Many years ago, long before the Boxer year, an American missionary in Shantung coveted a particular piece of property which belonged to a Chinese widow. The widow refused to sell, but she had a worthless opium smoking son who had devoured all of her substance except this particular piece of land and who urged her constantly to sell this last bit of property so that he could extort the money from her. The missionary connived with this rogue. The son stole the deed and sold it to the missionary. The latter registered the deed with the district magistrate before the widow missed the document and then went to take possession. The widow was so incensed when -she discovered what had happened that she poured a kettle of boiling water over the Christian propagandist, ruining his complexion. He immediately brought a charge against her in the magistrate's court, but the whole story came out and the magistrate not only upheld the widow in her act of profanation of the person of the foreigner, but also cancelled the registration of the missionary's deed amd returned the property to the woman.
The missionary immediately appealed to the nearest American consul for "protection." An investigation was made and the case, as it is given above, was referred to the Legation in Peking. The Legation supported the Chinese magistrate in his judgement and sent a full report of the incident to Washington. The State Department wrote that the Legation should use its own discretion in dealing with the case, but that the best course would be to bring the missionary before a consular court and impose a penalty which would remove him permanently from China. This suggestion was not executed, but the man was warned, the Chinese Government was given a full record of the case with all the correspondence, and the Imperial court sent copies of the full record to every governor and viceroy in China, calling attention to the wholesome precedent established, thanks to the foreigner's strict sense of justice. Cortiainly any other Legation would then have dealt similarly with a similar cage, and it is probable that
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.