The facts disclosed in the British Parliamentary Paper (C. 6431) appear to be that, on May 9th, 1891, two Chinese nuns were visiting a sick family at Wuhsueh, on the river Yangtze. As the disease of the parents was infectious, they removed the children. On the way to the Mission they met a relation, who demanded their restoration. This being refused, the nuns were taken before a magistrate, who, however, on the requisition of the fathers, immediately released them.
This excited much popular agitation, and three days afterwards, a woman came to the Mission to claim a child alleged to have died therein. As she was accompanied by a small crowd, which assembles in the narrow teeming streets of China on the slightest pretext, admission was apparently refused. Then commenced the work of destruction, costing two Englishmen, who gallantly went from some distance to render help, their lives, and imperilling many others, not only in the locality itself, but, later on, elsewhere on the river. Much foreign property was destroyed, and a very serious state of affairs seemed likely to supervene, for, as The Times recently wrote, and experience has often shown, "Native feelings of hostility, once roused against the white man and whetted by the intoxication of success, cannot be expected to take account of an imaginary dividing line between two spheres."
Anti-Foreign Feeling.
45.—In attributing the outbreak to Chinese hatred of the foreigner, two observations appear in this instance to claim consideration. The first is by Mr. Consul Gardner, in his despatch of June 9:—
"The mob was composed of many hostile from mere ignorance, many from the force of contagion, some from fear of others, a few really friendly, who, like the soldiers, led a lady to a place of safety under pretence of robbing her of a ring, and others who sheltered them from blows, while very few deliberately meant mischief."
The other is by the Rev. David Hill, a Wesleyan missionary of much experience, who was officially employed to inquire into the facts. Under date June 12th. 1891, he writes:—
"One thing which the sight of the house impressed on me was the evidence which it gave of the hold on the people's mind which the rumours as to the destruction of infant life have gained. On the upper story, the ceiling had been inspected by means of a ladder, which evidently had been brought up for the purpose. On the ground floor the boards of one of the rooms had been fired, and a large aperture made. Below the ground floor the ventilators outside had been torn open, as though search had been made for missing infants, and, of course, the lath and plaster walls in all the rooms where they might be found were pierced."
This latter view is confirmed by the Rev. Father de Quellec, who, writing in the Missions Catholiques, describes how, at another place, on the night of May 23rd, a dead child, from whom the eyes had been removed, was placed on vacant land near the Mission. A crowd assembling next morning, cried out, "It is the European devil who has torn out the eyes and heart of this child!" The house was stormed, but fortunately a magistrate arrived with troops more under command than is usual in China, and the mob was dispersed. "But," adds the Father, "eight out of ten believe that we take out the eyes and store them in the cellars of the Mission."
It is contended that, under such antagonistic circumstances, rescue work should be guided by the greatest care, for otherwise its use, to the prejudice of both missionary efforts and European trade, by reactionaries, is inevitable. Their sinister influence, once asserted, may at any moment call into fatally destructive play, as indeed recently, the anti-foreign feeling entertained by a large proportion of the Chinese.
That this anti-foreign feeling exists all agree. It is urged that it must never be forgotten—for what renders it especially serious in China, is the frequent evidence of its being fanned from above—and that the authorities have no efficient machinery of civil order on which reliance can be placed. Nor is the Central Government always able to enforce its will on distant provincial authorities, or even to prevent their varying the orders of the Throne.