Scott. When you're eighteen you can
read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you're ninety to read some
of the rest. It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to
live ninety years.

But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform,
preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China. It
was there that he declared himself a Boxer.

Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only
making trouble on her soil? If they would only all go home what a
pleasant place China would be for the Chinese! We do not allow
Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would
be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.

China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted
Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time. The
Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the
countries of other people. I wish him success. We drive the
Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of
his country. I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.

Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later,
he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring
fancy rates for "extinguished missionaries" in China as Germany had
done. Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for
her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing
to settle for produce--firecrackers and tea.

The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for
the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last
for a long time. He realized that he was tired and that the strain
upon him made any other sort of work out of the question. Writing to
MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, "I seem to have made many
speeches, but it is not so. It is not more than ten, I think." Still, a
respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was
carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social
pressure. Again to MacAlister:

I declined 7 banquets yesterday (which is double the daily average)
& answered 29 letters. I have slaved at my mail every day since we
arrived in mid-October, but Jean is learning to typewrite &
presently I'll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.

He added that after January 4th he did not intend to speak ag