To one who like myself has spent the greater part of his life in China and knows the Chinese as well as it is possible to know a people so alien in character and training, the events connected with the Boxer Rising were peculiarly lamentable. The depth of the anti-foreign feeling revealed in that outbreak is difficult to appreciate, and we naturally seek for its cause and long to discern a remedy. Forty years back I had occasion to travel widely in the Che-kiang, Ngan-hui, Kiang-si and others of the Central provinces of China, and although occasionally molested, I generally found the people friendly and above all hospitable. Fortune, the Kew botanist, who first brought to light the wealth of the Chinese flora, has left us a charming account of his life amidst the people in the interior of Che-kiang and of his kindly feeling towards them; a perusal of his travels shews us that in the districts he visited practically no antagonism to a well-conducted “Foreigner” then existed, notwithstanding that the memory of the cruel war with England of 1840—42 was still fresh in the minds of the people: but by the masses this war was regarded as an affair of the mandarins, whose mismanagement had brought about the trouble, and so individual travellers were not molested.