Jasper County Democrat, Volume 4, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 May 1901 — A REMARKABLE PREDICTION. [ARTICLE]

A REMARKABLE PREDICTION.

An Insurance Man Foreshadowed the Boxer Uprising la Chinn. “It is • curious fact,” remarked an insurance man of this city the other day, to a New Orleans Times-Demo-crat reporter, “that a quiet gentleman seated in a certain office in New York, foreshadowing the terrible uprising in China months before it took place, and did so by a process of purely inductive reasoning. He was separated by thousands of leagues from the scene of action, he knew nothing of oriental complications, and his profession was that of a plain, everyday accountant; yet he not only predicted what was going to happen, but named the locality of the outbreak and the native class that would be chiefly involved—this, too, at a time when the foreign colonists, from the ambassadors down, were in blissful ignorance of the gathering storm. The basis of his remarkable forecast, which was made in a letter written at the beginning of the year, was a brief report in a London financial paper of life insurance policies lately written in the northern Chinese provinces. The number was something astonishing, and he noted with interest that the new policy holders were nearly all native army and naval officers of high rank, among them being several commanding generals who were presumably very near the imperial throne. That set the quiet insurance man to thinking, and he proceeded to examine the statistics a little more closely. Only a few insurance companies have entered the north China field for business, and it was a significant circumstance that the great majority of the recent policies were written in a concern that agrees, among other things, not to contest losses incurred through ‘military operations’—in plain English, to pay the insurance carried by men who are killed in battle. The other companies do not include that proviso in their terms, and, being a hit of a Sherlock Holmes in his way, the quiet insurance man came to the conclusion that trouble was brewing. What kind of trouble was naturally the first question, and, as China had at that time no quarrel afoot with any particular power, the inference was quite nati ural that she was preparing to assume the aggressive against outsiders, in general. If a purpose of that kind was being entertained it would certainly be known to the military chiefs who would Be called upon to put it into execution, and they, as it 6eemed, were the very people who were doing the heaviest insuring. The fact that the phenomenal business was chieily confined to Peking and Tientsin led Mr. Holmes, Jr., to conclude that the conspiracy was a close corporation affair, limited to Manchuria. He figured all out for his own amusement purely, hut he had so strong a prescience of the correctness of his deductions that he wrote me a letter, in which he remarked, apropos of nothing, that there was likely, in his opinion, to be a general outbreak against the ‘white devils’ in north China before the end of the year. He added that a conspiracy was evidently in train, centering about the throne itself and including the chief military officers of the empire. 1 have not heard from him since the trouble began, hut I fancy he is patting himself on the hack. Maybe, though, he has forgotten all about it.”