forms led the Emperor to dispense with useless offices,
as in his twenty-first, twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth edicts, for the
purpose of retrenchment, and to dismiss recalcitrant officials for
disobedience to his commands, a howl arose which was heard throughout
the empire. The six members of the Board of Rites dismissed in edict
twenty-three, with certain sympathizers to give them face, went to the
Empress Dowager at the Summer Palace, represented to her that the boy
whom she had placed upon the throne was steering the ship of state to
certain destruction, and begged that she would come and once more take
the helm. She listened to them with the attention and deference for
which she has always been famed, and then dismissed them without any
intimation as to what her course would be.

When the Emperor heard what they were doing, he sent a courier
post-haste to call Yuan Shih-kai for an interview at the palace. When
Yuan came, he ordered him to return to Tien-tsin, dispose of his
superior officer, the Governor-General Jung Lu, and bring the army
corps of 12,500 troops of which he was in charge to Peking, surround
the Summer Palace, preventing any one from going in or coming out, thus
making the Empress Dowager a prisoner, and allowing him to go on with
his work of reform.

It is just here that we see the difference in the statesmanship of the
Empress Dowager and the Emperor. When she appointed these two
officials, one a liberal in charge of the army, she placed the other, a
conservative, as his superior officer, so that one could not move
without the knowledge and consent of the other, thus forestalling just
such an order as this. To obey this order of the boy Emperor, Yuan must
commit two great crimes, murder and treason, the one on a superior
officer, and the other against her who had appointed him to office and
who had been the ruler of the country for thirty-seven years, either of
which would have been sufficient to have execrated him not only in the
eyes of his own people but of history and of the world. Nay more, had
he obeyed this order, the conservatives would have raised the cry of
rebellion, and an army ten times greater than he could have mustered,
would have crushed Yuan and his little company of 12,500 men, on the
plea that he was about to take the throne.

Yuan then did the only wise thing he could have done. He went to Jung
Lu, without whose consent he had no right to move, showed him the
order, and ask