The Hon. John Goodnow, American Consul-General at Shanghai, emphatically declares:--``It is absurd to charge the missionaries with causing the Boxer War. They are simply hated by the Chinese as one part of a great foreign element that threatened to upset the national institutions.'' Viceroy Yuan Shih Kai when Governor of Shantung, in the spring of 1901, wrote to the Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries of the province as follows: ``You, reverend sirs, have been preaching in China for many years, and, without exception, exhort men concerning righteousness. Your church customs are strict and correct, and all your converts may well observe them. In establishing your customs you have been careful to see that Chinese law was observed. How, then, can it be said that there is disloyalty? To meet this sort of calumny, I have instructed that proclamations be put out. I purpose, hereafter, to have lasting peace. Church interests may then prosper and your idea of preaching righteousness I can promote. The present upheaval is of a most extraordinary character. It forced you, reverend sirs, by land and water to go long journeys, and subjected you to alarm and danger, causing me many qualms of conscience.'' A charge which has been so completely demolished by such competent and unprejudiced witnesses can only be renewed at the expense of either intelligence or candour. Dr. Arthur H. Smith truly says that ``amid the varied action of so many agents it is vain to deny that Christianity has sometimes been so presented as to be misrepresented, but on the whole there had for some time been a marked and a growing friendliness on the part of both people and officials. . . . The convulsion which shook China to its foundations was due to general causes, slow in their operations, but inevitable in their results. It was the impact of the Middle Ages with the developed Christian commercial civilization of the nineteenth century, albeit accompanied with many incidental elements which were neither Christian nor in the true sense civilized. If Christianity had never come to China at all, some such collision must have occurred.''[78] [78] ``Rex Christus,'' pp. 204-206. XXII THE CHINESE CHRISTIANS