ed their advance, believing that he might make use of them to
help his son to the throne. Their numbers were swelled by multitudes who
fancied that they would suffer irreparable personal loss through the
introduction of railways and modern labor-saving machinery; and China
can charge the losses of the last war to those misguided crowds.

Fortunately several companies of marines, amounting to four hundred and
fifty men, arrived in Peking the day before the destruction of the
track. The legations were threatened, churches were burnt down, native
Christians put to death, and fires set to numerous shops simply because
they contained foreign goods. Then it was that the foreign admirals
captured the forts, in order to bring relief to our foreign community.
That step the Chinese Foreign Office pronounced an act of war, and
ordered the legations and all other foreigners to quit the capital. The
ministers remonstrated, knowing that on the way we could not escape
being butchered by Boxers. On the 20th of June, the German Minister was
killed on his way to the Foreign Office. The legations and other
foreigners at once took refuge in the British legation, previously
agreed on as the best place to make a defence. Professor James was
killed while crossing a bridge near the legation. That night we were
fired on from all sides, and for eight weeks we were exposed to a daily
fusillade from an enemy that counted more on reducing us by starvation
than on carrying our defences by storm.

About midnight on August 13, we heard firing at the gates of the city,
and knew that our deliverers were near. The next day, scaling the walls
or battering down the gates, they forced their way into the city and
effected our rescue. The day following, the Roman Catholic Cathedral was
relieved,--the defence of which forms the brightest page in the history
of the siege, and in the afternoon we held a solemn service of
thanksgiving. The palaces were found vacant, the Empress Dowager having
fled with her entire court. She was the same Empress who had fled from
the British and French forty years before.

She was not pursued, because Prince Ching came forward to meet the
foreign ministers, and he and Li Hung Chang were appointed to arrange
terms of peace. Li was Viceroy at Canton. Had he been in his old
viceroyalty at Tientsin, this Boxer war could not have occurred. That
its fury was limited to the northern belt of provinces was owing to the
wisdom of Chang[5]