'The cause is so clear that he who runs read. For the past 50 years foreign governments, merchants, missionaries, and others have unceasingly urged upon' China the need for reform and progressive advance. Four years ago these reiterated counsels scorned, at lust, to have found believing advocates. A Reform Party was formed. From alm ry provincial cubital they issued newspapers, pamphlets, and books. These leavened the thought and began to mould the minds of the leaders of the nation. Thousands of scholars were com-led by an intellectual compulsion to ce in earnestness the problenis of reform and progress. This movement was not the outcome of a few brainless enthusiasts, but a national Renaissance. Tt entered the precinets of the Forbidden City, was taken up by the Emperor himself. Then came that series of splendid edicts that seemed to be the prophecy, of a permanent and genuine Reform, "Then followed the coup" defat and the intrigue and murder that startled the world in the fall of "98. Tnstead of supporting those who were advocating progress and instituting Reform, the Ambassadors sat on the stile and allowed the Emperor to be dethroned and the Reformers to be either massacred or banished. The unscrupulous Empress, finding her tyrrany unopposed, reversed most of the edicts that had advocated reform; stirred up in the minds of high officials hate against foreigners, promoted every official degraded by the pressure of either Germany, England, or America, abetted the designs of those plotting the extermination of foreigners, boldly and publicly proclaimed by edict in February that the time has come for shaking off all foreign interference and resisting by force any further claims for justice, That a policy
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.