ned with a greedy ear, but still she made no move.

During this time were the Emperor and his young "Confucius" idle? By no
means. They had hatched a counterplot, and had decided that what they
could not do by moral suasion and statesmanship they would do by force,
and so they sent an order to Yuan Shih-kai, who as we have said had
drilled and was in charge of 12,500 of the best troops in the empire,
urging him to "hasten to the capital at once, place the Empress Dowager
under guard in the Summer Palace so that she may not be allowed to
interfere in the affairs of the government, and protect him in his
reform measures."

The Emperor knew that nothing could be done without the command of the
army which was largely in the hands of a great conservative friend of
the Empress Dowager (Jung Lu) the father-in-law of the present Regent.
Yuan was in charge of an army corps of 12,500 troops, but for him to
have taken them even at the command of the Emperor, without informing
his superior officer, would have meant the loss of his head at once.
The first thing then for him to do was to take this order to Jung Lu.
Yuan was in favour of reform, though he may not have approved of the
Emperor's methods. Jung Lu hastened to Prince Ching and they two sped
to the Empress Dowager in the Summer Palace where they laid the whole
matter before her. She hurried to Peking, boldly faced and denounced
the Emperor, took from him his seal of state, and confined him a
prisoner in the Winter Palace. Kang Yu-wei, the young "Confucius,"
fled, but the Empress Dowager seized his brother and five other
patriotic young reformers, and ordered them beheaded on the public
execution grounds in Peking.

Naturally the Empress Dowager approved of the "wise and statesmanlike
methods" of Yuan in thus protecting instead of imprisoning her, and
thus placing the reins of government once more in her hands, and she
appointed him Junior Vice-President of the Board of Works, and when she
was compelled to remove the Governor of Shantung who had organized the
Boxer Society, she appointed Yuan Acting Governor in his stead. "Yuan,"
says Arthur H. Smith, was "a man of a wholly different stripe" from the
one removed, and "if left to himself he would speedily have
exterminated the whole Boxer brood, but being hampered by 'confidential
instructions' from the palace, he could do little but issue poetical
proclamations, and revile his subordinates for failure to do their
duty."