results were speedily seen in a shower of Imperial Decrees by which the Emperor feverishly strove to effect, in the space of a few weeks, a vast number of radical changes, administrative, financial, educational, military, and industrial, in the existing Chinese system. These changes were not in principle ill-conceived, but they were ordained with no preliminary preparation of the public mind, and with no appreciation of the opposition that they must arouse-an opposition the strength of which Mr Morse, who gives a list of the decrees, probably does not overestimate in declaring (III, 153) that against reform on this scale were arrayed, actively or passively, all the forces of the Empire.' Precautions for the securing of the Emperor's own position were taken too late; and the 'Hundred Days of Reform' ended in the sudden resumption by the Empress Dowager of the reins of authority and the relegation of the Emperor to a palace prison for the remaining ten years of his unhappy life.

Alarm at foreign encroachments, actual and threatened, had stimulated the demand for reform, but these excited not only alarm but anger; and the anger was felt by many who were quite untouched by any perception of a need of change. Far from their being led by events towards the adoption of Western ideas, animosity to the foreigner served in their case to intensify repugnance to reform, since reform was avowedly based on those ideas; and, while this counter-current of resentment at first merely strengthened the reaction that naturally followed the Emperor's hasty experiment, blind hatred of the foreigner gradually became the guiding spirit of policy, and ceased to be subject to the earlier restraint of fear. There were among the advisers of the Empress Dowager many who entertained no illusions as to China's military weakness; but there were others, of no experience in foreign affairs, who still refused to believe that recent concessions to the foreigner were the consequence of the country's weakness, and proclaimed them to be wholly due to lack of resolution in meeting his demands.

The advocates of this policy of firm resistance were given, early in 1899, an opportunity for testing it, when Italy made a demand for a naval station in China. The demand was met by the Chinese Government with a decided refusal and was thereupon withdrawn, to the

great strengthening of the anti-foreign party, whose leaders set themselves to inflame feeling among the ignorant masses of the people, believing that with their support the foreigner could be ejected from China. Of these efforts the Boxer rising of 1900 was the principal fruit. No episode in Chinese history has been the subject of such close study as this movement. Mr Morse places it in its proper perspective by including in his account of it a careful examination of the conditions prevailing throughout the Empire in 1899. Except in the province of Hunan there was, he shows (III, 161), 'distress and commotion' everywhere.

'In some districts risings were anti-dynastic, in others anti-foreign, in others especially directed against the missionaries; in some they arose from a rebellious spirit, in others from hostility to foreigners, and in others the exciting cause was scarcity of food.'

It was in the northern provinces that the Manchu leaders of reaction most industriously sowed their seed, and in them they reaped their most abundant harvest. The Boxer league, with nothing in its tenets or practices to distinguish it from other Chinese societies of the same kind, had the experience, unusual amongst such societies, of receiving high official encouragement, on the ground of its value as a weapon in the anti-foreign campaign. Although the Empress Dowager's approval was at first wavering and dubious, the movement found a powerful patron at Court in Prince Tuan, father of the young prince who in January 1900 was chosen as heir to the Throne. As father of the heir-apparent, Prince Tuan, one of the most ignorant and fanatical of the leaders of reaction, gained in the Government a commanding influence; and the movement he fostered grew by degrees too strong to be either suppressed or controlled. The Empress Dowager's chief concern became that of ensuring that this powerful weapon should continue to be aimed at the foreigner and not turned against herself.

Belief in the possession by the Boxer chiefs of supernatural powers played a part of some importance in the development of events, for it was firmly held by many of the ignorant Manchus who surrounded the Empress

Dowager, and undoubtedly strengthened their reliance on the league as an effective military instrument. Probably, also, at the moment when fear of retribution alone restrained her from the crime of an attack on the foreign Envoys, some transient belief in the reality of these powers turned a scale already delicately poised.

Mr Morse, as he mentions in the preface to his second volume, was strongly tempted to write a 'picturesque and detailed account' of the siege of the Peking Legations-'the most startling event in the century then just closing' but he resisted the temptation on the ground that it was his duty to be guided in his treatment of events solely by their relative importance. His narrative, however, though excluding mere picturesque incidents, gives an adequate account both of the eight weeks' siege and of the causes that contributed to the failure of the attack. The total length of the line defended was not far short of that held at Mafeking, and the defending force was so small that a determined enemy, in such strength as the Chinese commanded, must in the end have overcome all resistance. But the same lack of union that has made itself painfully apparent in the whole wide field of Chinese political affairs exhibited itself, to the extreme good fortune of the besieged, in the smaller arena of this conflict. There was a peace party as well as a war party among the Empress Dowager's advisers; and their influence in her councils fluctuated with her varying moods of confidence or misgiving as to the ultimate consequences of her acts.

The war party were fully in the ascendant during the last stage of the siege, but their efforts failed; and the Legations were relieved by a composite force in which, though in very unequal numbers, all the great Powers, with the single exception of Germany, were represented. The Court fled; and the representatives of the Powers applied themselves to the problem of determining, in conjunction with Chinese plenipotentiaries, the reparation to be exacted from China. Apart from the inherent difficulties of the task, the situation was complicated by the characteristic eagerness of Germany, which had come late to the fray, to undertake 'punitive expeditions,' long after these, in the judgment of all other Powers, had ceased to be either necessary or desirable, and by

Russia's disposition to separate herself from her temporary allies and pursue a policy of her own.

China's collapse had greatly facilitated Russian schemes of aggression; and during the negotiations that followed the occupation of Peking, Russia was busily engaged in strengthening her military hold on Manchuria. In the absence of any resistance from Chinese forces, her troops, in the autumn of 1900, had, as Mr Morse shows (III, 322), 'in a short campaign of little over two weeks laid their grasp on the whole of Southern Manchuria'; and her diplomatic efforts, during the two years following the Court's return to Peking, were directed to securing, by formal agreements with agreements with China, the hold thus acquired, which other Powers strove to loosen. In the diplomatic contest Russia's position had been weakened by the death, in November 1901, of Li Hung-chang, to the value of whose services M.Gérard bears frequent and grateful testimony, describing him as 'un allié précieux et fidèle, un auxiliaire singulièrement efficace' (p. 160); and there was visible in Russian policy a lack of unity of direction, which showed itself both in the independent and sometimes opposing action of her various agents, and in the absence of any understanding between them as to what facts were to be admitted or denied. Her schemes had moreover brought her directly into antagonism with the United States, whose determination to protect her commercial interests in Manchuria proved a serious obstacle to the attainment of Russian aims.

The issue in the end proved incapable of decision by diplomatic means; and, of the Powers opposed to Russia's designs, Japan was the only one prepared to use force in resisting them. Her treaty of alliance with Great Britain in 1902 had secured her against the danger of France joining Russia in case of war, for by the terms of that treaty this would have brought Great Britain also into the field; and, after five months of fruitless negotiation, Japan, in February 1904, broke off diplomatic relations. This,' to quote Mr Morse's terse summary of the causes and results of the conflict,

'initiated a war to decide which of two foreign Powers should exercise a predominating influence over three provinces of the Chinese empire, the original home of the dynasty and

the ruling race; a war fought, on the land side, entirely on Chinese soil, while China, maintaining her neutrality, looked on, interested only to the extent of a decision whether, in Manchuria, her territory and her subjects should be under Russian or Japanese domination' (III, 426).

The war ended in the victory of Japan, and the transfer to her of almost all the advantages that Russia, during the preceding ten years, had laboriously been acquiring. But, though this changed the whole diplomatic position, the effect in that sphere was not so immediate or so violent as that produced by Russia's defeat on Chinese national feeling.

'The result of the Russo-Japanese war . . . electrified the nation. The Asiatic had inflicted a signal defeat on the European power . . . and what one small Asiatic power had done might surely be done by another, greater in area, in population, and in resources. Every Chinese . . . began to ask by what means Japan had worked this result, and there were many fluent tongues ready to explain that it was by the wholesale adoption of Western ways. Japan had absorbed Western learning, had adopted a constitution, had created a parliament, had remodelled her army on modern lines, had accepted the Western calendar, had taken to European clothes and style of dressing the hair; and China had only to do the same' (III, 434).

It had in 1898 been possible to check and divert the forces that made for change, but those now set in motion proved impossible to control; and one by one the external bulwarks of Chinese conservatism went down before them. The stages of this political revolution, with which Mr Morse in his closing chapter very briefly deals, have already been described in the pages of this Review, and this sketch may therefore here close. It has necessarily been confined to an examination of the chief phases in China's international relations. Many factors by which those relations have been influenced and affected have been inevitably passed over. To Mr Morse's pages may safely be referred all who wish for full details of these factors, and for a just estimate of their influence.

HENRY COCKBURN.

'Q.R.,' July 1916. Four Years of the Chinese Republic.'