The irrepressible humourist has been busy lately with parallels between Pretoria and Peking. The essential resemblances between the two crise: sufficiently striking to arrest th aren of those who see no occasion for joking in the grim drama now being played out on the Peicho. The Dowager Empress as an Asiutic manifestation of the Oom Paul avatar, and the as the Uitlanders of China, suggest reflections which are not wholly humorous, and which may, indeed, be cultivated with some little instruction. In throwing down the gauntlet to the Powers the Empress Tze Asi and her entourage of Manchu Doppers have not only followed the example, on a larger scale, of the tribal Mandarins of Pretoria, but have applied "more sinico" certain political lessons which have lately been preached in the centre of European culture by no less a person than M. Jules Lemaitre. There is little to choose etireen the incendiary exclusivism of the French Nationalists and the anti-foreign incendiarism of the Chinese Righteous 'Harmony Fists.' Indeed, the balance of extenuating circumstances inclines to the barbarian. One can only hope that the moral of the parallel will not be lost sight of. Perhaps, too, the eloquent Continental journalists who are now applauding the forcible vindication of treaty rights, and the armed protection of the interests of civilisation in China, will come to see {that it was not wholly for ephores of influence and commercial exploitation that Great Britain drew the sword in South Africa. The dilemma has already been appreciated by one of them—Prince Uchtomsky—but he, with characteristic courage, has dealt with it, not by acknowledging that the action of the Powers in China is a justification of the Transvaal war, but by declaring that both are of pre-datary origin, and that the petticoated Kruger of Peking is as much to be com-mise rated as her frock-coated analogue, late of Pretoria."
It is not, however, as a justification or otherwise of British action in South Africa that the Peking-Pretoria parallel has interested me. There is an spect of it which has a direct bearing on certain practical considerations of domestic politis—considerations which at the present moment are necessarily much in the mind of the constituencies. In China we are apparently confronted by a crisis of exceeding gravity. To appreciate its seriousness we must go back to the gloomiest moments of the Armenian imbroglio, and imagine what the situation might have been had Abdul Hamid openly defied the Powers maple massacres. By risis and its sinister potentialities British interests of stupendous magnitude find us wholly unprepared to grapple with are imperilled, and yet apparently they them effectively. As in South Africa, all the portents of the storm seem to have passed unnoticed before the eyes of Downing Street, and if Ministers have not yet mide the mistake of attempting to deal with it with inadequate means—at least, I hope not—they have at any rate so cou trived our affairs that the full strength of the Empire is not available to meet all its menacing possibilities. The question, then, which the Peking-Pretorin parallel suggests to me is a question, not of the similarity of the origins of the two crises, but of the consistency' of absent-minded ness and miscalculation at home which have permitted both to assume the proportions of national anxieties of the first magnitude.
Leet me in the first. place review briefly the series of events which have led to the explosion in China—events with which every student of Far Eastern polities is mil In September, 1898, there was a Palace revolution in Peking. 'The Emperor, who had formed' the wise opinion that the only hope for China lay in the direction of administrative reforms, and who, to the great joy of his people, had already: dicated the main lines of his poli series of boldly liberal edicts, waas sud dispossessed of power by the Daw: press. Supported by the Imperial Manchit clansmen, the Empress reversed the polic of her nephew and surrounded herself wit counsellors of the most reactionary type. For a moment it was thought that the coup d'état was a Russian inspiration. Pavlofi's reply to the dismissal of Li Hun: hang, with which the zeal of Sir Claude ed. It became clear, however. that the activity of both diplomatists had been exaggerated, and that, while the disgrace of Li was due exclusively to the Emperor's desire to rid himself of the corrupt Tory element in the Chinese Gorernment, the revolt the work of this same element, inspired in the first place by the instinct of self-preservation, and in the second place by a strong antipathy to all foreign influences. This was rendered manifest by the appearance in the usurper's entourage of men like Jung In, a Manchu of the Manchus: Kane Yi, an "utterly ignorant old Bourasa Shanghai paper called him.
first task was to fill the ears of his Imperial distress with tales of the horrors Article in Petershurgekys Viedomoxti, quited in Petersiurger Zeitung, 1-14 Sune, 1900, perpetrated in the Schools of Western Knowledge; and Hsu Tung, a notorious hater of the foreign devils, who had publicly expressed a hope that he might see his coat lined with the skin of a foreigner before he died.+ The revolution was, in fact, from its inception essentially anti-foreign, and the necessity of placating the great muss of the Chinese people, who had been disquieted by the virtual deposition of the Emperor, rendered it necessary for the new Government to emphasise this aspect of its policy.
No pains whatever were taken to disguise the aims of the new regime. The revolution was not three months old when it was observed with alarm in all the Treaty ports that the Peking Government was busy with armaments' on an enormous scale. Notwithstanding the straitened condition of the finances, large sums were ordered to be spent on arsenals, on the manufacture of firearms, and the accumu lation of munitions of war. Men were enlisted in large numbers for the northern garrisons, and troops of formidable efficiency from Kansu were massed round and in the capital. The Empress's favourite general, Tung Fu-hsiang, who is now at the head of the Imperial troops fighting the allies on the Peiho, publicly boasted a few weeks after the coup d'état that the object of these preparations was "to drive all foreigners into the Yellow Sea." For a whole year the armaments proceeded, under the supervision of Manchu officials, who had everywhere been nominated to igh posts in the central and provincial administrations. Towards the end of last year the Dowayer Empress and her ad-ers seem to have convinced themselves that they were sufficiently prepared, not only to resist by force of arms any further aggressions of the Powers, but also to take some steps to obtain concessions from the foreigner.
The views of the Government were expounded in two remarkable decrees addressed to all the Viceroys, Governors, tar Generals, "and provincial com: manders-in-chief. Although ostensibly secrat, these documents were soon made en by the newspapers, Their authenticity has never been denied or even doubt ed. The occasion of their issue was the successful resistance of the Tsungli Yamin to the demand of Italy for a sphere of influence in Chekiang and a leasehold of Sanmun Bay, a resistance which alone shed flood of unheeded light on the new spirit animating the Peking authorities.
The first decree, which was sent out on the 2st of November lust, was a personal manifesto by the Empress. It was a vire I declaration of war against all further concessions to the foreigner, and a not tion that the era of compromises was at an The provincial authorities were warned that in future no disputes would ably arranged," and that of trouble with the foreigner force should be force, without referring, the dispute king. "Moreover, if one provincial authority became involved in such a dispute, the others were ordered to hasten at once to h id. The spirit of this circular is well illustrated by its concluding paragraph "Never should the word pence' fall from the mouths of our high officials, nor should they even allow it to rest for a mo-met their breasts. With such a country as ours, with her vast area, stretching out several tens of thousands of Li, her immense natural resources, and her hundreds of millions of inhabitants, if only each and all of you would prove his loyalty North-China Herald, August 21, 1899, and March 28, 1900.
North-China Herald, Dec. 19, 1898; Feb, 14, 1900,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.