handed my
interpreter a Chinese draft for $200 (Mexican), payable to bearer, and
told