Everywhere there had existed secret societies, or numbers of men banded together by oath to destroy the "Manchu usurpers," and ever and again some malcontent or another would set up the banner of insurrection, and to him would flock all the discontents and bandits of the neighbourhood. This is the opportunity of the secret society men. The cry of "China for the Chinese" is raised, patriotic feelings are appealed to, and save for the fact that the secret is always betrayed at headquarters long before the would-be revolutionaries are ready, any year of the past century might have seen a repetition of the scenes which are briefly referred to here. Ten years after the Treaty of Nanking news came that one Hung Siu-Chuen, amongst the mountain fastnesses of the south, with a small band of men known as the Society of Worshippers of God, had placed himself at the head of the discontented people--driven to rebellion by official persecution--and was defeating the Imperial troops everywhere. He claimed the Throne, called himself the {264} Tien-wang ("celestial or heavenly king"), and styled his new Dynasty the Taiping ("Great Peace"). To usher in the Golden Age was the work to which he dedicated himself. Threefold was his desire for freedom. The people groaned under the tyranny of an alien power, and so desired civil liberty; they were cursed by the superstition and idolatry to which they had given themselves, and so desired religious liberty; they saw the craving of opium blighting the lives of their best, and so were fighting for moral liberty for the nation. All Manchus were ruthlessly put to the sword, all temples and idols were utterly destroyed, and all traffic in or smoking of opium was sternly prohibited. In the early stages of the movement the moral forces of Christianity, the religious opinions that seemed to hold sway in the minds of the Taipings, and the high aims of the leaders of the movement made missionaries and Christians at home think that China was to arise from the ashes of her destroyed paganism, clothed in the fair garments of Christianity. Reports to the Dragon Throne informed the Emperor that the rebels were in full flight. As a matter of fact, they were carrying everything before them. They swept triumphantly through the provinces of Kwangsi and Hunan, then on to the busy mart of Hankow in Hupeh; there, freighting a thousand junks with their spoils, they swept on down the Yangtze to the ancient capital of the Ming Dynasty--Nanking. This city fell after a brief siege, and with its fall the initial work in preparing the way for a new kingdom was come. _If_--and in the "if" is perhaps the reason of the collapse of the movement--if the new-made king had known how to construct after he had done the work of destruction, there would have been a lasting revolution instead of an almost forgotten rebellion. One authority, who was in China at the time, says that the very