Sir Robert Hart knew that his articles would fly under the seas by cable; he also knew, none better, the effect that they would produce; how sweet his words would be to the Empress Tsŭ Hsi, to her eunuchs and the whole Court over which they ruled and before whom he bowed the knee! In the meantime honours were showered upon him. He was made a baronet, and at one time Lord Salisbury who, great as he was, never quite seemed to recognize the importance and needs of China, actually appointed him to be British Minister at Peking, a post which, happily, he did not take up. What Lord Salisbury failed to see was that, great as Hart’s influence with the Chinese undoubtedly was, that influence would die the death the day he left their service to enter ours. They would have looked upon him as a turncoat who had wormed himself into their secrets in order to use them on our behalf, and he would have had far less influence than any average Englishman promoted in the ordinary course. Nay more; it might conceivably, indeed it probably would, have wrecked the Customs service. There were not lacking mandarins who would gladly have returned to the old system of bribery and squeeze, and would have been ready to do all in their power under the guise of patriotic objections to get rid of an organization which was death to their methods and of all the foreigners who controlled it. The cry would be: “See the danger of admitting the foreign devils to our councils.” Nobody knew this better than Hart himself; moreover, had he accepted the post he would have been making a great monetary sacrifice and would have given up what was practically an autocracy for a position which, however honourable, would have placed him under an oversight to which he had long been a stranger. Sir Robert Hart’s attitude after the Boxer affair showed how he clung to the goodwill of the Tartar Government, and how little he cared what his countrymen must think of him so long as he might retain the favour of the Empress Tsŭ Hsi—the “old Buddha”—and her creatures. No sketch of Peking, however slight, is possible without some mention of that remarkable man. He was a maker of history, and may have been a good friend to China. To Europe he certainly was not; but he was an excellent friend to Sir Robert Hart, and to those whose careers, in the interest of his own, he chose to push.