The new patriotic club of which I wrote you has come to an untimely end. It has evaporated like rain drops from our summer clouds, leaving nothing but an ugly blot to remind us of its existence.
Tt was founded on a lie; and though it enrolled some respectable names its animus was from the first anti-foreign.
To one who read the documents, and talked with its members, there was no mistaking its spirit, but the alleged fact to which it appealed as a spur to the movement was not to be divined, without evidence. That evidence is now in hand.
The Emperor having ordered an inquiry, the Governor of Shantung replied that on careful examination he found no truth in the report of a sacrilegious mutilation of images. The soldiers he said had not even gone into the part of the temple which contained the images.
A Shantung missionary to whom I last week spoke of the alleged outrage promptly denounced the stories asa fiction, adding that he hal just come from the place referred to; and that he had not heard a wort said in regard to any occurrence of the kind.
The story was invented by some one who knows how to fire the Chinese heart. But what must we think of a patriotic asso tion that has no better basis to rest on?
''The organisation we are told was never to the false alarm are now ashamed of completed, and that those who responded having signed the paper.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.