At this point we have to record a singular conjunction of circumstances which has caused criticisms not altogether favorable to Russia. It has already been shown that she had frequently had recourse to acts which at once placed her somewhat apart from the community of the Powers, and also were liable to be interpreted as being designed to ingratiate herself with the afflicted China. Thus Count Lamsdorff more than once deprecated the continuance of the punitive expeditions which the allied forces made to one place or another in the Province of Chili.[358] His reasons were so apparently plausible that, under different circumstances, he might have been supported by certain other Powers.[359] These very Powers, however, most keenly resented Russia’s detachment from the allies, when she definitely cleared herself from the deliberation of the Representatives of the Powers at Peking in regard to the punishment to be inflicted by the Chinese Government upon certain provincial officials who had been directly guilty of outrages to foreigners during the recent trouble. The peace commissioners had almost disposed of the punishment question, in order next to attack the knotty problem of the indemnity to be paid by China, but M. de Giers had been instructed by his Government “not only to abstain from entering into any discussion as to the nature or method of execution of the capital sentence, but also to take no part in the further discussions relative to the punishment to be inflicted on the Chinese dignitaries.”[360] “At the meeting [of the peace commissioners at Peking] to-day,” wrote Sir Ernest Satow on February 28, the day after he reported the draft of the most exhaustive agreement broached by Russia upon China, and the very day when the Chinese Emperor appealed to Great Britain, Germany, the United States, and Japan to intervene, “we presented to our colleagues our list of provincial officials, of whom ten were named as deserving the death penalty and about ninety to be punished in a lesser degree. Objection was made only by the Russian Minister, who stated that he could not accept our proposals unless he received fresh instructions, and that his Government’s wish from the beginning had been to substitute a less severe form of punishment for the death penalty. Both my French colleague and I are of opinion that our death penalty list might justly have included far more than what had been demanded, and is exceedingly moderate in its reduced form.”[361] On March 15, that is, about the time when the terms of her proposed agreement were, as will be presently seen, modified by Russia in China’s favor, Sir Charles Scott wrote Lord Salisbury that recently Count Lamsdorff had intimated that “he considered the question of the punishment of Chinese officials at an end as far as concerned Russia,” and that “he referred to the murders of the missionaries as a subject in which Russia was not interested.”[362] Such