The following has been sent us by a missionary living at Chinanfu. 'This gentleman has had more to do with the high provincial officials of late years. thi y Protestant missionary in the Province, and the communication may be taken' as giving the actual state of HE. Yii Hsien's connection with the Boxer movement.
The purpose in making public the accompanying documents is (wrofuld, says our correspondent, the fact that the the obloquy of! he -civilised world on himself for permiting if not actually abetting the massacre 1 Shansi Province of scores of helpless foreigners and their innocent converts is the same person under whom as Governor of Shantung the Boxer movement, with all its dreadful concomitants, took its rise; under whom also it so' flourished, meanwhile spreading to Chihli, that the reactionary party in Peking found in it a ready instrument for their bloody antiforeign crusade, In the day of reckoning for the Shansi savagery Yii_ Hsien's earlier record should not be forgotten and in so far as that record" was due to Li Ping-hong's patronage the latter should also receive attention. These two men equally with the Peking coterie headed by Prince Tuan are chargeable the dire condition of North China. On January the 16th 1900 the Hon Mr. Conger, minister at Peking, wrote to the missionaries at Chinan: "There can be little doubt that the late Governor Yui Hsien, is very largely, if not wholly responsible for the whole deplorable situetion in Shantung." 'The Hon. John Fowler, U.S. Consul at Chefoo, than whom no representative of any foreign government in China Lad shown' a more intelligent appreciation of the situation last February, recommended to the U.S. Government that Yii Hsien be incarcerated in Chinan, that Li Ping-hong be forever degraded and that Chinan be constituted an open port. Meu-sures then seemingly extreme now appear light indeed.
2nd—To emphasise the fact that the Imperial Government is a purty to Yii Hsien's guilt in according him special honour upon his recall to Peking from the Shantung Governorship, and subsequently in the face of foreign protest appointing him Governor of Shansi, In ackuowledgug the receipt of the memorandum of charges against Yi Hsien given below, Mr. Conger writes the American Mission at an a follows: Besides the representations which resulted in Yi Hesien's removal (rom Shantung Government) and many more serious made since, 1 to-day again setting forth (to the Tsungli Yamin) his total unfitness to gover where foreigners, missionaries, or converts ure concerned, and filing " vigorous protest against his future appointment to any place where he will hive missionaries or their work under his control." The Imperial Government. will make desperate efforts to clear its skirts of much evil-doin connected with the present cri Tt shoul not be freed from the charge of complicity in Yii Hsien's guilt.
Below are given the charges presented by the American missionaries whose work
4, 5, and 6 should be especially noted. was nected and lives endangered, Charges in connection with the the Civiian rebel-Memorandum of charges against officials
lion. Presented by American missionaries at Pang Chuang, Shantung, January 1900, Agniust HIL. Yi Hsien late Governor of Shantun; 1 knowing the existence of the Ihe Ch'ixa in his province on a large and threatening scale, a society wholly contrary to the Imperial Laws, and in previous reigns severely punished, he took no steps to untagonise it.
That after fight had taken place in October betireen the provincial troops and the Boxers, the suid Governor wis very angry that shoat hundred of the latter had been killed, although told by the military officials that the encounter was uuavoidable. That he then secured the degradation of the prefect, and of the sion of Pingyuen, not for allowing this rebellion to grow unchecked, but for trying at last to stop it, That' he dismissed the military commander in charge at. the time, and eniployed him no more for this reason, That he encouraged the Boxers by helen the prisoners taken in that action requiring: no guarantee of good behuviocr, to the immediate encouragement of the leaders, who hud been ready to vive up the cause after this fight.
"That he secretly promoted and fomented the rebellion by refusing to allow the troops lo fight, repeatedly sending them into the field'with these explicit orders. That well-tsnown attitude was immediately influential in strengthening the rebellion, and was the direct cause of the murder of the late Mr. Brooks, as much as if the lute Governor had dispatched him with his own hand. That in a secret Memorial to the Throne he advocated the employment of the The Ch'iian as an agency for the driving
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.