A Conference has been held this week at Pekin at
which one would greatly like to have been present. The Russians, after evacuating Mukden, have found a pretest for reoccupying it, and have accordingly driven out its Chinese garrison and re- placed it by one of their own. The reason they allege is that the Chinese Governor cannot keep the local banditti in order, which is probably true. The Empress-Regent is greatly hurt, Mukden being the sacred city of the Imperial house, and she has summoned all her high officials and the great Manchu nobles to advise her what to do. That debate, could one but report it, would tell us more as to the future lines of Chinese policy than reams of despatches. It is said that one section of the Councillors strongly urged a strict alliance with Japan ; but others dread, or affect to dread, the Japanese as much as the Russians. Nothing appears to have been decided, and, indeed, decision was nearly impossible. The i Court has not the force to defy Rusiria without Japanese I
assistance ; Europe will not assist the Empress to recover Manchuria, which is regarded as lost; and the Empress, for all her energy, is not the person to devise or carry out a desperate policy. She fled, it must be remembered, from her capital, and if she appealed to her people to rise in arms for the protection of Manchuria, she would stake her throne. She will wait, therefore, though time must seem to her more courageous advisers to be running on.
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