At times during the four slow-moving months, however, the situation
became, as I shall endeavor to show, complicated in every way. The
escape of the foreigners was made absolutely impossible by the fact that
the whole of the roads, even those over the rough mountains leading
south, were blocked successfully by the rebelling forces, and, when the
deep gloom settled finally over the city, the fate of the Westerners
seemed sealed and their future hopeless. All round the foreigners'
houses the people, infected with that strange, unaccountable, national
hysteria, so terrible in the Chinese temperament, rose up to burn and
kill. Mayhap it means little to the man who reads. Massacres have always
been common enough in China, he will say; and there are thousands of
people in Europe to-day who know no more about China than what the
telegrams of massacres of European missionaries have told them. Years
ago one almost expected this sort of thing; but at the present day, when
China is popularly supposed to be working honestly to gain for herself
an honorable place among the nations, it is surely not to be expected in
the ordinary run of things in days of peace.
But we know that such visions are common to every European in Inland
China, and even at the coast men talk continually of and believe that
riots are going to happen in the near future.
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