CO129-180 - Public Offices & Others - 1877 — Page 444

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very distant date, through Siam and Birmah, and, if practicable, farther north, through Assam.

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Then within the last four and thirty years, we have entered into no fewer than three treaties with the Chinese Empire. Approaching it by sea on the east, we have now our Legation at Peking; and more than a dozen consulates along its seaboard and the Yang-tze river, at each of which the services of a highly qualified interpreter are required. On the south-east coast of the Empire, moreover, we possess the island of Hong-Kong, ceded to Great Britain in 1842, and separated at one point by a very narrow channel from the province of Canton. small portion of that province containing an area of four or five miles, a paring from the continent of China proper, was further ceded in 1860, and added to the colonial possessions. 'Tis the first leaf of the mulberry tree on which the silk-worm settles,' said a Chinaman to me; will

you go on from that and eat up the whole of China. 'England does not mean nor wish to do so,' I replied, but the cession of that little plot of ground may convince you that there must be an end with your government of the exclusive policy, and arrogant assumption of the past.'

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Interpreters are required in this colony of Hong- Kong in connexion with our courts of justice, and for other service. They are required also, I said, at all our consulates, and at the Legation in Peking. The young men intended for this department used to commence their study of Chinese at King's College, London, before they took their departure for China. For some years, those of them, not specially designed for Hong-Kong, have proceeded at once to Peking, and had their preliminary course of study there,

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being then drafted off, as necessity arises, to the several commercial ports. I hope the earlier arrange- ment will again be adopted, and the young men attend the classes here or in London. It has lately been proposed, very wisely proposed, that those to be employed in government service in India shall have at least two years at Oxford or Cambridge for general study, while they commence at the same time the acquisition of one or more of the Indian languages. It is most desirable that those intended for the same service in China should enjoy a similar privilege,

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Further, during the same period, the religious interest of this country in China has very greatly increased. I refer to the entrance of our various missionary societies into it, as the largest field in all the heathen world for their operations. They must now have well on to a hundred men labouring there for the propagation of Christianity. When I say that this may be considered as giving to Great Britain a religious interest in China, I do not mean to imply that the British Government stands to all the missions or to any one of them in the same relation which the Russian Government occu- pies to the Russian ecclesiastical mission, or that it claims any patronage and protection of their con- verts as France has done of the converts of the Roman Catholic missions. Like the United States, however, and every other Treaty Power, it has stipulated for the toleration of Christianity in China, and for the protection and freedom of action of its own subjects engaged in missionary labours. I do not wish that it did more in favour of Chris- tianity; I am glad that it does thus much.

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