"Tue Empress Dowager," said a Chinese official in a conversation on the situation, "is like a man riding tiger: he does not dare to get off for fear the tiger will turn and rend him." Tung Fu-hsiang, of course, is the tiger and this describes the situation at Hsianfu. As long as the Emperor and Empress Dowager go wherever Tung Fuchsiang chooses to conduct them, their lives are safe, but they dare not put themselves in'oppositivn to him. He knows perfectly well the fate that awaits him if he goes back to Peking, and his main object. is now to keep away from the Allies, Any stories that there has been a material change in the position at Hsianfu must be accepted with a good deal of doubt. The Emperor and eu higo Dowager are very likely homesick, but they are in durance, and it is only too probable that Tung Fu-hsiang has made them believe that if they were to accept Count von Waldersee's assurances and return to Peking and put themselves in the power of the Allies, they would perhaps fare no better than the officials recently executed by the Allies at Paotingfu. Is' is only natural that the Empress Dowager should judge the Allies by herself, and she knows what she intended doing when she- invited the Ministers to the Tsungli Yamen on the 20th of June, and when she subsequently promised the foreig ers in the Legations a safe-conduct to Tientsin. That the Emperor himself is anxious to get back to Pekin we can well believe: he has no guilty conscience urging him not to trast himself to the hands of the Allies. How much of the truth penetrates the rooms in which he is stilt virtually a prisoner it is impossible to know but he does know that it is not foreigners, but his own evil Ministers that have brought all these troubles on his country. If he had ever been allowed to see something out of the outside world, be might perhaps find
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.