ne of the largest
producers of opium in China. When the Chinese army, under imperial
direction, was fiercely bombarding the legations in Peking, the imperial
government was officially sending fruit and other delicacies, accompanied
by courteous notes, asking if there was not something they could do for
the comfort of the hard-pressed foreigners.

This indirection would seem to be the result of a constant effort, on the
part of everybody in authority, to shirk the responsibility for difficult
situations. Under a system which holds a man mercilessly accountable for
carrying through any undertaking for which he is known to be responsible,
he naturally tries to avoid assuming any responsibility whatever. An
official is punished for failure and rewarded for success in China, as in
other countries. And the official on whom is saddled the extremely
difficult job of pleasing, at one time, an empress who believes that a
Boxer can render himself invisible to foreign sharpshooters by a little
mumbling and dancing, a set of courtiers and palace eunuchs who are
constantly undermining one another with the deepest Oriental guile, a
populace with little more understanding and knowledge of the world than
the children of Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, and a hostile band of keen,
modern diplomats with trade interests and "concessions" on their tongues
and machine guns and magazine rifles at call in their legation compounds,
is not in for an easy time.

It hardly seems, then, as if we should blame the Chinese official too
harshly if his whole career appears to be made up of a series of
"side-steppings" and "ducks"--of what the American boxer aptly calls "foot
work." On the other hand, it is not difficult to sympathize with the
foreign diplomat who has, year after year, to play this baffling game. He
is always making progress and never getting anywhere. He has his choice of
going mad or settling down into a confirmed and weary cynicism. In most
cases he chooses the latter, and ultimately drifts into a frame of mind in
which he doubts anything and everything. He takes it for granted that the
Chinese government is always insincere. It is incredible to him that a
Chinese official could mean what he says. And so, when the Chinese
government declared against the opium evil, the cynical foreign diplomats
and traders at once began looking between and behind the lines in the
effort to find out what the crafty yellow men were really getting at. That