e reserved
such seals of office as made it necessary for all the highest officials
to come and express their obligations to her at the same time they came
to thank the Emperor. While Kuang Hsu may have been reconciled to the
performance of these duties at eighteen, they became irksome at
twenty-seven and he demanded and received full liberty in the affairs
of state.

We have seen how he used his liberty,--not wisely, perhaps, as a
reformer, and yet the reformation of China can never be written without
giving the credit of its inception to Kuang Hsu. He was very different
from Hsien Feng, the husband of the Empress Dowager, before whose death
we are told "the whole administrative power was vested in the hands of
a council of eight, whilst he himself spent his time in ways that were
by no means consistent with those that ought to have characterized the
ruler of a great and powerful nation." Whatever else may be said of
Kuang Hsu, he cannot be accused of indolence, extravagance, or
indifference to the welfare of his country or his people.

Appreciating the difficulty of securing an expression of opinion from
those opposed to his views, and thus getting both sides of the
question, in his fourth edict he requested the conservatives to send in
their objections to his schemes for progress and reform, and then as if
to get the broadest possible expression of opinion he adopted a
Shanghai journal called Chinese Progress as the official organ of the
government. But lest this be insufficient, in his twenty-second edict
he gave the right to all officials to address the throne in sealed
memorials.

There was at this time a third-class secretary of the Board of Rites
named Wang Chao who sent in a memorial in which he advocated:

1. The abolition of the queue.

2. The changing of the Chinese style of dress to that of the West.

3. The adoption of Christianity as a state religion.

4. A prospective national parliament.

5. A journey to Japan by the Emperor and Empress Dowager.

The Board of Rites opened and read this memorial, and, astounded at its
boldness, they summoned the offender before them, and ordered him to
withdraw his paper. This he refused to do and the two presidents and
four vice-presidents of the Board accompanied it with a counter
memorial denouncing him to the Emperor as a man who was making
narrow-minded and wild suggestions to His Majesty.

Partly because they had opened and read the memorial and partly b