three days allowed for compliance; in six days after, namely on the 24th, Captain Elliot arrived at Canton, against the wishes and in defiance of the opposition of the Chinese, who thereupon blockaded the river front of the factories and withdrew the native servants; on the 25th, he was refused passports for himself and countrymen, and the opium formally demanded; and early in the morning of the 27th, he issued his fateful mandate to the British merchants for its surrender.

He was highly lauded afterwards by the Duke of Wellington for his "courage and self-devotion" in taking so immense a responsibility upon himself, and Davis defends him strongly from the manifold attacks of the press and the merchants: but what strikes an unconcerned observer at this distance of time, is the ready facility with which Great Britain was suffered by her representative to be muleted to the amount of two millions and a half sterling, for her share in a mutual trade that had existed so long with the connivance of all the authorities of the empire below the imperial court itself. Captain Elliot was well aware of the habitual extravagance of Chinese demands; he knew that, notwithstanding the military force surrounding the factories, no attempt had been made to compel the attendance of the merchant whose presence within the city had been required; and he had himself declared immediately before that the mischief did not exist in the old established trade, but merely in the obtrusiveness of the river traffic. As for the execution of the opium dealer, this was but one of many contrivances that had been practised from time to time with the view of putting an end to the consumption of the drug, but which had not even the effect of stopping the cultivation of the plant in China itself. Upon the whole, it would seem that the superintendent acted with great precipitation; and it may

be a question whether Lin or the people of England were the more surprised on hearing of the surrender of two thousand two hundred and eighty-three chests of opium,— some vessels that had actually taken their departure from the coast being brought back to make up the quantity. This view of the case appears to be confirmed by the fact that a portion of the commissioner's edict which required the merchants to sign a bond engaging, under the penalty of death, to bring no more of the proscribed article to China, was successfully resisted, and the parties permitted to leave Canton in all the criminality of their disobedience.

Lin, however, whose operations appear to have been determined by the course of circumstances, now acted as master. By the 20th of April ten thousand chests had been delivered, but although the good faith of the British had thus been proved, they were retained in close imprisonment, and a positive stipulation they had made disregarded, that they were to be allowed communication by passage boats with the outer anchorages. He extorted opium likewise from the Portuguese at Macao; and it was only the withdrawal of the English from Canton on the 23rd of May after the deliveries had been completed, and the total cessation of trade, that gave him pause. This latter was an awkward circumstance, for he well knew that the stoppage of the emperor's fiscal supplies would in all probability send him to travel in Tartary—supposing it left him a head to travel withal; and by the end of October, notwithstanding various cross-grained occurrences, involving even a threatened blockade by the British ships of war, some adjustment of the various questions was arrived at, which promised to admit of the intercourse being resumed at least below the Bocca Tigris, till advices should be received from England.

A new circumstance, however, occurred to apply a fresh stimulus to the energies of Lin. A British trading vessel entered the Bocca Tigris, the master signing the bond above alluded to; and the commissioner was so elated that he at once returned to his old requisitions; intimating that if the bond were not signed by the whole of the merchants, and likewise a man given up in one of the ordinary cases of homicide, the British and their vessels would be driven off the Chinese coast, or else destroyed, in three days. This brought matters to a crisis. Two ships of war were moved up to the Bogue, where the Chinese fleet was concentrated, with a communication from Captain Elliot. It was returned unopened; and the result was an action fought with the admiral Kwhan and twenty-nine war-junks, six of which were sunk or driven ashore by the British. Unluckily, however, the victors returned to Macao after the fight, upon which Kwhan claimed the victory, and thus rendered the continuance of the war, now fairly commenced, inevitable.

It is proverbially easy to be wise after the event; but in reviewing the circumstances which led to the remarkable contest we have now to sketch, it seems sufficiently obvious that the wild and frantic energy of Lin was not met by sufficient firmness on the part of Elliot and that there was not that forethought displayed by the British government which the important change in their commercial relations with this difficult and peculiar people had demanded. At the same time it must continue to be a question whether it would have been possible to do more than delay an appeal to arms. The destruction of the opium had merely the effect of stimulating the trade by enhancing the value of the drug; the events in the Canton river had merely the effect of diverting the traffic to the eastern coast; and the general

insecurity of person and property had merely the effect of disencouraging the wealthy and respectable merchants, and throwing the business into the hands of desperate and reckless adventurers, till in the words of Elliot himself, "the coasts were delivered over to a state of things which seemed likely to pass from the worst character of a forced trade to plain buccaneering." Such was the effect even of the most stringent measures upon the illegal traffic in opium; and such were the circumstances which brought on, as if by fatal necessity, what is popularly and not unaptly termed the Opium War.

This name, however, it should be said, gives offence to the sticklers for the dignity of Great Britain, who assert that the robbery of the opium was merely a spark thrown into a mine charged with the insults and injuries of two hundred years. But it is hardly fair to call that a robbery to which the compliance of the parties, without resistance or protest, gave strictly the character of a seizure of contraband goods; and as for the absurd superiority assumed by the Chinese, it had all along been fully recognised, for their own selfish purposes, by the European nations. The best and indeed the only defence of the war lies in its necessity. Assisted throughout by the people of China themselves, and by the imbecility of their government and the venality of its functionaries, we had gradually placed ourselves in a false position, in which it was destruction to remain, and from which the magnitude of the interests that had grown up rendered it impossible to retire.

CHAPTER IV.

THE OPIUM WAR, AND THE TERRITORIAL SETTLEMENT OF THE BRITISH.

66

THE year 1840 commenced with an edict directing all trade with the English to cease for ever: a remarkable indication on the part of the court that they had at length thrown away the scabbard. "The tone which Lin adopted," says Lieutenant Ouchterlony, was now undisguisedly hostile, defiance was hurled in his own edicts against the British, and a large bounty was set upon their heads, to excite the populace along the sea-coast to expel and destroy them as noxious reptiles. All thought of compensation for the opium surrendered, and for the serious losses which the merchants had suffered during the tumults at Canton, and their expulsion from the factories was repudiated, as well as all idea of abandoning their right to seize and execute foreigners, whenever the savage laws of the empire should demand life for life." Still the condition of the English, residing at an anchorage