Apparently, the Shansi peasant can be at one time simple, industrious, loyal, and at another time a slaying, ravishing maniac. The Chinaman himself is the greatest paradox of all. He is the product of a civilization which sprang from a germ and has developed in a soil and environment different from anything within our Western range of experience. Naturally he does not see human relations as we see them. His habits and customs are enough different from ours to appear bizarre to us; but they are no more than surface evidences of the difference between his mind and ours. Thanks to our strong racial instinct, we can be fairly certain of what an Anglo-Saxon, or even a European, will think in certain deeply human circumstances--in the presence of death, for instance. We cannot hope to understand the mental processes of a Chinaman. There is too great a difference in the shape of our heads, as there is in the texture of our traditions. But we can see quite clearly that the imperial government of China is, while it endures, a strong and effective government. It is significant that the Chinese people rarely indulge in massacres on their own account. Why not? The hatred of foreigners must be always there, under the placid surface, for these people rarely fail to turn into slaying demons once the officials let the word be passed around. There have been thirty-five serious anti-foreign riots and massacres in China within thirty-five years, besides the Boxer uprising of 1900; and among these there was probably not one which the mandarins could not have suppressed had they wished. The Boxer trouble was worked up by Yue Hsien while he was governor of Shantung Province. When the foreign powers protested he was transferred to Shansi, which had scarcely heard of the Boxer Society, and almost at once there was a "Boxer" outbreak and massacre in Shansi. The Peking government meanwhile carried on Yue Hsien's horrible work at Peking and Tientsin. The siege of the legations at Peking was conducted by imperial soldiers, not by mobs. During all the trouble of that bloody summer, Yuan Shi K'ai, who succeeded to the governorship in Shantung, seemed to have no difficulty in keeping that province quiet, though it was the scene of the original trouble. Chang Chi Tung, "the great viceroy," subdued the Upper Yangtse provinces with a firm hand, though the Boxer difficulty there was complicated by the ever-seething revolution. In a word, the officials in China seem perfectly able to control their populace and protect foreigners. As Dr. Ferguson, of Shanghai, put it to me, "No other government in the world can so effectively enforce a law as the Chinese government--when they want to!"