To confound “stranger” with “enemy” is the error of Bedouin or Afghan.  Does not China do the same when she mistakes hostility to foreigners for patriotism?  By this blunder she runs the risk of alienating her best friends, England and America.  A farmer attempting to rope up a shaky barrel in which a hen was sitting on a nest full of eggs, the silly fowl mistook him for an enemy and flew in his face.  Is not China in danger of being left to the fate which her friends have sought to avert?

In April a magistrate went by invitation to the French Catholic Mission to settle a long-standing dispute, and he settled it by committing suicide—­in China the most dreaded form of revenge.  Carried [Page 260] out gasping but speechless, he intimated that he was the victim of a murderous attack by the senior priest.  His wounds were photographed; and the pictures were circulated with a view to exciting the mob.  Gentry and populace held meetings for the purpose of screwing their courage up to the required pitch—­governor and mandarins kept carefully in the background—­and on the fifth day the mission buildings were destroyed and the priests killed.  An English missionary, his wife and daughter, living not far away, were set upon and slain, not because they were not known to belong to another nation and another creed, but because an infuriated mob does not care to discriminate.

English and French officials proceeded to the scene in gunboats to examine the case and arrange a settlement.  The case of the English family was settled without difficulty; but that of the French mission was more complicated.  Among the French demands were two items which the Chinese Government found embarrassing.  It had accepted the theory of murder and hastily conferred posthumous honours on the deceased magistrate.  The French demanded the retraction of those honors, and a public admission of suicide.  To pay a money indemnity and cashier a governor was no great hardship, but how could the court submit to the humiliation of dancing to the tune of a French piper?  An English surgeon declared, in a sealed report of autopsy, that the wounds must have been self-inflicted, as their position made it impossible for them to have been inflicted by an assailant.  But

[Note from PG proofer:  two lines of text missing here.]

[Page 261] In 1870 France accepted a money payment for the atrocious massacre at Tientsin, because the Second Empire was entering on a life-and-death struggle with Germany.  If she makes things easy for China this time, will it not be because the Republic is engaged in mortal combat with the Roman Church?

China’s constant friction and frequent collisions with France spring chiefly from two sources; (1) the French protectorate over the Roman missions, and (2) the menacing attitude of France in Indo-China.  It was to avenge the judicial murder of a missionary that Louis Napoleon sent troops to China in 1857-60.  From this last date the long-persecuted Church assumed an imperious tone.  The restitution of confiscated property was a source of endless trouble; and the certainty of being backed up by Church and State emboldened native converts not only to insist on their own rights, but to mix in disputes with which they had no necessary connection—­a practice which more than anything else has tended to bring the Holy Faith into disrepute among the Chinese people.