Adams Lecture on the War with China.
MAY,
equally well known to the British and Chinese governments, and in the contro- versy which immediately followed this first collision between lord Napier and the governor of Canton, the latter once and again asserts that ample warning had been given to the British merchants that when, by the expiration of the pri vileges of the East India Company, the functions of the táipán would be super- seded, some suitable messenger must be substituted to settle with the hong-mer. chants those trifling and insignificant concerns of commerce which it was far beneath the dignity of the government of the celestial empire to provide for or
to notice.
But I am already trespassing upon your patience—a brief and summary notice of the sequel, is all that your time will at present allow. The proud and generous British noble mariner persisted in his determination to hold direct communication with the governor of the two provinces, Lú, and to continue his residence at Canton, till he was obliged to call for an armed force from the British frigate in which he had performed his passage, and for the frigate and another to force the passage of the river for the protection of his person from assault by the armed force of the governor, who on his part issued edict after edict against the barbarian eye the laboriously vile Napier, who had come by sea more than ten thousand miles to the flowery land of the celestial empire, for what purpose, the chief of the two- eyed peacock feather could not tell, but against all reason, and ignorant of all dignities, pretending to correspond with the viceroy of the provinces of Kwáng- tung and Kwangsí, upon matters of trade, by letter, instead of by petition, and to assuine the functions, which for a century and some tens of years had always been performed in all humility by a táipán, petitioning through the medium of the hong-merchants. Three of the principal hong-merchants attempted for seve- ral days to negotiate a compromise between the governor and the noble lord su- perintendent, without success, till at length an edict was issued by the governor which suspended the British trade. The British commerce in China was pros. trated at a blow, and the only alternative left to lord Napier was to retire under numerous insults and indignities to Macao, where on the 13th day of October, 1834, he died of chagrin and a broken heart.
And here we might pause :—do I hear you inquire, what is all this to the opium question, or the taking of Canton? These I answer are but incidents in that movement of mind on this globe of earth, of which the war between Great Bri- fain and China, is now the leading star. Of the four questions which I have pro- posed this evening to discuss, we have not even reached the conclusion of the
first.
The justice of the cause between the two parties:~which has the righteous cause? You have perhaps been surprised to hear me answer Britain-Britain has the righteous cause. 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. 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 perinitted again to address you, I should pursue the course of the inquiry, through the four questions with which I have begun. But the solution
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