After the siege of Peking came the Russo-Japanese war. The Russians had long been known and feared by the Chinese; they were to the Chinese mind the embodiment of the warlike and blood-thirsty spirit of the West; they were hated for their cruelty and feared for their prowess. The awful story of the massacre of Blagovestchensk in 1900 was still present to the popular mind. The story was this. The Amur divides China from Siberia. When the Boxer movement broke out the Russians required all the Chinese to go to their side of the river; but with sinister intent, they removed all the boats, so that no one could cross. The Chinese pointed this out, and the respectable merchants of the town presented a petition saying they were ready to obey the Russian Government in everything, but without the boats they could not do so; but the Russians insisted that boats or no boats, they must cross the Amur; they protested, but in vain; a half-circle was formed round them by the soldiery, and the whole Chinese population of the city was driven into the river at the point of the bayonet. The Japanese were also well known to the Chinese; they had been till lately, when the Western movement had altered everything in Japan, their pupils in civilisation. The Japanese believed in Confucius, used Chinese characters, worshipped in Buddhist temples, sacrificed to ancestors, in fact {12} were in Chinese estimation a civilised race, though inferior of course to themselves. When these two antagonists met in Manchuria, the war could not fail to make a deep impression on China. To begin with, it was an insult surpassing that of the sack of Peking to the Chinese _amour propre_, to have the war carried on in Manchuria. Russia and Japan were disputing over Korea, and both nations were at peace with China. Russia might have invaded Japan; Japan might have invaded Russia, or both might have met in Korea, but what they did was to select a province of a neutral State and decide that there should be the scene of conflict. What made this more striking was that they agreed to respect the neutrality of the rest of China; in fact they selected their battle-ground with the same equanimity as if China and her national rights did not exist.