Appreciating the difficulty of securing an expression of opinion from those opposed to his views, and thus getting both sides of the question, in his fourth edict he requested the conservatives to send in their objections to his schemes for progress and reform, and then as if to get the broadest possible expression of opinion he adopted a Shanghai journal called Chinese Progress as the official organ of the government. But lest this be insufficient, in his twenty-second edict he gave the right to all officials to address the throne in sealed memorials. There was at this time a third-class secretary of the Board of Rites named Wang Chao who sent in a memorial in which he advocated: 1. The abolition of the queue. 2. The changing of the Chinese style of dress to that of the West. 3. The adoption of Christianity as a state religion. 4. A prospective national parliament. 5. A journey to Japan by the Emperor and Empress Dowager. The Board of Rites opened and read this memorial, and, astounded at its boldness, they summoned the offender before them, and ordered him to withdraw his paper. This he refused to do and the two presidents and four vice-presidents of the Board accompanied it with a counter memorial denouncing him to the Emperor as a man who was making narrow-minded and wild suggestions to His Majesty. Partly because they had opened and read the memorial and partly because of their effort to prevent freedom of speech, Kuang Hsu issued another edict explaining why he had invited sealed memorials, and censuring them for explaining to him what was narrow-minded and wild, as if he lacked the intelligence to grasp that feature of the paper. He then turned them all over to the Board of Civil Office ordering that body to decide upon a suitable punishment for their offense, and assuring them that if they made it too mild, his righteous wrath would fall upon them. The latter decided that they be degraded three steps and removed to posts befitting their lowered rank, but the Emperor revised the sentence and dismissed them all from office, and this was the beginning of his downfall. The Empress Dowager had been spending the hot season at the Summer Palace, and during the two months and more that the Emperor had been struggling with his reform measures, she gave no indication, either by word or deed, that she was opposed to anything that he had done. And I think that all her acts, from that time till the close of the Boxer insurrection, can be explained without placing her in opposition to his theories of progress and reform.