It can hardly be denied that from about 1840 to 1900 China was subjected to a degree of indignity, insult, extortion, and bullying on the part of some of the foreign powers no Christian power would have tolerated. Treaties were imposed upon her by force, her finest harbors seized, and vast stretches of her littoral successively placed under foreign rule. She was compelled to consent to agreements providing for the transfer of her immense river trade to foreign flags, and for the gridironing of the entire land by means of foreign built and foreign controlled railroads, while for every concession made by her a dozen new ones were presented by the foreign powers. In December, 1899, the Empress issued a secret edict, addressed to the Viceroys of the various provinces. “The various foreign powers cast upon us looks of tigerlike voracity, hustling each other in their endeavors to be the first to seize upon our innermost territories,” she declared. “They fail to understand that there are certain things which this Empire can never consent to do, and that if hard pressed we have no alternative but to rely upon the justice of our cause.” Four weeks later another edict was dispatched to the same officials by the Dowager Empress, who had, it was said, English or American blood in her veins, her mother having been a Eurasian, or child of a white father and Manchu mother. In this second edict the Viceroys were warned to exercise a prudent discrimination towards the disturbers of public peace. “The reckless fellows who band together and create riot on the pretext of securing the inauguration of reforms,” were to be punished, while those “loyal subjects who learn gymnastic drill for the protection of their families and their country,” that was to say, the members of the “Righteous Harmony Fists (‘Boxers’) association,” were to be favored. The “Boxers” association was openly a society for the cultivation of gymnastics, but secretly an anti-foreign political movement, something like those “Turnverein” or gymnastic societies which played so important a political rôle in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, becoming one of the most important factors in the liberation of the fatherland from the presence of the French invader. From the time the “Boxers” were openly encouraged by the Empress, they became a means of union among all the various secret societies, and the fact that these societies in all parts of the immense Chinese Empire simultaneously took to arms to drive out the foreigner was due to the adroitness of the old Empress, who thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, emulated in a way the rôle played by Queen Louise of Prussia when she roused her countrymen to rid Germany from the thraldom of Napoleon. However, the Chinese went about it in the most horrible fashion, subjecting the objects of their hatred to the most agonizing tortures and inflicting upon them every conceivable atrocity the barbarian mind could invent.