During the dinner the Governor directed the conversation towards the Boxer leaders and their prowess, and led them once more to relate to all his friends their powers of resistance. He fed them well, and after the dinner was over he suggested that they give an exhibition of their wonderful powers to the friends whom he had invited. This they could not well refuse to do after the braggadocio way in which they had talked, and so the Governor lined them up, called forth a number of his best marksmen, and proceeded with the exhibition, and it is unnecessary to add that if the Empress Dowager had invited Yuan to the meeting with the princes when they discussed the advisability of joining the Boxers on account of a belief in their supernatural powers, she might have been spared the humiliation of 1900. We shall soon see that Yuan cared no more for the "confidential instructions" of the Empress Dowager, when his statesmanship was involved, than for the orders of the Emperor. His business was to govern and protect the people of his province, and thanks to his wise statesmanship and strong character "there was not only no foreigner killed during the troubled season of anxiety and flight" of 1900, and "comparatively little of the suffering elsewhere so common." And now we come to another plot which indicates the character of Yuan and two other great viceroys, Chang Chih-tung, now Grand Secretary, and Liu Kun-yi, Viceroy of the Yangtse-kiang provinces. It is a well-known fact that during the Boxer rebellion the Empress Dowager was so influenced by the promises of the Boxers to drive out all the foreigners that she sent out some very unwise edicts that they should be massacred in the provinces. Yuan and his two confreres secretly stipulated that if the foreign men of war would keep away from the ports of their provinces they would maintain peace and protect the foreigners no matter what orders came from the throne. So that when these confidential instructions came from the palace to massacre the foreigners, in order to gain time they pretended to believe that no such orders could have come from the throne. They must be forgeries of the Boxers. They therefore refused to believe them until they had sent their own special messenger all the way to Peking to get the edict from the hands of Her Majesty and bring it to them in their provinces. This messenger was also secretly instructed to find out what the contents of the edict were, and if it was contrary to the desires of the Governor, he was to dilly-dally on the way home until the Boxer trouble was ended or until the foreigners had all been removed from the territory. And it was such conduct as this on the part of three Chinese and one Manchu viceroys that saved China from being divided up among the Powers in 1900, a fact which the Empress Dowager was not slow to understand and reward.