REAL POINT AT ISSUE. 155 waged for the purposes of continuing the trade in opium, with which the English Government distinctly repudiated all sympathy and connivance-not because a few enthusiasts denounced its use as the indulgence of a hopeless sin, but because the Imperial Government of China had on more than one occasion expressed a belief that it was corrupting its people, and impoverishing the country-it may be urged, with some show of fairness, that the English Government would have shown greater prescience and statesmanship, that the English Plenipotentiary would have revealed a more perfect grasp of the subject, had they insisted, not on the prohibition, but on the legalization of opium. Of course this would have provided the self-appointed champions of morality with a fresh ground of complaint; but then this might have been tolerated for the sake of the advantages that would have accrued to the Governments of China and of England. The Chinese Government alone could put a stop to the import of opium. No arbitrary act of the Indian authorities could prevent the Chinese supplying themselves with a luxury which hosts of producers would be only too eager to supply, whether from Persia or from Yunnan mattered little. But the Chinese Government did not possess the power to prevent smuggling. It would have been wiser and more profitable to have recognized this. The second foreign war might have been averted, and the dignity of China would have been preserved from some of the rude shocks which it has since had to incur, if the candid statement had been made, and admitted that the responsibility of crushing smuggling remained on the Chinese alone. It is taking a very narrow view of this struggle, however, to suppose that the question of opium was the principal matter at stake. The real point at issue was whether the Chinese Government could be allowed the possession of rights which rendered the continuance of intercourse with foreigners an impossibility. Those claims were unrecognized in the law of nations. They were based on the pretension of a superiority, and of a right to isolation, which the inhabitants of the same earth have never tolerated, and will never allow to any single branch of the human family. What China sought to retain was a possession that no other State attempted to hold, and one which superior might alone could establish, if it could no more justify selfishness in the case of a country than in that of an individual. There was never any good reason to suppose that China possessed the sufficient strength, and the war clearly exposed the military weakness of the Celestial Empire. When people talk, therefore, of the injustice of this war as another instance of the triumph of might over right, they should recollect that it was China which in the first place was in the wrong, as claiming an impossible position in the family of nations. The initial stages of the making of that claim were accompanied by an amount of arrogance on the part of the Chinese officials towards foreigners, which was the fitting prelude to the destruction of their property. We cannot doubt that had these acts been condoned there would have been no delay in enforcing the right to treat the persons of foreigners with as scant consideration as had been shown for their belongings. The lives of Europeans would have been at the mercy of a system which recognizes no gradation in crime, which affords many facilities for the manufacture of false evidence, and which inflicts punishment altogether in excess, according to Western ideas, of the fault. Commissioner Lin was filled with an enthusiasm in exalting the majesty of his sovereign and the superiority of his nation that left him no room to consider the feelings or claims of the outside peoples. They ought, in his mind, to have been wellsatisfied at being allowed to come within even "the outer portals" of the Middle Kingdom, and in return for this favour they should have been willing to show due subordination, and humility in face of insult, danger, and tyrannical interference. All this was of course intolerable, and not to be acquiesced in by the meekest of people; and the English, despite all their lip-zeal about equal rights and the' virtue of timely concessions, are not at heart a meek people at all. The inevitable result followed with rather more delay than might have been expected, a fact which may be attributed to the distance between Canton and London and the imperfection in the A CUCKOO-CRY. 157 existing means of communication; but it may be confidently said that were any Chinese official to now attempt the acts of high-handed authority which made the name of Commissioner Lin historical, the redress would have to be far more promptly rendered than it was years ago. Yet we cannot hope to have heard the last of the cuckoo-cry that the war of 1842 was unjust. There were some, however, at the time to see the injustice of these allegations, and to point out with much clear and cogent argument that not only was England in the right morally, but that she was conferring a benefit on all foreigners alike by her decided and spirited action. Prominent among these was John Quincy Adams, the famous American professor on International Law, who, at an earlier period, had filled with lustre the highest place in the community of the United States. The question of the relations between China and foreign countries was passed by him in able and detailed review, and the conclusion to which he came was that England was in the right-he said "Britain has the righteous cause." The conclusion forced itself on his mind, as we fain believe it will on those who read the events we have detailed, that the opium dispute was an incident, and not the true cause of the war. There is the more reason to accept his opinion as he thought that the opium traffic was an evil in the suppression of which the English Government might have taken a much greater part; yet, notwithstanding his accord with the opponents of opium, he could not deceive himself as to the fact that England was fully justified in her policy, and that she being in the right, China necessarily must be in the wrong.* cause. * Professor Adams's lecture will be found in full in vol. xi. of the "Chinese Repository," pp. 274-89. The following may be quoted as his concluding opinion: "Which has the righteous cause? You have perhaps been surprised to hear me answer Britain-Britain has the righteous But to prove it, I have been obliged to show that the opium question is not the cause of the war. My demonstration is not yet complete. The cause of the war is the kotow!-the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relation between lord and vassal. When, too, the justice of this war is impugned, let it not be forgotten that the arrogance of the Chinese authorities was of no fleeting character. It even survived the rude shock of a period of open defeat and unqualified disaster. The confidential utterances of Chinese ministers showed that they never ceased to contemplate the return of the time when they would be in a position to advance their old claims to supremacy, and to withdraw the concessions which had been wrung from them by the necessities of the day. They gave way in order to gain the time needed to collect their resources, and they fancied that by military reforms, and by punishing their unfortunate generals, they might in the course of a little while create a new army, and obtain fresh commanders to show the way to victory and to undo the many concessions which they held had been made to Europeans. How far their hopes were thought even by themselves to be practical it is not necessary for us to inquire. The persistence of their pretensions after discomfiture shows how deep-rooted must have been the sentiment to regard all foreigners as inferiors, rigidly to be excluded from the benefits and privileges of their own nation. The melancholy catastrophe with which I am obliged to close, the death of the gallant Napier, was the first bitter fruit of the struggle against that insulting and senseless pretension of China. Might I, in the flight of time, be permitted again to address you, I should pursue the course of the inquiry through the four questions with which I have begun. But the solution of them is involved in the germinating element of the first, the justice of the cause. This I have sought in the natural rights of man. Whether it may ever be my good fortune to address you again, is in the disposal of a Higher Power; but with reference to the last of my four questions, "What are the duties of the Government and the people of the United States, resulting from the existing war between Great Britain and China?" I leave to your meditations the last event of that war, which the winds have brought to our ears-the ransom of Canton. When we remember the scornful refusal from the gates of Canton in July, 1834, of Mr. Astell, bearing the letter of peace and friendship from Lord Napier to the Governor of the two provinces, and the contemptuous refusal to receive the letter itself, and compare it with the ransom of that same city in June, 1841, we trace the whole line of connection between cause and effect. May we not draw from it a monitory lesson, written with a beam of phosphoric light-of preparation for war and preservation of peace?" A GRAND INCOMPATIBILITY. 159 No circumstance revealed this feeling of pride and suspicion more clearly than the tone adopted by the enlightened Elepoo, in one of his last despatches to Sir Henry Pottinger with regard to the English Sovereign, and which evoked from the English Plenipotentiary the indignant sentence that "his royal mistress, the Queen of England, acknowledges no superior or governor but God; and that the dignity, the power, and the universal benevolence of Her Majesty are known to be second to none on earth, and are only equalled by Her Majesty's good faith and studious anxiety to fulfil her royal promises and engagements." There can, therefore, be no kind of doubt, and the evidence lies before us in accumulated piles from both sides, from those engaged in the fray, as well as from the critical and disinterested spectator, that not one questionable branch of trade brought England and China into hostile collision, but the grand incompatibility of Chinese pretensions with universal right. Unless we are prepared to cancel all the obligations of international relations, to deny the claims of a common humanity, to maintain that the deficiencies of one region are not to be supplied by the abundance of another, and to hand down to future generations a legacy of closed frontiers, public suspicion, and interminable strife-unless we are to agree in denying every common principle of probity since the founders of nations went forth in all directions from the Tower of Babel, then we must come to the conclusion that the Chinese brought the humiliations of the first foreign war upon themselves, and that they, however blindly, were the erring side in what was, regarded by its consequences, a momentous struggle. It is more gratifying to be able to leave the scene of contest, to turn from the record of an unequal and inglorious war, with the reflection that the results of this struggle were to be good. However inadequately the work of far-seeing statesmanship may have been performed in 1842, enough was done to make present friendship possible, and a better understanding between two great governing peoples a matter of hope, and not desponding expectancy. The Treaty of Nankin did not place the English representatives on that |