would have accepted
would have been Yuan Shih-kai's. Had you or I been ill would we have
allowed the man who was the cause of our fall to select our physician?
But granted that Yuan Shih-kai did employ his physician, and that his
death was the result of slow poisoning, could Yuan Shih-kai have so
manipulated Prince Ching, the Regent (who is the late Emperor's
brother), the ladies of the court, and all those thousands of eunuchs,
to remain silent as to the death of the Empress Dowager until he had
completed the slow process on His Majesty? No! If the Emperor was
poisoned--and the world believes he was--there are a number of others
whose skirts are as badly stained as those of the great Viceroy, or
long ere this his body would have been sent home a headless corpse
instead of with "rheumatism of the leg."

What then is the explanation? It may be this, that the court, and the
officials as a whole, felt that the Emperor was an unsafe person to
resume the throne, and that it were better that one man should perish
than that the whole regime should be upset. They even refused to allow
a foreign physician to go in to see him, saying that of his own free
will he had turned again to the Chinese, all of which indicates that it
was not the plot of any one man.

Why then should Yuan Shih-kai have been made the scapegoat of the court
and the officials, and branded as a murderer in the face of the whole
world? That may be another plot. The radical reformers, followers of
Kang Yu-wei, have been making such a hubbub about the matter ever since
the death of the Emperor and the Empress Dowager that somebody had to
be punished. They said that Yuan had been a traitor to the cause of
reform, that he had not only betrayed his sovereign in 1898, but that
now he had encompassed his death.

Now to satisfy these enemies, the Prince Regent may have decided that
the best thing to do was to dismiss Yuan for a time. I think that the
trivial excuse he gives for doing so favours my theory--with
"rheumatism of the leg," to which is added, "Thus our clemency is
manifest"--a sentence which may be severe or may mean nothing, and when
the storm has blown over and the sky is clear again, Yuan may be once
more brought to the front as Li Hung-chang and others have been in the
past. Which is a consummation, I think, devoutly to be wished.

XX

Peking--The City of the Court

The position of Peking at the present time is one of peculiar interest,
for