British soil by the bayonets of the sepoys from our distant Eastern Empire. Twenty miles away Hong Kong lies ringed in by sapphire sea. From the land it has no danger to dread while a man of this small but resolute force guarding its frontier remains alive. The outburst of fanaticism in North China, the attacks on the foreign settlements in Tientsin and Pekin, the treachery of the Court, had their echo in the far‐off southern provinces. Canton, turbulent and hostile, has ever been a plague‐spot. Before now English and French troops have had to chasten its pride and teach its people that the outer barbarian claims a right to exist even on the sacred soil of China. In the troublous summer of 1900 10,000 Black Flags, the unruly banditti who long waged a harassing war against the French in Tonkin, were encamped near this populous city. Fears were rife in Hong Kong that, fired by exaggerated accounts of successes against the hated foreigners in the North and swelled by the fanatical population of the provinces of the two Kwangs, they might swarm down to the coast and attack our possessions on the mainland, or even endeavour to assail the island itself. Li Hung Chang, the Viceroy of Canton, had sounded a note of warning. Purporting to seek the better arming of his soldiery to enable him to cope with popular discontent, he induced the colonial authorities to allow him to import 40,000 new magazine rifles through Hong Kong; but there was no security that these weapons might not be turned against ourselves. As it was well known that the Imperial troops in the North had made common cause with the Boxers, the wisdom of permitting this free passage of modern arms may be questioned. Rumours of a rising among the Chinese in Victoria itself, of threatened invasion from the mainland, were rife; and the inhabitants of our colony in the Far East were badly scared. The first Indian brigade under General Gaselee passed up to the more certain danger in the North; but representations made to the home authorities caused the stopping of his two line‐of‐communication regiments, the 3rd Madras Light Infantry and 22nd Bombay Infantry, to strengthen the denuded garrison of Hong Kong. This and the subsequent detention of his 2nd Brigade to safeguard Shanghai left his command in the Allied Armies on the march to Pekin numerically weak and forced him into a subordinate position in the councils of the Generals. Hong Kong was by no means in such imminent peril; and the troops thus diverted would have made his force second only to the Japanese in strength, and enabled him to assert his authority more emphatically among the Allies.