Chinese sentiment was ungauged in the West because we had never put ourselves in their places. Unforeseen save by a few unheeded Cassandras, and unprepared for, there broke out the planless, leaderless Boxer Rebellion, grim fruitage of the national resentment. A few hastily gathered legation guards were alone available for defense. Spreading from the Shan-tung Province, where the severity of the Germans had goaded the usually peaceable people to madness, the I-Ho-Chuan besieged the legations at Peking. It was the infuriated and ill-directed rush of a patriotism real if futile,--a turning against the spoilers. The movement was crushed in a torrent of blood, and with a devastation that for long will leave its mark upon the northern provinces. The closing year of the nineteenth century saw the Taku forts stormed, Tien-tsin, the Liverpool of the North, taken over and administered by a foreign board, Manchuria and Mongolia swarming with Cossacks, the Dowager Empress in flight, and her capital looted by foreign armies. The coming of alien soldiery to the Forbidden Palace left its impress in the fiercer though more carefully smothered hatred of mandarins and people. It was still a blind resentment. They were injured, stung in all their pride and self-sufficiency, but dumb, bewildered, not knowing what to do, which way to turn. The liberals with their solution were gone; with them had passed the hopes of a progressive policy. The people, perplexed, looked to their reëstablished reactionary rulers for guidance. But these officials, mostly of advanced age, and steeped in the ideas and ideals of the Confucian classics, were anxious mainly to close the ears and eyes of the masses to the unpleasant realities; to feather their own nests and finish off their lives in tranquility. The Chinese Minister to the United States, Wu Ting Fang, gives a graphic picture of these Celestial Bourbons:-- “It must be remembered that most of the high officials in Peking are born and bred Chinese of the old school. All the princes and nearly all the ministers of state have spent most of their days within the four walls of the capital. They have never visited even other parts of the empire, not to say foreign lands; nor can they speak any other language besides their own. They have absolutely no knowledge or experience of foreign ways except those who are ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen, and the experience of these men has been confined exclusively to their official intercourse with the foreign representatives at Peking.” Buttressing their hereditary _intransigeance_, these mandarins had, after the Hay Circular, possessed a measure of confidence that their yielding of open-door trade privileges to the greed of the foreigners had enlisted a combined support which would preserve China’s remaining national powers.