The Chinese bitterly remember the massacre at Blagovestchensk on the Amur River in 1900. When the Europeans were besieged in Peking, the Russians drove the innocent and unarmed Chinese inhabitants into the river at the point of the bayonet. Many were drowned, and their bodies choked the landing wharves as they floated down-stream. Yet some inquirers ask why there should be an anti-foreign feeling in China! The name of General Chitchegoff, who gave the murderous order, would live in history yoked to Nero’s if we had writers to-day as able and patriotic as fearless Seneca and Lucan. If you are an American and ask Chitchegoff in the place of his retirement why he did it, he will answer: “Ask the Bureau, and blame the oligarchical system, not the miserable agent.” There was a time, too, when Prince Henri d’Orleans, Paul Doumer, Garnier, Leroy Beaulieu, Riviere, Loti, Petit, Bert, Imbere and Bonheur wrote, when France, as Russia’s ally, had her aggressive designs on China. Hongkong, when I lived there, was haunted by continual nightmares after France took possession of Kwangchou Bay in Kwangtung province. Since the French ran their railway from Haiphong to Yunnan City, French influence is strong in Yunnan province, and the Szechuenese are looking for France’s hand at the headwaters of the Yangtze River. In a sense this puts a barrier against the British attack on Western China from Burma, and the American attack from the Philippines. While France at home and in Tonquin is a high tariff country, there is more confidence in the republican people of France on the part of America and Britain than there is in the reliability of the other mighty diplomatic competitors. Still French aggression is potential and not to be ignored, especially as France has in Indo-China a colony of 735,000 square miles with a population of 34,000,000 people at the southern gates of old China. The heavily subsidized Messageries Maritimes mail line plies between Marseilles, Saigon and the ports as far as Japan. I once sailed half around the world on one of their white boats and know their service to be excellent. At present the French monopolize the Yunnan traffic with their railway, charging in addition to the rates a high transit fee on bonded traffic. This is internationally illegal, and is exactly what incensed Germany blew out of French diplomacy in Morocco at the muzzle of the _Panther’s_ guns, when that vessel dropped anchor at Agidir one eventful morning. In desperation, the Chinese tin miners of Kuo Chia (some of whom are citizens of Hongkong) contemplate an opposition railway to Nanning, and the old water route to Hongkong. The division of Siam between France and Britain is slowly going on, France having recently taken over one of the Shan States. To protect Singapore as a world equator gate, Britain must connect the Malay states with Burma, and in time take part of Siam. At one time France had a design of pressing her Tonquin