When the north wind tried to compel a traveller to take off his cloak, the cloak was wrapped the closer and held the tighter. When the sun came out with his warm beams, the traveller stripped it off of his own accord. The sunrise empire has exemplified the latter method; China prefers the former. Is it not to be feared that the apparent success of the boycott will encourage her to persist in the policy of the traveller in the north wind. She ought to be notified that she is on probation, and that the only way to recover the exercise of her sovereign rights is to show herself worthy of confidence. The Boxer outbreak postponed by many years the withdrawal of the cloak of ex-territoriality, and every fresh exhibition of mob violence defers that event to a more distant date. To confound "stranger" with "enemy" is the error of Bedouin or Afghan. Does not China do the same when she mistakes hostility to foreigners for patriotism? By this blunder she runs the risk of alienating her best friends, England and America. A farmer attempting to rope up a shaky barrel in which a hen was sitting on a nest full of eggs, the silly fowl mistook him for an enemy and flew in his face. Is not China in danger of being left to the fate which her friends have sought to avert? In April a magistrate went by invitation to the French Catholic Mission to settle a long-standing dispute, and he settled it by committing suicide--in China the most dreaded form of revenge. Carried [Page 260] out gasping but speechless, he intimated that he was the victim of a murderous attack by the senior priest. His wounds were photographed; and the pictures were circulated with a view to exciting the mob. Gentry and populace held meetings for the purpose of screwing their courage up to the required pitch--governor and mandarins kept carefully in the background--and on the fifth day the mission buildings were destroyed and the priests killed. An English missionary, his wife and daughter, living not far away, were set upon and slain, not because they were not known to belong to another nation and another creed, but because an infuriated mob does not care to discriminate.