Up to 1898 these secret societies had for their main object the overthrow of the Manchu or Tartar dynasty, but after that they devoted their attention to the expulsion of the foreigner from the land. It has always been a mistake to believe that John Chinaman was a stranger to patriotism. Indeed, so passionately devoted is he to his native country that he makes arrangements for the return of his bones to the Flowery Kingdom in the event of his dying in foreign lands. This fiber of patriotism was utilized in 1900 by that extraordinarily clever woman, the Dowager Empress, to rally the entire nation into the presentation of a virtually united front to the foreigner, to convert the secret societies from anti-dynastic into anti-foreign movements, and to achieve that which the Triad sought in vain to bring about at the time of the Taiping rebellion—namely: coöperation of all the secret societies, one with another, against the common foe, which this time was not the Manchu conqueror but the white foreigner.
It can hardly be denied that from about 1840 to 1900 China was subjected to a degree of indignity, insult, extortion, and bullying on the part of some of the foreign powers no Christian power would have tolerated. Treaties were imposed upon her by force, her finest harbors seized, and vast stretches of her littoral successively placed under foreign rule. She was compelled to consent to agreements providing for the transfer of her immense river trade to foreign flags, and for the gridironing of the entire land by means of foreign built and foreign controlled railroads, while for every concession made by her a dozen new ones were presented by the foreign powers.
In December, 1899, the Empress issued a secret edict, addressed to the Viceroys of the various provinces.
“The various foreign powers cast upon us looks of tigerlike voracity, hustling each other in their endeavors to be the first to seize upon our innermost territories,” she declared.
“They fail to understand that there are certain things which this Empire can never consent to do, and that if hard pressed we have no alternative but to rely upon the justice of our cause.”
Four weeks later another edict was dispatched to the same officials by the Dowager Empress, who had, it was said, English or American blood in her veins, her mother having been a Eurasian, or child of a white father and Manchu mother. In this second edict the Viceroys were warned to exercise a prudent discrimination towards the disturbers of public peace.
“The reckless fellows who band together and create riot on the pretext of securing the inauguration of reforms,” were to be punished, while those “loyal subjects who learn gymnastic drill for the protection of their families and their country,” that was to say, the members of the “Righteous Harmony Fists (‘Boxers’) association,” were to be favored. The “Boxers” association was openly a society for the cultivation of gymnastics, but secretly an anti-foreign political movement, something like those “Turnverein” or gymnastic societies which played so important a political rôle in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century, becoming one of the most important factors in the liberation of the fatherland from the presence of the French invader. From the time the “Boxers” were openly encouraged by the Empress, they became a means of union among all the various secret societies, and the fact that these societies in all parts of the immense Chinese Empire simultaneously took to arms to drive out the foreigner was due to the adroitness of the old Empress, who thus, at the close of the nineteenth century, emulated in a way the rôle played by Queen Louise of Prussia when she roused her countrymen to rid Germany from the thraldom of Napoleon.
However, the Chinese went about it in the most horrible fashion, subjecting the objects of their hatred to the most agonizing tortures and inflicting upon them every conceivable atrocity the barbarian mind could invent.
The fact that Hon. Edwin H. Conger, United States Minister to China, his wife and daughter, were among the foreign ambassadors and ministers shut up in Peking, and sometimes reported massacred, was sufficient reason that the United States should join with the allied armies in the war against “The Yellow Terror,” and there were other good reasons. Thus came about the part that the United States naval and military forces took in that war, in which occurred the battle of Tien-Tsin and the relief of Peking, together with the development of the fact that Minister Conger and his family were safe. All of which are matters of recent history, and for which there is no reason that it should be repeated here.
In the entire war, however, the exemplary conduct of the American soldiers was apparent to the world, and it has been shown that the kindness of President McKinley and the humane nature that characterized him in all things was the spirit that pervaded the American camp.