te," thus severing the last cord that bound them
to the old regime.

What, now, was the Empress Dowager doing while Kuang Hsu was issuing
all these reform edicts, which, we are told, were so contrary to all
her reactionary principles? Why did she not stretch forth her hand and
prevent them? She was spending the hot months at the Summer Palace,
fifteen miles away, without offering either advice, objection or
hindrance, and it was not until two delegations of officials and
princes had appeared before her and plead with her to come and take
control of affairs and thus save them from being ousted or beheaded,
and herself from imprisonment, did she consent to come. By thus taking
the throne she virtually placed herself in the hands of the
conservative party, and all his reform measures, except that of the
Peking University and provincial schools, were, for the time,
countermanded, and the Boxers were allowed to test their strength with
the allied Powers.

Passing over the two bad years of the Empress Dowager, which we have
treated in another chapter, we find her again, after the failure of the
Boxer uprising, and the return of the court to Peking, reissuing the
same style of edicts that had gone out from the pen of Kuang Hsu. On
August 29, 1901, she ordered "the abolition of essays on the Chinese
classics in examinations for literary degrees, and substituted therefor
essays and articles on some phase of modern affairs, Western laws or
political economy. This same procedure is to be followed in examination
of candidates for office."

And now notice another phase of this same edict. "The old methods of
gaining military degrees by trial of strength with stone weights,
agility with the sword, or marksmanship with the bow on foot or on
horseback, ARE OF NO USE TO MEN IN THE ARMY, WHERE STRATEGY AND
MILITARY SCIENCE ARE THE SINE QUA NON TO OFFICE, and hence they should
be done away with forever." It is, as it was with Kuang Hsu, the
strengthening of the army she has in mind in her first efforts at
reform, that she may be able to back up with war-ships and cannon, if
necessary, her refusal to allow Italy or any other European power to
filch, without reason or excuse, the territory of her ancestors.

September 12, 1901, she issued another edict commanding that "all the
colleges in the empire should be turned into schools of Western
learning; each provincial capital should have a university like that in
Peking, whilst all the sc