COMPENSATION DEMANDED BY BRITAIN.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 11131, 25 January 1899, Page 3

COMPENSATION DEMANDED BY BRITAIN.

A PEIEST RELEASED. Boocivcd January 25, 1 a.m. Pekin, January 24. Sir Claude M'Donald has protested to the Chinese Government, and demanded compensation for the murder of the missionary Fleming. The Szechuan rebels. h.ave released Father Fkury, ' A. correspondent from Pekin sums up the present position of affairs in China ■us follows:— The whole situation is one whose features can hardly be appreciated by the reader in Europe, because, underlying its grim facts, medieval barbarities, cold-blooded treachery, and violence, there lurka a certain quality of unreality and doubt, in the light of which the sternest truths appear improbable. It is as if a tale of the Thousand and One Nights were retold in a new and Gilbertian manner. The presence of modern journalists in that old-world city where the Emperor of 300,000,000 is a prisoner in. his own palace ; the sudden closing of ancient city gates, to which a viceroy is hurrying in a special lrain-de-luxe ; voices of foreign envoys clamoring loudly for contracts and concessions above the stress of an unheeded national crisis ; secret odicte, full of the bloodthirstiness Of the Middle Ages, flashed over the telegraph Vires in pursuit of trembling fugitives j finally, the chief object of a usurper's wrath carefully guarded by the armed cruiser of a nation which witnessed the usurpation itself without emotion— these are conditions which lend to the whole tragic comedy % fantastic element obliterating in some degree its <rery f*riousnes3.