"Nothing," answered Dr. Tenny, "except to be willing to submit to the conditions."
"And what are those conditions?" asked His Excellency.
"They are that you open schools in every important town, place in them well-educated, competent teachers, whom you are willing to pay a salary equal to what they may reasonably expect to get if they enter business."
"May I ask if you would be willing to undertake the development of such a system?" he asked further.
"On one condition," answered Dr. Tenny.
"And what is that?"
"That you allow me to open a school wherever I think there should be one, call my teachers from whatsoever source I please to call them, pay them whatever salary I think they deserve, sending all the bills to Your Excellency, and you pay them without question."
The Viceroy had known Dr. Tenny for years, had always had the most implicit confidence both in his ability and his honesty, and so, lightening up his duties in the Tientsin and Paotingfu Universities, he commissioned him to establish what may be termed the first public school system of education on modern lines in the whole empire. This one act, if he had done no other, was reason enough for a wise regent to have continued him in office even though he "had rheumatism of the leg." But it may be that there are extenuating circumstances in this act of the Regent as we shall point out later.
There is one phase of the Boxer uprising that I have never yet seen properly represented in any book or magazine. We all know how the ministers of the various European governments with their wives and children, the customs officials, missionaries, business men, and tourists who happened to be in Peking at the time, with all the Chinese Christians, were confined in the British legation and Prince Su's palace. We know how they barricaded their defense. We know how they were fired upon day and night for six weeks by the Boxer leaders and the army of the conservatives under the leadership of their general, Tung Fu-hsiang. But the thing which we do not know, or at least which has not been adequately told, is the most interesting secret plot of the liberal progressives, under the leadership of "Prince Ching and others," to thwart the Empress Dowager and the Boxer leaders, the conservatives and their army, and protect the most noted company of prisoners that have ever been confined in a legation quarter. The plot was this:
When Prince Ching and his progressive associates in Peking discovered that they could not vote down the Boxer princes, they dared not openly oppose them, but they secretly decided that the representatives of the Powers must not be massacred else the doom of China was sealed. When they discovered that Yuan Shih-kai and the other great viceroys had decided by stratagem to foil the Boxers even though they must set all the imperial edicts at naught, they decided, for the sake of the protection of the legations and the preservation of the empire, that they would do the same. They secretly sent supplies of food to the besieged, which the latter feared to use lest they be poisoned. But more than that they kept their own armies in Peking as a guard and as a final resort in case there was danger of the legation being overcome, and as a matter of fact there were regular pitched battles between the troops of Prince Ching and his associates and those of the Boxer leader, Tung Fu-hsiang. Had the Boxers finally succeeded, Yuan Shih-kai and Prince Ching and their associates would have lost their heads, but as the Boxers failed it was they who went to their graves by the short process of the executioner's knife.