greatly they were to be dreaded, urging a mild and conciliatory policy. . . . The more he speaks the more does he expose himself, so that at the last we have come to entertain for him the same contempt we feel for a yelping cur."
He had doubtless taken advantage of the panic created at court by the advance of the allies to Tientsin, and sought to reinstate himself in favor by making the emperor believe he could be of special service with the foreigners, and he was given an independent commission to treat with the envoys. His true character of duplicity and untruthfulness had been revealed to the allies by the documents captured at Canton, and they refused to receive him. The American and Russian ministers, however, out of regard for his past services, his old age, and misfortunes, received and returned his visit, but held no negotiations with him. He suddenly disappeared from Tientsin, and on his return to Peking there was sent him a silken scarf from the emperor's hand, "in Our extreme desire to be at once just and gracious," which was the imperial indication that he would be permitted to save his family from any stain of disgrace by putting an end to his own life by strangulation, in lieu of his decapitation by the executioner. And thus disappeared from the stage of public affairs the most prominent Chinese statesman of his generation.
There are some indications in the official documents of a certain degree of friction between the envoys of the allies and the two neutral ministers, and the contemporaneous accounts speak of the jealousy of the
