Directory_and_Chronicle_1842 — Page 303

1842.

Adams Lecture on the War with China.

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hotel, in state. That this humiliation of the British nation in the person of their embassador should lack no appropriate appendage, it seemed to be part of the intended ceremony of the day to display the beauties of the palace to the embas- sador; which his indisposition obliged him to decline; and to leave the honor of this perainbulation to sir George Staunton himself, and to other gentlemen of the embassy. Thc kóláu led them through a great number of separate edifices erected on a regular plan in a high style of magnificence, all intended for public occa- sions and appearance, while the emperor's private apartinents were pointed out at a distance in the interior palace.

With the emperor's answer to the letter of his Britannic majesty farewell presents for him, for the embassador, and for every person of his scite, were sent to the hotel. Lord Macartney was extremely reluctant at commg to the conclusion that his embassy was at an end, and that he had nothing more to do but to ask per- mission to depart and return to his own country; but a kind friend at the imperial court, whose good offices he had sccured, suggested to him that the Chinese had no other idea of an embassy, and there was in truth no other alternative. To relieve him from this embarrassment to his British pride and this Tartar courtesy, he just at this time received advices of the war which the National Convention had declared against the king of Great Britain, and the Stadtholder of the Netherlands, and he comforted himself with the anticipation that by returning home imme. diately in the Lion, the ship which had conveyed him to China, he might at the same time perform the service of conveying in safety the East India Company's fleet of merchantmen then bound to Europe.

This ship, however, which had landed him at the mouth of the Pei ho river, within three days' journey of Peking, had already sailed from the neighboring is. land of Chusan, and was returning to Canton. The distance from that city to Peking is from twelve to fourteen hundred miles, the whole of which lord Macart. ney and his whole embassy were transported by island, river, and canal naviga. tion, at the cost of his imperial majesty, in the custody of a succession of officers, civil and military, of the very highest dignity-everywhere treated with distin- guished honors, occasionally buffeted with humiliating insults, and never suffer- ed to stray a single mile from the river or canal upon which they were boated, into the country through which they were passing; or to pass a night in one of the numerous citics through which they were conducted. They were nearly three months in the performance of this inland safe conduct; and at the expiration of his voyage and embassy, lord Macartney knew about as much of the condition of the interior of China as if he had, during the two years of his absence, continually resided in Pall Mall or Piccadilly, within a stone's throw of the palace of St.

James.

This embassy, however, appears to have been treated with more respect than any other from an European government during the two centuries of the reign of the Tá Tsing or Mantchou-Tartar dynasty. The narrative of sir George Staunton distinctly and positively affirms that lord Macartney was admitted to the presence of the emperor Kienlung, and presented to him his credentials without performing the prostration of the kotow, the Chinese act of homage from the vassal to the sovereign lord:-ceremonies between superiors and inferiors are the personification of principles. Nearly twenty-five years after the repulse of lord Macartney, in 1816, another splendid cimbassy was dispatched by the British government, m the person of lord Amherst, who was much more rudely dismissed, without every