Meanwhile the Tajens (heads of boards) wrote to the I.G. asking for a safe convoy through the foreign lines, and he sent one of his own men to bring them down, since, though poor enough in other things, they were so rich in fears.  Five came this first time, but one acted as spokesman to voice the grief of all over what had occurred, and to exonerate the Emperor and the Empress-Dowager of blame.  No doubt the two sovereigns were innocent of responsibility for what had happened—­no one would believe it at the time, however—­and were captured, as these ministers said, by “officials of another way of thinking, and made to appear as if approving what they disapproved and ordering what they really forbade.”

Their position is not too difficult to understand when one remembers that, Oriental fashion, they were shut up in their palaces, where no breath of impartial advice could possibly reach them, and that they heard only what courtiers with their own fish to fry permitted them to hear.

The real culprits then, according to all accounts, were the officials who deliberately misled the Court.  It was characteristic of the I.G., always too big for resentment, that he could find some excuse for them and, though the length of his service entitled him to more consideration than most of those who cried out bitterly for “vengeance,” could write in his book ("These From the Land of Sinim"), “In the heat of the conflict, and under the agonizing strain of anxiety for imperilled loved ones, many hard things have been said and written about the officials who allied themselves with the Boxers.  But these men were eminent in their own country for their learning and services, were animated by patriotism, were enraged by foreign dictation, and had the courage of their convictions.  We must do them the justice of allowing that they were actuated by high motives and love of country—­not that these necessarily mean political ability or highest wisdom,” The truth is—­and he realized it thoroughly—­that the real deep feeling of the Chinese people has always been to be left alone in peace to pursue the even tenor of their way.

So enlightened a man as the great Minister Wen Hsiang—­“one of the most intelligent and broad-minded Chinese I ever knew,” as Sir Robert Hart sometimes said—­frankly confessed this when speaking to the I.G. a few years after the inauguration of the Customs.  “We would gladly pay you all the increased revenue you have brought us,” were his exact words, “if you foreigners would go back to your own country and leave us in peace as we were before you came.”

Of course neither the wishes of the Chinese nor the question of Imperial responsibility or non-responsibility mattered greatly in 1900.  The nations of the world were not in a tolerant mood; they would, as he pointed out, care little for excuses and less for the Chinese anxiety about the Palace, “with its ancestral contents,” or the Imperial Tombs.  The only thing which might influence them was the consideration of the welfare of the Chinese people.