As the edicts continued to come out in such quick succession my Hanlin friend became alarmed. He came to me one day after the Emperor had censured the officials for trying to delay the establishment of the Imperial University and said:
"I must return to Peking."
"Why return so soon?" I inquired.
"There is going to be trouble if the Emperor continues his reform at this rate of speed," he answered.
It was when the Emperor had issued the sixth of his twenty-seven decrees that this young Chinese statesman made this observation. If his most intimate advisers had had the perspicuity to have foreseen the final outcome of such precipitance might they not have advised the Emperor to have proceeded more deliberately? When one remembers how China had been worsted by Japan, how all her prestige was swept away, how, from having been the parent of the Oriental family of nations, a desirable friend or a dangerous enemy, she was stripped of all her glory, and left a helpless giant with neither strength nor power, one can easily understand the eagerness of this boy of twenty-seven to restore her to the pedestal from which she had been ruthlessly torn.
Another reason for his haste may be found in the seizure of his territory by the European powers. A few months before he began his reforms two German priests were murdered by an irresponsible mob in the province of Shantung. With this as an excuse Germany landed a battalion of marines at Kiaochou, a port of that province, which she took with fifty miles of the surrounding territory. As though this were not enough, she demanded the right to build all the railroads and open all the mines in the entire province, and compelled the Chinese to pay an indemnity to the families of the murdered priests and rebuild the church and houses the mob had destroyed. China appealed to Russia who had promised to protect her against all invaders. Instead of coming to her aid, however, Russia demanded a similar cession of Port Arthur, Talienwan and the surrounding territory which she had refused to allow Japan to retain two years before. Not to be outdone by the others, France demanded and received a similar strip of territory at Kuang-chou-wan; and England found that Wei-hai-wei would be indispensable as a kennel from which she could guard the Russian bear on the opposite shore, but why she should have found it necessary also to demand from China four hundred miles of land and water around Hongkong was no doubt difficult for Kuang Hsu to understand.
When the Empress Dowager turned over the reins of government to her nephew she did it very much as a father would place the reins in the hands of a child whom he was teaching to drive an important vehicle on a dangerous road—she sat behind him still holding the reins. Among the things reserved were that he should kotow to her once every five days whether she were in Peking or at the Summer Place, and she reserved such seals of office as made it necessary for all the highest officials to come and express their obligations to her at the same time they came to thank the Emperor. While Kuang Hsu may have been reconciled to the performance of these duties at eighteen, they became irksome at twenty-seven and he demanded and received full liberty in the affairs of state.
We have seen how he used his liberty,—not wisely, perhaps, as a reformer, and yet the reformation of China can never be written without giving the credit of its inception to Kuang Hsu. He was very different from Hsien Feng, the husband of the Empress Dowager, before whose death we are told "the whole administrative power was vested in the hands of a council of eight, whilst he himself spent his time in ways that were by no means consistent with those that ought to have characterized the ruler of a great and powerful nation." Whatever else may be said of Kuang Hsu, he cannot be accused of indolence, extravagance, or indifference to the welfare of his country or his people.
Appreciating the difficulty of securing an expression of opinion from those opposed to his views, and thus getting both sides of the question, in his fourth edict he requested the conservatives to send in their objections to his schemes for progress and reform, and then as if to get the broadest possible expression of opinion he adopted a Shanghai journal called Chinese Progress as the official organ of the government. But lest this be insufficient, in his twenty-second edict he gave the right to all officials to address the throne in sealed memorials.
There was at this time a third-class secretary of the Board of Rites named Wang Chao who sent in a memorial in which he advocated: