PREFACE.
299
No more terrible event has ever been chronicled in the annals of British intercourse with China than the massacre recorded in the pages of this pamphlet. Never has such hitter feeling been excited in the breasts of British residents in China and in Hong- kong as was manifested at the great meeting held in Hongkong on the 8th instant. (the proceedings of which are herein reported) to allow the community an opportunity of expressing its sorrow and indignation at the massacre of British subjects at Kucheng. Never has a more severe condemnation of any government been put into words than the condemnation pronounced at that meeting against the apathy and indifference of the British Government in not enforcing its treaty rights and not affording adequate protection to its subjects in China. Never has it been brought so clearly home to US all that that apathy and indifference is criminal, inasmuch as and that such crimes as
immediate deploring now direct consequences of the failure of the British Government to exact adequate punishment and reparation for every breach of treaty, for every infringement of the rights or liberties of British subjects in China. One crime allowed to pass unnoticed and unpunished has led to another, and that to a third, and so on, until the culmi ating point has been reached in the murder of eleven helpless women and chil- dren, in cold blood, without provocation of any kind, with every mark of deliberation and under circumstances of the most fiendish cruelty, and with the strangest evidence of the knowledge and connivance of the officers of the Chinese Government.
we
are
are
the
This pamphlet is published for transmission to England and mainly for circulation there, and we hope and believe that the perusal of it will light up such a fire of indig- nation in the breasts of men and women in England that the Government will feel itself compelled to exact, not compensation or reparation merely, but such full and effective punishment of the murderers and of the officials in any degree responsible for the safety of the missionarie, that the Chinese Government and its officers may be made to understand once for all that Englishmen and Englishwomen may not be murdered or ill-treated with impunity. There is no present effective remedy but coercion. The Chinese Government either will not punish its officials
is unable to do so. In either
there and its subjects or
is but one take alternative. Great Britain must
the
there task in hand herself, and
The mandarins at never be a more fitting opportunity than the present. Foochow have officially declared themselves unable to guarantee the lives and properties of British subjects in that province. Let the British Government take possession of Foochow and hold it for a year or two until the Chinese authorities feel equal to the performance of their duties.
can
The Hongkong Telegraph Office,
HONGKONG, 12th August, 1895.
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