their land, the steamers
plying on their waterways, the merchant and the missionary penetrating
year by year farther to the interior, became to the Chinese mind types
of an alien invasion, changing the course of their national life and
fraught with vague forebodings of disaster to their beliefs and their
self-control.

For several years before the present troubles all the resources of
foreign diplomacy, backed by moral demonstrations of the physical
force of fleets and arms, have been needed to secure due respect for
the treaty rights of foreigners and to obtain satisfaction from the
responsible authorities for the sporadic outrages upon the persons and
property of unoffending sojourners, which from time to time occurred at
widely separated points in the northern provinces, as in the case of the
outbreaks in Sze-chuen and Shan-tung.

Posting of antiforeign placards became a daily occurrence, which the
repeated reprobation of the Imperial power failed to check or punish.
These inflammatory appeals to the ignorance and superstition of the
masses, mendacious and absurd in their accusations and deeply hostile
in their spirit, could not but work cumulative harm. They aimed at no
particular class of foreigners; they were impartial in attacking
everything foreign.

An outbreak in Shan-tung, in which German missionaries were slain, was
the too natural result of these malevolent teachings. The posting of
seditious placards, exhorting to the utter destruction of foreigners and
of every foreign thing, continued unrebuked. Hostile demonstrations
toward the stranger gained strength by organization.

The sect, commonly styled the Boxers, developed greatly in the provinces
north of the Yang-Tse, and with the collusion of many notable officials,
including some in the immediate councils of the Throne itself, became
alarmingly aggressive. No foreigner's life, outside of the protected
treaty ports, was safe. No foreign interest was secure from spoliation.

The diplomatic representatives of the powers in Peking strove in vain
to check this movement. Protest was followed by demand and demand by
renewed protest, to be met with perfunctory edicts from the Palace and
evasive and futile assurances from the Tsung-li Yamen. The circle of the
Boxer influence narrowed about Peking, and while nominally stigmatized
as seditious, it was felt that its spirit pervaded the capital itself,
that the Imperial forces were imbued with its doctrines, and