Page:Kidnapped in London.djvu/123

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
Appendix.
119

active participation in the violent section of the reform movement. In China, to be innocent is not to be safe; an accusation is none the less dangerous for being utterly unfounded. Sun had to fly for his life, without a moment's deliberation as to friends or property or anything else; and for two or three weeks he was a fugitive hiding in the labyrinthine canals and impenetrable pirate-haunts of the great Kwang-tung Delta. A report has been published that forty or fifty of his supposed accomplices were executed, and a reward was offered for his arrest, but he got away to Honolulu and thence to America. The story goes that this indomitable patriot immediately set to work converting the Chinese at the Washington Embassy to the cause of reform, and that afterwards he tried to do the same in London; that one of the Chinese in the Legation at Washington had professed sympathy with the apostle of enlightenment, and then thought more money could be made on the other side, and so telegraphed to the London Embassy to arrest Sun and kidnap him back to China by hook or by crook. However that may be, he was captured and confined in a most outrageous manner in the London Legation, whatever plausible piffle may be put forward by Sir Halliday Macartney, or any servile prevaricator; and it is due to Dr. Cantlie, Sun's friend and teacher in Hong Kong, that one of the best men China has ever produced was rescued by British justice from the toils of treacherous man-