"'I doubt it. They don't want it. In fact, both my mother and myself did all that we really dared to bring the Empress-Dowager around to our viewpoint on the question of reform. The fact of our being able to speak more languages than our own naturally made the people in and out of the Court both jealous and suspicious of us. They were sure that we were trying to influence the old Empress-Dowager to {295} adopt some of the foreign ideas that we had accumulated during our stay abroad, and one particularly good (?) friend of ours, Prince Na Yung, told everybody that my mother was a woman Kang Yu-wei. "'One thing: they must bring up Manchu babies a different way and send them abroad. Then probably there would be some hope. This younger generation, like the ex-Regent, have common blood in them. The mother of the Prince Regent and the two brothers was a concubine of Prince Chung, the ex-Regent's father. And this woman was a slave-girl. She had no education. Prince Chung died and left the boys very young and they, of course, had no opportunity. They have their mother's blood and they are just like their mother. That generation all descends from concubines. "My idea is, as long as the Chinese will have concubines they will not progress. It is common blood. My idea is that the first reform should be the abolishment of the concubine business. Let us say some officials have daughters. They do not wish their daughters to be concubines; they must be proper wives, so the concubines must be slaves or bad women. Now how can they bear fine sons? Their blood is common. One thing, however: the Imperial concubines are selected from the Manchu officials' daughters--the daughters from the first and second rank, not lower than that. They consider themselves just like slaves. It is an awful life. The late Empress-Dowager was a concubine. She was selected when she was seventeen years old. She had a son and gained power that way. Her son was Emperor Tung Chih, who died when he was nineteen. I know the girlhood of the old Empress, and some day I will write it. She suffered terribly after she went to the Court.' "'What are the first things to be done in China to institute real reform?'