…The agitation in Beijing in reality amounts to nothing. One cannot help being seriously sorry for the poor Chinese, who are treated with utter disregard of all justice and right. Last year I myself was an eye witness of the following revolting incident. A certain foreigner—a dentist by profession —at a stoppage of a train at a station between Tanggu and Tianjin, began, with the greatest assurance, to pull eggs out of a Chinese vendor's basket, and to throw them in his face, and when some of the Chinese bystanders remonstrated, he went for them in the same manner. They became exasperated and began to throw stones into the windows of our carriage. Fortunately for us the train started just then, and we escaped the retribution richly deserved by our fellow-passenger. Can you wonder after this that the Chinese detest foreigners?
I myself am profoundly convinced that the Chinese are the most peaceable people in the world and incapable of violence unless exasperated into it. In their intercourse with us missionaries, they are infinitely more courteous and pleasanter than the civilized nations. What a tumult of laughter and shouting greeted me in Berlin and London when I appeared on the streets in the garb of my order, the "civilized" police looking on in silence, or with a sympathetic grin! Nothing of the sort ever happened to me in the streets of Beijing and other Chinese cities. As to the villages, I am received there as I would be in my own native Russia. Just at this present time I ride every day through villages to superintend some building, alone on a humble donkey, with a lad for driver, and meet with nothing but courtesy—at the very time that the papers all but predict a St. Bartholomew massacre of foreigners.—A while ago we received into the church the commander of all the Albazins. With God's blessing it will not be difficult, through his influence, to induce his whole people to return into the Orthodox Church.
