To most people Chinese matters seemed settled. The preservation of a nation had been combined with the guaranteeing of a great free market; the orgy of grabbing had ceased. Russia, assenting to the open door, had promised to evacuate Manchuria. The special concessions, though secured by stand-and-deliver methods, it was felt would bring economic improvements and would furnish to the Chinese a demonstration of the beneficent results of Western civilization. It was recognized that there would be frictions: misunderstandings are inevitable when old ways are faced with new. The extra-territorial rights of foreigners and their converts, absolutely necessary to protect their liberties if not their lives, could not but create occasional unharmonious situations, in which the consuls would have to intervene. The severity of the judicial punishment meted out at times to rioting cities for harm done to the protégés of the Powers was to be deplored, each nation grieving at the atrocities the others had seen fit to perpetrate. But periodic local and temporary disturbances had been going on from time immemorial. Did not the Chinese realize, we reasoned, that their old corrupt government had been given another undeserved chance to try and march with the rest of the race; that this world is not the place for graft-ridden relics from the fifth century B.C.? The least we felt was that, thanks to the bearer of the “Flowery Banner,” the Chinese had been given a last opportunity. A self-denying Occident had guaranteed the nation’s existence and had presumably earned its everlasting gratitude. “Let China get up and do something--let it redeem itself.” [Illustration: THE BRIDGE AND TABLETS IN PEI-HAI] A very small circle of Chinese shared this Western view, and realized at their true value the mights if not the rights. There existed among the literati at Peking and in the coast cities the rudiments of a foreign liberal party. Recognizing that Western methods must come, they had been in favor of accepting foreign improvements even at the cost of railway concessions and the violated dwellings of wind and water spirits. When this party won over the young Emperor, there began the period of foreign concessions. Reforms, too, covering every subject, from queue-cutting to postage-stamps, were inaugurated. The summer of 1898 saw the important edict which ordered the abolition of the Wen-chang essays and the penmanship posts, with the Emperor’s personal comment that the examinations should test “a knowledge of ancient and modern history, and information in regard to the present state of affairs, with special reference to the governments and institutions of the countries of the five great continents, and their arts and sciences.” A Bureau of Mines was established, a patent-office, schools, a scheme of army reform.