It was pushed even further in 1860. The French and English had just completed the sack of the "Summer Palace," and whatever the justice or the injustice of the war may have been, China had tasted her first great lesson of humiliation from the hand of Western powers, and was in no condition to resist any of their demands. The English and the French made treaties, most of them concerned with commercial and military matters with which it is not necessary to trouble the reader, and the French had a condition which was quite reasonable, that the {47} Chinese should restore all the buildings that had been destroyed in the late troubles; the wording of the clause was so vague that it could be made to apply, and did apply, to any building which had been destroyed at any previous time in the history of China, but the most remarkable part of the clause needs further explanation. The French had as their interpreter a very able Jesuit, Père Delamarre, and as the French Minister could not read Chinese, he had to trust his interpreter with regard to the Chinese version, and this man inserted into the treaty two other provisions, one securing that Christians should have a right to the free exercise of their religion all over China, and the other that French missionaries should have the right to rent land in all the provinces in the empire and to buy and construct houses. When this pious fraud was discovered, the French Minister thought it would do no good to denounce his interpreter, and therefore the treaty was treated by the French as binding and never questioned by the Chinese; the other powers profited by it under the "most favoured nation" clause. The Roman Catholics a few years later pushed the wording of this treaty to its uttermost. Their missions had been at work for 150 years or more, and they could prove a great number of confiscations which had to be made good by the Chinese. Just at that time in France Napoleon III. was trying to establish a doubtful title by the help of the Pope, {48} and it was his policy to push in every way the interests of the Roman Catholics. China had felt the weight of European armies and she was unable to resist these claims, and so it came about that the very country which now is the centre of free thought was the means of forcing Christianity upon the Chinese through fear of her armed power. Can you be surprised at the answer I got when I asked a Chinese statesman, who I knew was sympathetic with the teaching of Christianity, why China, who had always professed, and to a very great extent had practised tolerance, should persecute Christianity? His reply was, the Chinese did not hate Christianity, and were indeed tolerant of missions, but they still disliked them, because Christianity is the religion of the military races, and they had a historical tradition that the advance of Christianity was connected with war.