"I consider it a most dangerous undertaking, and I would advise against it. But if Your Majesty decides to cast in your lot with the Boxers I will do all in my power to further your wishes." It is not a matter of wonder therefore that the Empress Dowager should be led into such a foolish measure as the Boxer movement, when the Prince who had been president of the Foreign Office for twenty-five years could so weakly acquiesce in such an undertaking. "The Emperor," said the Princess, "was not asked for an expression of his opinion on this occasion, but when he saw that the Boxer leaders had won the day he burst into tears and left the room." Similar meetings were held in the palace on two other occasions, when the Emperor implored that they make no attempt to fight all the foreign nations, for said he, "the foreigners are stronger than we, both in money and in arms, while their soldiers are much better drilled and equipped in every way. If we undertake this and fail as we are sure to do, it will be impossible to make peace with the foreigners and our country will be divided up amongst them." His pleadings, however, were disregarded, and after the meeting was over, he had to return to his little island, where for eight weeks he was compelled to sit listening to the rattling guns, booming cannons and bursting firecrackers, for the Boxers seemed to hope to exterminate the foreigners by noise. He must have felt from the books he had studied that it could only result in disaster to his own people. When the allies reached Peking and the Boxers capitulated the Emperor was taken out of his prison and compelled to flee with the court. "What do you think of your bullet-proof Boxers now?" one can imagine they hear him saying to his august aunt, as he sees her cutting off her long finger nails, dressing herself in blue cotton garments, and climbing into a common street cart as an ordinary servant. "Wouldn't it have been better to have taken my advice and that of Hsu Ching-cheng and Yuan Chang instead of having put them to death for endeavouring in their earnestness to save the country? What about your old conservative friends? Can they be depended upon as pillars of state?" Or some other "I-told-you-so" language of this kind. From their exile in Hsian decrees continued to be issued in his name, and when affairs began to be adjusted, and the allies insisted on setting aside forever the pretentions of the anti-foreign Prince Tuan and his son, banishing the former to perpetual exile, our hopes ran high that the Emperor would be restored to his throne. But to our disappointment the framers of the Protocol contented themselves with the clause that: "Rational intercourse shall be permitted with the Emperor as in Western countries," and with the return of the court in 1902 he was still a prisoner.