so eloquent on the horrors of opium as the great Li Hung Chang, when talking with foreigners; yet Li Hung Chang was one of the largest producers of opium in China. When the Chinese army, under imperial direction, was fiercely bombarding the legations in Peking, the imperial government was officially sending fruit and other delicacies, accompanied by courteous notes, asking if there was not something they could do for the comfort of the hard-pressed foreigners. This indirection would seem to be the result of a constant effort, on the part of everybody in authority, to shirk the responsibility for difficult situations. Under a system which holds a man mercilessly accountable for carrying through any undertaking for which he is known to be responsible, he naturally tries to avoid assuming any responsibility whatever. An official is punished for failure and rewarded for success in China, as in other countries. And the official on whom is saddled the extremely difficult job of pleasing, at one time, an empress who believes that a Boxer can render himself invisible to foreign sharpshooters by a little mumbling and dancing, a set of courtiers and palace eunuchs who are constantly undermining one another with the deepest Oriental guile, a populace with little more understanding and knowledge of the world than the children of Israel in the Sinai Peninsula, and a hostile band of keen, modern diplomats with trade interests and "concessions" on their tongues and machine guns and magazine rifles at call in their legation compounds, is not in for an easy time.