The 4,000,000 membership of the “Boxers” society was made up of coolies, river men, idlers, pirates, bandits, and criminals of all classes. But their leaders, although unknown to the European authorities in the far East in the latter part of 1899 when the great uprising was inaugurated, were men of ability and shrewdness. The “Boxers” might reasonably be considered as simply a part and parcel of the revolutionary propaganda in China. The society differed little from other societies known at different times as the “Society of Heaven,” the “Heaven and Earth Society,” the “Triads,” the “Black Flags,” the “Teente Brotherhood,” the “Tea Society,” the “Water Lilies,” the “Floods,” or the “Vegetarians.” These societies and others with different names but similar purposes, waged constant war against the foreigners. They always resented the presence of Christian missions and commercial enterprises alike. To them the engineer who surveyed a railroad, the physician who came to end an epidemic, and the missionary were equally the objects of aversion, and the secret society murdered the one as cheerfully as the other. Previous to the “Boxer” outbreak there were three or four rebellions which tended to put the Celestials in the humor to fight anything and anybody, particularly the foreigners. China is yet honeycombed, and has been for centuries, as no other country in the world with secret societies, embracing all classes, having an existence dating from the second century of the Christian era—an existence not of tradition but vouched for by record. Up to 1898 these secret societies had for their main object the overthrow of the Manchu or Tartar dynasty, but after that they devoted their attention to the expulsion of the foreigner from the land. It has always been a mistake to believe that John Chinaman was a stranger to patriotism. Indeed, so passionately devoted is he to his native country that he makes arrangements for the return of his bones to the Flowery Kingdom in the event of his dying in foreign lands. This fiber of patriotism was utilized in 1900 by that extraordinarily clever woman, the Dowager Empress, to rally the entire nation into the presentation of a virtually united front to the foreigner, to convert the secret societies from anti-dynastic into anti-foreign movements, and to achieve that which the Triad sought in vain to bring about at the time of the Taiping rebellion—namely: coöperation of all the secret societies, one with another, against the common foe, which this time was not the Manchu conqueror but the white foreigner.