3rd September, Iw an interview with a journalist in Europe, Baron Czikann, who was recently Austro-Hungarian Minister at Peking, is reported to have said that it was quite certain that the attack made on foreigners at Pekin in 1900 would never be repeated, the Empress Dowager and her advisers having learnt a lesson which there was no fear of their forgetting. In deprecating at the time the conversion of the Legation area into a fortress, we dwelt on the improbability of the attempt to eject foreigners from North-China being made again in the same.way. That the Empress Dowager and her Manchu friends are at heart any better pleased at the presence of foreigners in Peking than they were before we do not believe; nor do we believe that there is any sincerity in the proclamations that have been issued enjoining hospitality towards foreigners throughout the empire, or in the Empress Downger's effusive recognition of foreign Indies as being "all one fami The lesson really taught was that while the end sought was desirable, the means used were wrong; and a more subtle but more effective means is now being used to make foreigners far more unpopular throughout the empire than they have ever been before. The opera tions of war in the north and the punishment that fell upon the officials guilty of the outrages on foreigners do not seem to have increased the dislike of the Westerners to any appreciable extent; the return of the missionaries to their stations was generally welcomed as indicating that the troubles were over; and there seems to have been a Breignere was a fit of madness that neral feeling that the attack on
had passed off, and the less said about it the better. It can well be understood that this easy-going dismissal of the trouble has not been to the taste of the Government after the hardships it suffered in its enforced flight from Peking: and it is quite probable therefore that while it officially deprecates the extortion that is being everywhere practised, it is not really sorry that the people are
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.