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Adams Lecture on the War with China.

MAY,

able to the great, powerful and enlightened nations of Europe, that for several centuries they have, for the sake of profitable trade, submitted to these insolent and iusulting pretensions, equally contrary to the first principles of the law of nature and of revealed religion—the natural equality of mankind—

Auri sacra fames, quid non mortalia pectora cogis?

This submission to insult is the more extraordinary for being practiced by Chris. tian nations, which, in their intercourse with one anotlier, push the principle of cquality and reciprocity to the minutest punctilios of forms. Is a treaty to be concluded between the British and Russian empire, it must be in both their languages, or in a third, agreed upon by the parties. The copies of the same treaty are to be so varied that cach of the parties is first named in the copy re. tained by itself; the signatures of the plenipotentiaries must either be in parallel lines or alternate in their order upon the two copies. Duels have been fought between embassadors of two European courts to the monarch of a third, for the precedence of admission to his presence; and in the reign of Charles II., a bloody battle was fought in the streets of London between the retinuce of a French and a Spanish cinbassador, in a struggle between the two coachmen, which should Icad the other in a procession.

Among the expedients to which the British government had resorted to hide their faces from the shame of subinission to their principle of commercial inter- course with China, was that of granting the monopoly of trade to a company of Inerchants. The charter of the East India Company was the instrument of this monopoly; and as the Company possessed none of the attributes of sovereignty, whatever compliances their thirst for gain might reconcile with their self-esteem as men or their pride as Britons, was supposed to involve no sacrifice of the nation. al honor and dignity. They submitted, therefore, to accept the permission to trade with the people of China, as a boon granted to their humble supplication, called a pin. But their trade was to be confined to the single port of Canton, in an empire of seven millions of square miles, with a population of 360,000,000 of souls. Even into that city of Canton no British subject was ever to be suffered to get his foot. They were permitted to erect, on the banks of the river below the city, the buildings necessary for a counting-house, over which they might display the degraded standard of their nation, but from which their wives and families were to be for ever excluded.-For the superintendence of this trade, certain officers were appointed by the East India Company-and it was to be exclusively carried on with ten or twelve Chinese merchants of the city, called hong-merchants, through whom alone, the outside barbarians had access by the pin (i. e. petition} to the government of the city.

In the year 1792, just at the time when the wars of the French revolution, in which Great Britain took so prominent a part, were breaking out, the British government instituted a splendid embassy to the emperor of China, Kienlung, who was then approaching the termination of a reign of sixty years. The selection of the time for this mission excited a gencral suspicion throughout Europe, that its object was connected with the policy agitated by the approaching conflict, and that an alliance at least defensive against revolutionary France, was contemplated, under the ostensible appearance of placing the cominercial intercourse between the two countries upon a more just and equitable footing. From the historical account of this embassy, published by sir George Staunton, it appears that its object was to prevail upon the Chinese government to admit the establishment of

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