Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BEGINNING OF THE OUTBREAK. The following’ narrative of the earlier events in the North was sent to Dr. Hykes, of the American Bible Society, by the Agent of the Society in Tientsin on June 5th, 1900:? It now seems that we are to have the closing chapter of a movement second only to the great T'ai P'ing rebellion, although at this writing I can but mention facts that indicate the beginning of the end. It has been assumed by visitors to the North that the reports of Boxer uprisings have been grossly exaggerated; and to some extent this is doubtless true; but the events of the past two weeks have shown but too clearly that the Boxer movement cannot be regarded too seriously. For many months past Boxer bands have, with ever increasing malignity and power, committed countless outrages; but these being confined to native Christians have not given cause for strong action on the part of the Foreign Ministers, though they have done all that lay within their power to cause the Chinese Government to suppress the rebels. Men, women and children have been put to death outright after being robbed, or robbed and tortured, and in either case their homes have been destroyed; but to the casual observer these things have not been prominently in evidence. Disturbances, though frequent and plentiful, have been in distant and more or less isolated places, from which reports have been slow in reaching us and rendered untrustworthy by the transforming imaginations of the Chinese. For this reason visitors to the North have been deceived by surface appearances; and, while exaggerated reports may have been spread, many of these observers have been driven to the other extreme and pronounced a comparative calm where better informed people could detect the rumbling of a volcano soon to burst into fla…
