day of May, when the Senate and the House had clothed themselves in mourning for a brother fallen in the battle of life in the distant State of Missouri, the senator from Massachusetts sat in the silence of the Senate chamber, engaged in the employments appertaining to his office, when a member from this House, who had taken an oath to sustain the Constitution, stole into the Senate, that place which had hitherto been held sacred against violence, and smote him as Cain smote his brother. . . . Sir, the act was brief, and my comments on it shall be brief also. I denounce it in the name of the sovereignty of Massachusetts, which was stricken down by the blow. I denounce it in the name of humanity. I denounce it in the name of that fair play which bullies and prize-fighters respect. What! strike a man when he is pinioned-when he cannot respond to a blow! Call you that chivalry? In what code of honour did you get your authority for that? I do not believe that member has a friend so dear who must not, in his heart of hearts, condemn the act.1

1 The speech was reprinted for private distribution in Cambridge, 1856. Senator Wilson, Sumner's colleague in the Senate, writes of the assault: "Standing as it does in its relation to the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery, it was a revelation of a state of feeling and sentiment, especially at the South, which both startled and surprised the nation and the world, though it has since lost much of its special significance looked at by the side of the more horrible demonstrations of rebellion and civil war. Thus considered it shows Mr. Brooks as only a fit representative of the dominating influences of the slaveholding States, where not only did their leading men and presses indorse the deed as their own, and defend it by voice and vote, but the people generally seemed ready to vie with each other in their professed admiration of his course." ("Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America," II, p. 484. See also Rhodes's "History of the United States," II, pp. 145-7, and Pierce, "Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner," Boston, 1893, vol. III, pp. 460–524, a most detailed account.)

Brooks, who had in vain challenged Senator Wilson for calling the assault "brutal, murderous, and cowardly," took action at once after Burlingame's speech, and was met by a prompt acceptance of his challenge, the latter proposing rifles as weapons and Deer Island, near Niagara Falls, as the place of meeting. The chivalry of the South recoiled at the suggestion of such instruments of precision on the field of honour, and "Bully" Brooks declined to meet his opponent, on the ground that to reach the place designated he would have to travel "through the enemy's country." He was glorified for months thereafter by complimentary banquets and presents of various kinds of clubs suitably inscribed.1 Mr. Burlingame was returned with increased prestige to the Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses during the administration of President Buchanan, but failed in securing a reelection in 1860, though ardently supporting Lincoln and his triumphant party by speeches in the campaign. As a reward for faithful political

1 Both Brooks and Butler died within a year of this incident, the former confessing to a friend that he was "heartsick of being the recognised representative of bullies, the recipient of their ostentatious gifts and officious testimonials of admiration and regard." A detailed account of the challenge, by Colonel James, Mr. Burlingame's second, was given to the Washington Post, October 27, 1901, by W. A. Crofutt, and is to be found in full in John Bigelow's "Retrospections of an Active Life,” vol. I, pp. 165-170. It is the most authoritative document on the subject.

service he received an appointment as minister to Austria, but learned while in Paris on his way to Vienna that the Austrian court objected to him as too outspoken a champion of Kossuth and of Sardinian independence1 to be persona grata at that capital. The Chinese legation being offered, he at once accepted the post, probably with rather vague ideas as to the past history of that country, and some doubts as to whether he should even be allowed to reside in its capital when he reached it.

China in 1861 was suffering from the twofold affliction of a rebellion at home and a recent defeat of her army by foreign invaders before Peking. The latter war had opened her capital for the first time in the history of the empire to the permanent residence of Western plenipotentiaries, but there remained a desperate hope in the hearts of the Chinese that these might still be induced to remove in time to the treaty ports; the initial step in Mr. Burlingame's programme was to establish an American legation there upon the basis of conventions secured by Great Britain and France. Owing to the fearful disasters of the Tai-ping Insurrection during ten years, and the strain upon their re

1 He had moved while in Congress the recognition of Sardinia as a first-class power.

sources from the presence of the rebels in the provinces of the Yangtse, the government of China was sufficiently alarmed at the critical condition of the ruling dynasty to treat the foreigners with circumspection and, for the time at least, carry out the terms of the treaties. with honesty and faithfulness.1 It reflects credit upon the spirit of the Tartar clan ruling an alien and discontented people that, despite its decadence and loss of morale after two centuries of occupation, it should have faced the diverse evils of this crisis with determination and without a suggestion of surrender. The plight of the dynasty was relieved by the death of its dissipated and cowardly monarch, Hsien-fêng, in August, 1861, during his flight to Jehol from the Europeans, when the government came into the hands of his infant son, T'ung-chih, controlled by the two Empresses-Dowager and Prince Kung, a brother of the deceased sovereign. From what has lately been made known of her career it appears that the dangerous situation was met by the secondary wife, Tsz-hsi, the

1 Besides the Tai-ping, or Chang-mao, "long-haired," rebels who held Nanking as their capital, there were at this time the so-called Pathan, or Moslem, insurrection devastating Yunnan, other Mohammedan revolts in the north-west,- which a little later carried away the whole region from Kansu westward to Kashgaria in a revolt that was not suppressed until 1881,-and an uprising of bandits called Nien-fei in Shantung.

actual mother of the Emperor, then in her twenty-seventh year, who, with that extraordinary perception in the choice of her agents which distinguishes great rulers everywhere, made common cause with Prince Kung against a palace clique opposed to her interests, and brought the baby sovereign back to Peking to govern under a regency. It has been the custom in Western accounts of this woman to call her wanton and cruel. Personally she seems to have been quite the reverse, though as indifferent to human life when her own interests were critically involved as are all Asiatics. The supreme obstacle to a fair exercise of her exceptional ability was her utter ignorance of the outside world, the inevitable result of a traditional policy of the Manchu dynasty, carefully fostered by astute Chinese officials, who tried thereby during the nineteenth century to reduce the princes to impotence and to control the empire for their own selfish exploitation. The Empress was never easily deceived in matters which came within the compass of her own observation, but it was not difficult to play upon her pride of race or upon the anxieties she ever entertained as to intrigues menacing her supremacy within the palace. From such motives she would occasionally visit the greatest