Mr. Adee to Mr. Denby.
Washington, August 24, 1895.
Sir: The Chinese mail, which reached this Department yesterday, brings your dispatches Nos. 2283, 2284, 2286, and 2288, of the dates of July 8, 10, and 12, with regard to the investigation of the outrages committed upon foreign missionary residents at Chengtu in June last. The steps taken by you in appointing Mr. Spencer Lewis, an American citizen and resident at Chungking as the lay representative of this Government on that investigating commission, is in entire accordance with the proposed constitution thereof announced in your former dispatch [Page 117] No. 2278 of the 1st ultimo, which has been approved by the Department’s telegraphic instructions to you of the 20th instant.
It does not appear that the constitution of the Chinese representation on that commission has been formally notified to you, although it would seem from your No. 2288 that it would probably be composed of the prefect of Chengtu, the provincial treasurer, and the judge. Whether these officials are of sufficiently high rank to scrutinize the action of their superior official, the viceroy, and pronounce upon his culpable neglect or suspected complicity, of which many circumstantial indications appear, is not stated by you. Your several dispatches show that you fully appreciate the necessity of making an example of any high provincial or vice-regal authorities, to whose incompetency or hostile apathy, if not deliberate collusion, the occurrences in the province of Szechuan may be attributable, and the Department cordially approves that part of your note to the Tsung-li Yamên, No. 16, of July 9, 1895, in which you point out that unless the guilty officials are punished no settlement of the matters appertaining to the riots will be satisfactory, and that it is clearly in the interest of China to make a grave public example, showing her intention that riots of this class shall be prevented by the condign punishment of the guilty, whatever be their station.
While your demand in that note that the ex-viceroy of Szechuan be ordered to Peking to await the result of the investigation may have been deemed conducive to the more effectual surveillance, and in the needful event, the punishment of that officer, it may perhaps not turn out to have been advisable to bring him into immediate personal touch with the Yamên and the responsible officers of the Chinese Government at Peking, whereby he might be enabled to exert an influence tending to control the proposed investigation and its contemplated results. Your dispatch breaks off the narrative of events before the action of the Yamên upon your request was made known, and it can only be conjectured whether the ex-viceroy, Liu, was in fact ordered to Peking. The press dispatches of yesterday and to-day announce the appointment of “Viceroy Liu” as the chief commissioner of China to investigate the later massacre and looting at Kutien, and if this Liu be in fact the same ex-viceroy whose guilty course at Chengtu you so earnestly qualified in your note to the Yamên, you can hardly have failed to at once remonstrate against the offensive indecency of appointing such a man, laboring under so grave a charge, to investigate a similar and graver outrage in another province than that which he himself had misgoverned. I have to-day sent you a telegram in this regard, which I confirm on the overleaf. It is trusted that the press reports may be founded upon some mistaken identity of names; otherwise the action of the Chinese Government in appointing this degraded and suspected official to a renewed official capacity, having extraordinarily far-reaching and international effects, would be as incomprehensible as objectionable.
I am, etc.,
Acting Secretary