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.
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