son must take a lower place than his parent in his presence, be he Emperor or peasant. The Empress Dowager still reigns. The times are still too troublous for her to withdraw her experience from the councils of State, and though longing for the quiet and rest so necessary to a woman of her age, and though really anxious to retire, she feels the time has not yet come.
The Empress Dowager, having crushed the Reformers, and reseated herself upon the Throne, was, from the time of the coup d’état, considered to be anti-foreign and responsible for all the attacks upon foreigners by ignorant Chinese that took place after that event. When, only two years after the coup d’état, the secret society of the Boxers began their sanguinary attacks upon the foreigners, Her Majesty was considered responsible for them, was looked upon as aiding and abetting the Boxers; and, by the foreigners at least, she was considered to be the high priestess if not the originator of the order. But the Boxer movement had no such high origin. It started among the people, the humble people, in the Northern provinces of China, far from the Capital, and had been in existence for a number of years before the attack upon the Legations in 1900.